Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 3

The Past Isn’t What It Was

  Where do policemen live? 999, Letsby Avenue. Obviously. British humour doesn’t travel very well, much like most of our films. And if the film ‘See How They Run’, proves one thing, it’s that the British don’t make very good mainstream films anymore. We can manage the odd bit of intriguing arthouse (‘The Wonder’, ‘Men’) […]

Something Beneath The Froth

We’ve often talked, you and I, about the tragic fate of the humorous novel (this is how I think of us, snuggled in front of the fire with a glass and a pile of books, not hunched over a laptop alone with a blanket over my knees because London is so fracking cold), but I’m […]

Ninety Nine Per Cent Perfect

Anyone familiar with this blog will know by now that the autumn/winter season (I say winter, it’s 17C here in London) is peppered with film reviews because it’s movie preview time, when we get to check out all the non-comic-universe upcoming releases. I got out to an actual cinema again this week, under the watchful […]

Web Fiction Is Changing The Writing Game

My agent and I agreed the other day that publishers are not listening to teen readers who turn to the largely free and vast resource of online fiction. After all, how do you begin to get a handle on it? Noël Coward, judgemental arch-snob, bullied his performers about preserving the clarity of language. He is […]

Peeling Back The Layers Of ‘Glass Onion’

Benoit Blanc, the New Orleans detective essayed by Daniel Craig in the surprise hit ‘Knives Out’, channels his inner Foghorn Leghorn and has a hoot in its sequel ‘Glass Onion’, which is yes, an old Beatles song and also, literally, a very big glass onion. If the template last time was ‘The Old Dark House’ […]

Hallowe’en Horrors, Guy Fawkes Gore

Hallowe’en Hell We don’t do Hallowe’en well in this country. We’re just not gung ho enough to embrace all of its American peculiarities, except in the suburbs. Nobody can be arsed to do what apparently every American resident does, ie, build hundred foot-tall orange singing plastic skeletons that breathe fire. Except, of course, we have […]

Pumpkin-Free Zone: Hallowe’en Horrors

Hallowe’en was possibly observed around the world, possibly for centuries, possibly not. Unlike other ceremonial events it has no confirmed pedigree, so all bets are off. In the same way that America successfully monetised Christmas in the 20th century it did the same with Hallowe’en, colour-coding it and providing a specific number of purchasable requirements. […]

When You Talk To Journalists, Keep Your Mouth Shut

If You Enter The Ring, It’ll Get Mucky Over the years I’ve told some true stories about journalists here and elsewhere, but I’ve always kept myself patient with them because I began my career (like most authors) connected to the press. Just as the fearless wade into the Facebook cesspool to pass on un-news, it’s […]

A Bit Of A Race Against Time

How Do I Write Now? On one side – a head full of ideas. On the other – permanent pain and exhaustion. How on earth am I meant to balance them? This is hardly a new problem for writers, but once I could have written my way through difficult patches, and I now have to […]

The Book You Need About…Wit

Witty writers fall into three groups; first there are those who set their stories within a recognisable world and pass comment upon its flaws. The most instantly graspable of these in my chemo-raddled brain is Tom Wolfe’s super-zeitgeisty ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’, his brilliant satire on American society in the 1980s. Like other great social […]