Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 182

Desert Island Movies

On Saturday May 14th at the Cinema Museum in London’s Elephant & Castle, I’ll be talking to film expert Barry Forshaw about my Top Ten Movies – but how the hell do you come up with such a shortlist? After a lifetime spent working more in film than in books, my range of choices […]

Invisible Ink 4: Virginia Andrews

Sometimes an author’s work lives on, but here’s the first example I found of an author living beyond her death (the practice is commonplace now). Or rather, not – because the real Virginia Andrews has been forgotten and was replaced by a ghost writer called Andrew Neiderman, who penned over 40 subsequent volumes in her […]

Why Outsiders Make The Best Writers

I recently got into an argument about tattoos. We have our first Prime Minister with a tattooed wife, and I agree somewhat with the Joan Collins quote; ‘Once if you wanted to see the fat lady and the tattooed man you had to go the circus.’ The Times just ran an article about the rise […]

Author Update: What I’m Writing Next

Well, ‘Strange Tide’ has barely hit the ground (we haven’t had the launch party yet!) and I’m hard at work on ‘Wild Chamber’. To all those of you who yelled at me for what I did to Arthur Bryant, I hope now all is being forgiven. Of course most readers buy the paperback (although hardback […]

The Year’s Best TV Show

In the last few years a handful of TV series have proved to be better than anything Hollywood can hope to produce; ‘Six Feet Under’, ‘The Wire’, ‘The West Wing’, ‘The Newsroom’, ‘Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’, ‘The Bridge’, ‘Trapped’ and of course ‘Breaking Bad’. To that illustrious list should now be added ‘The People […]

A Few Of My Favourite (Deadly) Things

‘So, I guess you think a lot about killing people,’ said the customs officer as he went through my bag yesterday. I’d told him I was a writer because I was trying to explain why I had four copies of the same book in my bag. And I suppose I do think about murder rather […]

Invisible Ink 3: Eric Ambler & Neville Shute

While neither of these classic authors is truly forgotten – in the UK at least – their words have faded to a faintness only discerned by loyal fans, and most modern readers would be hard-pressed to recall them. Reprints are available and second-hand copies lie in Oxfam shops, but both have been caught out by […]

Oh God, I’ve Just Found My Unpublished Novels

You all know the story about the Beatles and Hamburg, about how awful they sounded before they left and how professional they were when they returned after playing hundreds of gigs. The same applies to writers. Good first novels never materialise out of nowhere. They’re reached after many many hours, days, months, years of writing. […]

The Most English Thing In England

Every week in ‘The Avengers’, the old TV series, not the Marvel Comics lycra-fest, John Steed and Cathy Gale/Emma Peel/ Tara King (not sure I count Purdy though I’m willing to hear a persuasive argument) solved a bizarre plot. The situations involved losing an hour, losing the population of a village, losing a graveyard, losing […]

The Old Codgers Are Lurking In London Now

Between now and the official party for ‘Bryant & May: Strange Tide’ I’ll be doing what I usually do – hiding signed copies of the hardback in London’s open spaces. Two dozen signed copies will be left between Piccadilly and the Euston Road over the next few days, partly because it’s great to watch who […]