Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 305

The No-Tourists Road Trip Part 3

Low and high art today, starting with the former. Once again the strange European obsession with turning inanimate objects into humanoid sub-species manifested itself in the breakfast display of fruit at our parador. This is what happens when staff have too much time on their hands. I have many more pictures like this. Oh yes.

On [...]

The No-Tourists Road Trip Part 2

Having started in Seville, where this bizarre Venetian plaza can be found, we headed for Trujillo, the town where the convent nuns are forbidden any human contact with the world andmake money selling wine and bread which they can only serve by placing in revolving shelves in their wall.

Before we left I took a picture [...]

Road Trip II

As I have cunningly combined my research with a road-trip, I’m now heading for Trujillo, a town where the convent nuns are forbidden any human contact with the world.

As they make money buy selling bread, they can only serve by placing their hands through holes in walls, a penance we should perhaps confer upon MPs [...]

The Work/Life Trap

They say great minds discuss ideas, ordinary minds discuss events and small minds discuss people.

That’s how we go from the Washington Post and the New York Times (task: to enlighten and inform) all the way down to Rupert Murdoch’s wreckage of The Times London edition.

Once called ‘The Thunderer’, the former newspaper of note now headlines [...]

Stop Press: Award Alert!

Thanks Rachel and Transworld for being at Bristol Crimefest to speechify for me – I won the eDunnit Award last night but couldn’t be there.The eDunnit Award is for the best crime fiction ebook published in 2012 in both hardcopy and in electronic format.

I also found out last night that I’ve made the shortlist for [...]

Road Trip!

Expect sporadic outbreaks of blogging for a few days while I go on a road trip starting in Seville and ending who knows where. I’m researching a novel and also using the opportunity to escape London as we enter our ninth month of a bitter, bleak Gulf Stream-free winter that makes February in Iceland seem [...]

The Deadliest Is Yet To Come

Martin Edwards is the author of the excellent Harry Devlin and the Lake District series of crime novels, but he’s also the editor of the Crime Writers’ Association anthologies of short fiction. Last time out, ‘Original Sins’ gathered together the cream of British crime, and now he’s done it again with ‘Deadly Pleasures’. For this, [...]

How Religion Works

How Dan Brown Spoiled A Church, and How Demons Didn’t Get Raised

As a plethora of new London books appear in the stores, I thought we’d take a look at Lincoln’s Inn and its surroundings, one of the most fascinating and least explored areas of Central London.

At one edge is theTemple Church,a late-12th-century churchlocated between Fleet Street and the Thames, built for and by the Knights Templaras [...]

Re:View – ‘Gantz’

I sat through both parts of ‘Death Note’ unimpressed, thinking only that this was really not aimed at me, but ‘Gantz’, from the same producers, started out as another matter entirely. A cross between ‘Battle Royale’ and er, I don’t know, ‘Super 8′ possibly, or ‘MIB” crossed with ‘Scott Pilgrim VS The World’, or perhaps [...]