Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 213

Getting The End Of The World Right

Post-apocalypse films, eh? Bit of a hiding to nothing, the end of the world, isn’t it? The collapse of civilisation, fighting for food, desert wastelands, lost cities, all life wiped out except a small band of bickering survivors – I nearly topped myself after ‘The Road’ and haven’t been able to watch ‘The Walking Dead’ […]

Here Come The Sand Men…

So, after your kind help, we reached – or rather the publisher’s designers reached – a decision on the cover of ‘The Sand Men’ which was not one of the ones most of us chose! Having said that, I really do like it, as it captures the tone of the book perfectly – somehow looking […]

Now Shopping Malls Want You To Believe They’re Good For Society

In ‘Millennium People’ futurist author JG Ballard imagined a five-minutes-from-now world of gated communities and shopping malls where a quiet rebellion against middle-class normality is taking place. As civic responsibility and the trappings of consumer society are jettisoned, the movement grows belligerent and Ballard’s hero is lured in by the idea of revolution and terror. […]

Poems About The Thames

I’m researching the history of the Thames, and along the way looking at poems about it. There’s a long and illustrious history of poetry written for the river that is ‘too dark to lack a god’. Oscar Wilde, always good with colours, had a couple of Thames poems, this one repeating the colour yellow; […]

Look Me In The Eye: The Thoughts of Dan Terrell

Recent research suggests the young aren’t comfortable talking to strangers, and especially not ones outside of their immediate age group. We had an argument about this new fear of expressing oneself, which I feel arises because when many young people go online they hang with their peers and keep their opinions consensual – but when […]

Will You Survive Long Enough To Read This?

The curse of any fiction writer is that people sometimes don’t believe what you write has any basis in reality. Most of my books are filled with solid research and hard facts – it’s the hardest part of writing any book, and I just removed 30 or 40 pages of factual evidence from the upcoming […]

A London Miscellany

The upside to living in what has now become the world’s most popular city is that new things are opening all the time. In October, Scotland Yard’s so-called ‘Black Museum’ – a phrase they are keen to distance themselves from, except that here at Fowler Towers there are long memories – opens to the public […]

Worthy Of Your Attention: Anne Valery

There have been a great many (too many) books about the Second World War, but Anne Valery’s ‘Talking About The War…1939-45: A Personal View of the War in Britain’ moved me intensely. Valery is the co-author of ‘Tenko’ and over 50 television plays (remember those?) and her wartime memoir, illustrated with some astonishing photographs I’ve […]

Favourite Soundtracks No.2: ‘The Mercenaries’

Good gracious, it’s been ages since we had un peu de musica on this site. Here’s the only film soundtrack that the great French jazz composer Jacques Loussier ever wrote (to my knowledge at least) for a film version of Wilbur Smith’s ‘The Dark of the Sun’, a tough drama about a diamond smuggling trip […]

Bryant & May And The Missing Genre

‘Choose one style of writing and stick with it,’ I was told many years ago by an editor. Naturally I ignored her and continued to plough a lonely furrow between every possible known genre, starting with my very first fiction novel ‘Roofworld’ (SF? Fantasy? Urban Drama? Thriller? Satire?) through ‘Spanky’ (Thriller? Satire? Bromance? Supernatural?) to […]