Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 256

Bryant & May In Shorts

Over the past few years whenever someone has wanted to publish a short story in the crime genre, either for a charity collection or an anthology, I’ve written a Bryant & May story for them. Now I seem to have quite a few in my files. But how to get them to the public? Short […]

What Did Hitler Ever Do For Us?

Ah, the Northern Line, running through London like the digestive-tract of a prawn, unreliable and overcrowded, with stations that still use creaking lifts to escape from platforms. The Northern Line, which is in two entirely separate sections just to mess with our heads, and where you have to go North to go South even though […]

Cataloguing Is My Life

Men like order. Not in an attractive, tasteful way, but in a ‘That badly needs to be alphabetised’ unhealthy way. A female friend was appalled when I told her I spent the afternoon re-cataloguing my DVD collection, and couldn’t decide whether auteur directors deserved to be filed by surnames or by their films. For a […]

10 Great Movies About The Theatre

At the moment the theatre world is turning to old films for inspiration, but what about the other direction? Once, a huge number of movies were made from plays. In cinema’s early yearsthere was a rush to shoot the classics and the great historical stories in this country; after all, the nation was steeped […]

London Corners: The South Bank

Hardly a corner, and yet in summer the South Bank now holds all sorts of surprises. For years the Thameside area was neglected – it had a power station at one end, in what had long been a dangerously rough neighbourhood, and the walkway passed beneath several dark bridges. Right into the noughties it was […]

Mad, Mad Michael Moorcock

First, an apology for the shot of Jon Finch; it seems insulting to start a piece on Michael Moorcock with a still of the film he must hate (‘The Final Programme’) – but it’s not easy to pin down quicksilver. For a long time he was seen as primarily a fantasy writer – a genre […]

The Arts & The Internet

I’ve long thought that true creativity is not just about originality; it’s about making connections that others don’t notice. When we were kids it was hard to draw these invisible lines between people and places, objects and ideas. Very rarely someone sprang out of nowhere, fully formed – Mozart, Dickens, Van Gogh – but most […]

Morricone Forever

A few years ago I saw Ennio Morricone at the Royal Albert Hall, on stage for the best part of three hours, delivering one of the most superb concerts I’d ever attended. It was a bumper year – I saw John Barry’s final performance there, and my small local theatre hosted Michel Legrand and his […]

Brozen

Because it made me laugh, and I used to do this with my brother too.

What The Author Did Next

Friends think that when I’m in Barcelona I’m at the beach or in tapas bars. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m working at twice my normal pace, thanks to the siesta that breaks my working day into two distinct halves and seemingly doubles my output. As I return to London and face the […]