Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 186

Everybody Wants Content – Nobody Wants To Pay

First a quick history of 20th century print; Newspapers employed journalists, who carried out court reporting and studied investigative journalism, and had salaries at the publishing house, which paid the printers and distributed papers. The press barons were bigoted – the Daily Mail supported Hitler – and the print union chapels got greedy and destroyed […]

The Ghost Train Stops In London

I’ve a confession to make. I’ve never been about to read scripts. I seem to be script-blind. I’ve read thousands in my career, and hardly any of them have ever made a jot of sense. So when I got involved in a horror play and found the old problem recurring, I didn’t worry so much. […]

Why Everyone’s An Author Now

The Observer just ran an interesting article that confirmed my suspicions. A marketeer uploaded a fake book onto Amazon, took a photo of his foot for the cover and added it into Amazon’s format, bought three copies and was awarded a ‘Number 1 Amazon Bestseller’ banner by the company. What he did was tick two […]

The Magic Of Ghost Trains

When I was a child, the ghost train on Brighton pier showed a carriage filled with nodding skeletons that disturbed me. As I got older they continued to be a source of fascination, from the Tobe Hooper movie ‘The Funhouse’ to the ghost train in Vienna’s Prater, with its disturbing images of Jack the Ripper’s […]

The North Deserves Better

Britain’s empire was managed from the South but driven by the North; the South fed the nation from Kent, ‘the garden of England’, but coal, wool, steel, ships, china, cutlery, chocolate and most of its exports came from the North to provide us with trade.You see the remains of the wealth it generated when you […]

Delivering The Right Gift

I have a theory about Paula Hawkins’ perfectly acceptable but (to me, anyway) not especially interesting novel ‘The Girl On The Train’ – its title offered an ironclad guarantee of what was inside. There would indeed be a girl (actually a woman) and she’d be on a train. But there’s also a passivity; she’d […]

‘The Burning Man’ Paperback Is Here

This is how casual one gets about writing after you’ve been doing it for many years; my publication day is here and none of us woke up to it until a fan mentioned it on Twitter. I’ve always thought that publishers focus on the wrong edition. Hardbacks are the first sighting of a new novel, […]

‘The Burning Man’ Paperback Is Out Today

This is how casual one gets about writing after you’ve been doing it for many years; my publication day is here and none of us woke up to it until a fan mentioned it on Twitter. I’ve always thought that publishers focus on the wrong edition. Hardbacks are the first sighting of a new novel, […]

Look Who Else Is Back!

‘The Flying Scotsman’ wasn’t just a dodgy King’s Cross strip-pub. It was a train built in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, in 1923, and it soon became the star locomotive of the British railway system, pulling the first train to break the 100mph barrier in 1934. This morning I awoke to the sound of a helicopter filming […]

Nell Gwynn’s Back

It’s hard to emphasise how important Nell Gwynn once was in English history, as a folk figure, as a rags-to-riches Cinderella story, as an everywoman and as the first female actor star, she was called ‘pretty, witty Nell’ by Samuel Pepys and was always regarded as a living embodiment of the spirit of Restoration England. […]