Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 209

The Mystery Of Sherlock’s Home

The Independent is becoming a great uncoverer of odd stories. Today they reveal that the address of Sherlock Holmes, 221b Baker Street,together with two valuable properties near Hyde Park and a mansion in Hampstead worth a total of 147m, are linked to notorious Kazakh businessman Rakhat Aliyev,the son-in-law of Kazakhstan’s President. He was accused of […]

More Bad Writing

If you hired a carpenter and he built you some shelves that subsequently collapsed when you stood books on them, you’d call him a bad carpenter. So in yesterday’s article about bad writers I was interested by a number of comments (some of which I didn’t publish because they were from online trolls) which argued […]

Is This The World’s Best Bad Writer?

It’s an excitingly rich field that started with William McGonagall and has reached itsne plus ultra with the wonderful, appalling ‘Sherry Silver’. Her prose is so staggeringly inept that I’ve sort of fallen in love with her, as I did with Jacqueline Suzanne and Dan Brown. Ms Silver sounds like a perfectly nice, normal kind […]

Going Back To Castle Dracula

Bram Stoker supposedly had the idea for ‘Dracula’ after seeing a Victoria family enjoying a picnic inside a crypt in Highgate Cemetery. And so the most exotic fantasy was born of a very English obsession, the taking of high tea with relatives, albeit ones that were dead. I had that thought in mind as I […]

Harrogate & The Gender Balance

Every year Harrogate hosts Britain’s biggest gathering of crime writers and their readers at the Old Swan Hotel, and the four-day event, called the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, is usually a sell-out. People in Yorkshire are avid readers (and drinkers of the eponymous beer) but there are also visitors from all over the […]

Where Would You Rather Live?

Two new apartment buildings perfectly illustrate London’s housing dilemma, and help explain what’s going so wrong.Look at these two photographs and decide which building you would prefer to live in. Without thinking, I automatically chose the brick building. I was surprised to discover it’s social housing. The one on the left is […]

Poor But Honest Entertainment

I’ve always preferred honest B movies to under-ambitious and oversold A movies. Watching [Rec]4 last night brought that home as I sat there thinking ‘Outboard-toting heroine fights rabid monkeys on a detonating ship – what’s not to love?’ The [Rec] series has a certain amount of originality and rings enough changes to intrigue, but originality […]

Sorry We Ate It All, The Crumbs Are For You

Young people aren’t having a moan for nothing: It seems there really has beena 10% drop in their prospects compared to the opportunities their parents had when they were young. The 2015 Intergenerational Fairness indexreported a year-on-year decline in prospects for Generation Y across a range of indices including housing, education, health, income, debt and […]

Crime Swamps ‘Britain’s Happiest Town’

According to property agents, Harrogate in North Yorkshire is the UK’s happiest town, while nine out of 10 of the grimmest places to live are in London – but Harrogate, with its flower-filled park running through its centre, its famous tea rooms and spa, its affluent kitchen design shops, hides a dark secret. This Thursday […]

The Unstoppable Rise Of The Archetype

Think of a consulting detective. Sherlock Holmes?A footballer. David Beckham?A playwright. William Shakespeare?A Greek philosopher. Aristotle?A schoolboy wizard. Harry Potter? They’re the most obvious archetypes in their fields, but choosing a single figurehead to represent an entire field of endeavour goes way deeper. Almost every group or sub-group you can think of has an archetype […]