Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 222

What’s The Long-Term Plan For London?

Last month, the Chancellor and the Mayor announced a long-term plan for London.In essence, this consisted of the following wishlist: Secure London’s strong economic future by outpacing the growth of New York, adding 6.4bn to the London economy by 2030. Create over half a million extra jobs in London by 2020 by backing businesses, attracting […]

Bryant & May Today – And For Christmas

Alma rose and tidied away the tea things. ‘Why don’t you get your mind off all this morbidity? Come to church with me this evening.’ ‘You never give up, do you? I’m not that desperate for something to do,’ Arthur Bryant replied, dusting crumbs from his stained waistcoat. ‘Besides, I remember what happened the […]

How Much Should Writers Expose about Themselves?

I’m currently doing a blog tour and finding it refreshing after years of doing regular press interviews. Instead of some poor exhausted journo trying to file ten stories in one day and not having had the time to even read your book jacket, let alone the book, I’m being asked intelligent and interesting questions by […]

Well, Here’s A Surprise!

So you thought I’d got rid of them… This Thursday sees the publication of ‘Bryant & May: The Burning Man’, my twelfth novel in this series – but it won’t be the last. This coming Christmas there’s actually going to be a brand-new SECOND Bryant & May book in a single year, and it caught […]

His Name Became An Adjective – Now His Work Has Been Saved.

In America it’s a Rube Goldberg contraption, but here, predating Goldberg, it’s always been – and remains – a Heath Robinson contraption. I seem to have a great many books by the magical Mr Robinson and loved them as a child. Now hundreds of pictures by the illustrator who became a byword for eccentric, ingenious […]

Mind The Doors!

Remembered when they carved up London’s grand old cinemas into nasty little boxes and stuck Michael Bay films in all of them? There’s a bit of a reverse trend going on around the country at the moment. The Curzon Group is expanding its empire of high quality screens across the nation, and has reopened London’s […]

Who Wrote The Most Books Of All Time?

I have three new books out this year. People always accuse me of being prolific, but it’s just the way novels sometimes bunch up in publication, even though they’ve taken years to write. And in the grand scheme of things, I’m really a long way from ‘prolific’. Harper Lee is being discussed all over the […]

An Iron Fist In A Chocolate Glove

Not long ago, Joanne Harris’s earliest novel that came to my attention, back in the days when I was writing for Time Out, was re-issued. Until I re-read it, I’d forgotten how much it had changed my view of her work. Here’s part of what I wrote for that re-issue; I sometimes think that people […]

Cool Double-Bills No.1

An occasional series in which I pair two little-seen films together to make a neat double-bill. It’s an idea I developed years ago, after seeing one of the rarer double bills at my local cinema; ‘The Strange Vengeance Of Rosalie’ and ‘To Kill A Clown’. In the former, psychotic Bonnie Bedelia lured a businessman to […]

Nesbit Goes Off The Rails

Edith Nesbit’s ‘The Railway Children’ is an odd book to have become a classic. The Edwardian tale of a middle-class family relocated from London to Yorkshire after their father’s arrest for treason is a series of disconnected episodes, snapshots taken over one summer, in the children’s lives. By 1970 it had been all but forgotten […]