Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 289

Admin Does The Crime Thriller Club

Watch the clip here or on YouTube. Yes, I know it’s in fuzzyvision, I was in a hurry as I’m heading for Manchester’s Grimm Up North festival Today for a PA and signing…

Can There Be More Bryant & May Books?

When my mother read the third Bryant & May novel, she turned to me and said; ‘Well dear, I think you’ve mined out that particular seam.’

When I wrote the first Bryant & May book, it was intended to be a one-off, a perfectly reproduced Golden Age mystery entirely set in the 1940s. My then-publisher turned [...]

The Power Of Fairytales

I’ve recently been involved in a new project to ‘redesign’ fairytales by deconstructing them and returning them to something dark and adult.

The resulting book, ‘Feary Tales’, is out later this month, edited by Steven Jones, and contrasts the new stories with the originals. The result, from Neil Gaiman, Joanne Harris, Reggie Oliver, me and others, [...]

Five More Unusual London Objects

The past is all around if you know where to look. Outsidethe Athenaeum Club and the Institute of Directors in Waterloo Place are a pair of blackened kerb stones, or horse blocks, requested by the Duke of Wellington in 1830. They let him reach his horse while visiting his club. It’s odd that so many [...]

Me & TV: A Spotted History

So, last night I turned up on TV after a fairly long absence, yattering on about Bryant & May and not looking quite as dorky as I thought I would, although what I was thinking when I donned that T-shirt I don’t know, ‘cos I didn’t really think about what I should wear on telly.

And [...]

Gothica Britannica

If you’re going to create gothic literature, you have to do it properly, which is why I hate books and TV shows that lazily set themselves in a peculiar non-existent Victorian gothic past. Sometimes, accessing the best bits and mashing them together into a movie works, as in the hilariously inaccurate but delicious Guy Ritchie [...]

Has Crime Fiction Lost The Plot?

A British Library recent exhibition was Murder in the Library: An A-Z of Crime Fiction. Perhaps it gave readers a chance to discover the dazzling range of crime fiction available, and encouraged them to step away from publishers’ current offerings, because, at the present time, the genre has backed itself into a dead end.

Some years [...]

Getting Away With Murder: The Live Event

This is according to Time Out:

‘Greenwich-born thriller writer Fowler, whose latest book, ‘Plastic’, follows a shopaholic housewife in her 24-hour demise to homelessness, discusses ‘Film Freak’, a new volume in his memoirs.’

This is concerning my appearance this coming week on Thursday October 3rd at Welwyn Garden City Library, and came as a bit of a [...]

Short Attention Span Reading

‘Sheila grew up in Sheffield, a Northern English town that had once been famous for the magnificence of its cutlery and the bravery of its air force pilots. By the time she was seventeen its glory had faded, and the grand Victorian lady had become a disappointed drab. It still had eleven cinemas, the smallest [...]

My Bipolar Life

That should probably read ‘Bi-national’, something I’ve more or less been since my late twenties. I don’t like being pinned to one city, which makes it ironic that I’ve become known for my love of London (I do love it, but only so long as an escape route occasionally opens).

Recently, though, my life has felt [...]