Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 277

The Fauna of Central London

In Berkeley Square I remember regularly seeing the annual migration of caterpillars, wherein every inch of the square from railings to gazebo was covered in peristaltic green wrigglers, dropping from the trees down the back of your neck. Equally, great clouds of starlings in Leicester Square swooped through the trees in vast flocks, and formed [...]

Quotes From My Non Bryant & May Books No.2:

This is the from the very first appearance of Bryant & May, long before I thought of giving them a series. They turned up in my second novel, ‘Rune’, and were pretty much fully formed from the start, as you can see here.

‘You can’t possible be serious about retiring, Arthur. Can you honestly see yourself [...]

Catching Movies When You’re Sick

Well, that was fun: On Thursday I went to see my local GP. On Friday I saw a specialist and hediagnosed a double hernia. On Saturday I had the operation for both. On Sunday I went to lunch with friends. And next week I’m due to go down a bob-sled run in Latvia with the [...]

Reading Is Not What You Comprehend

One of the main pleasures of watching a show like, say, The Simpsons has always been getting all of the post-modern ironic jokes, from the film parodies to more subtle critiques on American consumerism, like Homer passing a bookstore called ‘King & Koontz’, but I have friends who hate and fail to get the show [...]

Reading Is What You Remember

I’m one of those people who can can pretty much point to any country on a map, andtell you the names of everyone in the cast of ‘It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World’. I remember what I choose to remember, and much of it gets stored away for research. Equally, like Arthur Bryant, I [...]

My Bookshop Hitlist No.2: Watermark Books

The revamped King’s Cross Station would be an alien sight to its original builders; a vast matrix of shining white steel tubes forms a mesh over the original fabric of the once dingy and sooty terminus. At night the dome is lit in different colours, and beneath this is the porter-trolley sticking out of the [...]

Re:View – ‘The Wolf Of Wall Street’

Ironically, what may ultimately kill Martin Scorsese’s best film in years is bad timing; is the world ready for a movie in which the excessive lifestyle of a criminal banker is regarded with grudgingadmiration? Leonardo DiCaprio has already been forced into a position of defence after preview audiences took the nearly three-hour fable at face [...]

Quotes From My Non-Bryant & May Books No.1

(In the opening chapter of my first novel, a boy falls from the Coca-Cola sign in Piccadilly Circus)

For a moment, his form was imprinted in the flickering neon strips that made up the vast sign. Then, silhouetted against the bursting light, his body pulled away from the wall as the tubes exploded and broke loose, [...]

My Bookshop Hitlist No.1: Bookpeople

The building aint’t pretty, but it’s what’s inside that counts. You can love a bookshop without ever having gone there, because friends you like and trust know and recommend it, so today a big shout-out goes to Bookpeople in Austin, Texas.

Look at the crowd it gets for events, dammit – sometimes we’re lucky to get [...]

2014: Start As You Mean To Go On

You reach an age where the click of the calendar to another year is viewed with a certain ennui and the thought, My God, here we go again.

And yet it’s hard not to be excited. This year I’ll be doing some travelling (Latvia in two weeks time, then Vietnam) and ‘The Bleeding Heart’ and ‘Nyctophobia’ [...]