Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 340

On Being A Professional Writer No.3: The Genre Pool

The reviewers of JK Rowling’s first adult novel were quick to point out that they consider her still to be, at heart, a children’s writer, saying that it’s only in the teenaged passages that the book takes off. I wonder if this typecasting would have held if ‘The Casual Vacancy’ had been Rowling’s first work. [...]

Ten Beautiful Things

1. Sunrise over St Paul’s Cathedral.

2. Irish girls.

3. The Grande Corniche on the Cote D’Azur.

4. American publishers.

5. Sausages, eggs and newspapers on Sunday mornings.

6. Manchester Art Gallery.

7. The bookshops of Connaught Place, Delhi.

8. The train from London to Paris.

9. A Shoreditch bar with a bunch of mates on a rainy night.

10. The proofs for ‘The [...]

Has The Naked Rambler Reached The End Of The (Clothes) Line?

He has become one of Britain’s most endearing and annoying sights. Ex-marine Stephen Gough has walked the length of the country nude and has been so consistently arrested that courts and prisons are now exasperated with him, and want to break the circle of lawbreaking and incarceration his behaviour has inspired.

Last time the Scots let [...]

In Which Your Host Abjectly Fails To Score In Historical London Quiz

I don’t think it’s giving too much away to point out that I utterly failed to win the quiz section of the Londonist Out Loud podcast, but in my defence I was up against the excellent Fiona Rule, a London historian, and I had decided to take an innovative approach i.e. guessing wildly. As for [...]

The Devil Rides To Manchester

Tomorrow I’m in Manchester introducing ‘The Devil Rides Out’ on the big screen.

In it, Christopher Lee takes a rare heroic turn as scholar and occultist Duc de Richleau, playing him with a dark elegance and intensity, in a trim goatee. He discovers that the son of a war buddy has joined a satanic cult lorded [...]

A Blast Of A Bond Theme

To that list of people who have been there through most of our lives that I published a few days ago should be added ‘James Bond’. It seems he was always there, first in very sexy little collectable mass-marker paperbacks (which are now collectors’ items), then as films.

I still own the ‘volcano’ poster for [...]

A Sopping Surprise

This morning I headed for the Barbican to stand in the rain.

Installations that engage the public directly are all the rage, and Random International’s Rain Room at the Curve in the Barbican art gallery is attracting huge attention. They’re the techheads who put together the room of mirrors that turned to face you as [...]

A Dry Spell

Installations that engage the public directly are all the rage, and Random International’s Rain Room at the Curve in the Barbican art gallery is attracting huge attention. They’re the techheads who put together the room of mirrors that turned to face you as you walked around them, and now they’ve turned their electronic skills to [...]

London’s Musicals: Big But Not Clever

Variety calls them tuners, and they clog up well over half of the city’s theatres. Andrew Lloyd-Webber has done more damage to West End theatre than any single person I can name, with a string of tenth-rate musicals stuffed with TV talent show nonentities aimed at tourists who’ll pay over £70 a ticket for a [...]

On Being A Professional Writer No. 2: Defining Who You Are

There’s a strange mystique attached to professional writing that comes from the idea of creating something from nothing. But it’s not something from nothing at all – every writer I know shows his or her influences quite clearly, and much of our early work can be traced back to those who inspired us. This is [...]