Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 310

Does Anyone Still Read Short Stories?

(This article contains an edited version of a passage in ‘Paperboy’)

With the arrival of e-reading I’ve found that short story anthologies seem to have largely vanished from shop shelves. My first break into fiction was via a collection of short stories, and I went on to produce ten volumes of them, most of which have [...]

How Do You Doodle?

In times of economic crisis, people get creative. When the book trade became threatened by the rise of e-books, Claire Main did a smart thing – she came up with an idea to add value to paper books as desirable objects. She asked authors to write inside them and draw a doodle that represents something [...]

The Openings Of 5 Great Suspense Novels No.1

I have to review a lot of thrillers. Many start out with a paragraph describing the weather. They go in the bin. Others starts with a cop pulling on a cigarette and staring at a dead body. Just as predictable as the weather – bin. But it shouldn’t be like this, particularly in a thriller. [...]

Finally Visible In The US

See what they’ve done here, our friends across the Atlantic? They’ve dropped the words ‘Bryant & May’ from the cover but have hidden their initials in the stained glass window. It’s an elegant solution to the age-old problem; how do you keep refreshing a series? Every time a new volume comes out, the sales of [...]

Saying No To Work

I come from a generation that never said no to any job, no matter how crummy it was. It took me many years to figure out that this is not necessarily a good thing.

Admittedly, it’s different when you’re managing your own career. If you attain a modicum of minor success, people ask you to do [...]

Re:View – ‘La Chispa De La Vida’ (The Spark of Life)

Alex de la Iglesia is one of my favourite directors. Not everything he does works – witness the drab version of ‘The Oxford Murders’, his only film in English – and I wasn’t over-struck on ‘Perdita Durango’, the prequel to ‘Wild At Heart’. But the hits, like ‘Day of the Beast’, ‘La Comunidad’, ’800 Bullets’ [...]

Welcome To The Magpie Generation

Where do ideas come from?

Last week the Guardian website started a weekly round-up of best commercials (not a new concept; back in the 1970s ‘Newcomers’ used to round up commercials at 9:00am every Monday on ITV) but these Best Commercials are themselves preceded by a commercial, in this case a crappy one for instant coffee. [...]

Cloudy With A Chance Of Trains

Walking around the corner to get a loaf of bread from the patisserie in St Pancras Station, which brings Parisian bread in on the Eurostar, I was astonished to see yet another new sculpture on the upper floor – this time of people living among the clouds, up near the immense glass roof of the [...]

When The Future Becomes The Past

Growing up in sixties suburban London was rather like lying in tepid bathwater for several years. Into this pleasant, sleepy complacency fell ‘1984’, a book that entrapped me for life.

I was on the cusp of adolescence, reading voraciously, gradually testing the limits of my smug world, and bought ‘1984’ in the Popular Book Centre Greenwich, [...]

Computer-Friendly People

I think of my self as a computer dunce. I can only write the simplest bits of code, I have trouble getting download programs to work, and when something goes seriously wrong all I know how to do is TIOATIOA. I find it impossible to keep track of my many, many changing passwords and am [...]