Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 343

That’s The Way To Do It!

When I wrote ‘Bryant & May and the Memory of Blood’ I underestimated the interest in Punch & Judy that still exists in the UK. Last week, the oldest Punch & Judy master in the UK, Leslie Press, 84, who has been performing the shows for 60 years, returned to his old Primrose Hill home [...]

Last Chance To See

Well, the response to news that scientists have been stunned to discover that the Arctic ice will be completely gone in about four years was predictable; they’re getting excited about drilling up the oil and minerals underneath, rushing to Armageddon. Now’s the time to visit the Maldives and Venice if you haven’t been (Venice is [...]

LDN to BCN

I’ll be here for a long weekend trying to arrange Broadband for my flat in a language I can’t yet speak, so it’s hard to say if I’ll post on Saturday or Sunday – but early next week there should be some news on several new books, guest appearances and events.

Sarcasm, Aisle Three

It was actually a brilliant idea for Waitrose to ask consumers to complete their hashtag that began ‘I shop at Waitrose because …’ They must have known they would get an avalanche of sarcasm from British punters who all too clearly recognise the supermarket’s elitist position, and they’ve responded with good humour.

Some of the completed [...]

A Locked Room Mystery

My friends over at the ever-excellent Londonist are adept at finding things I didn’t know about right on my doorstep. This time it’s Hinthunt, a pop-up live game service that locks you in a room and defies you to escape within an hour, following clues and puzzles before the countdown is over. Up to five [...]

Neglected Films No. 13: ‘Agatha’

Written by Kathleen Tynan (Kenneth’s wife) and directed by Michael Apted, ‘Agatha’ explains what hypothetically happened to Agatha Christie during the eleven days she was missing in 1926. Her car was found crashed in a ditch and the police combed woodlands for her but Mrs Christie eventually reappeared in a Harrogate hotel under an assumed [...]

Brainwaves

Here’s a real mystery;
Sir Bernard Lovell, the visionary scientist who became the founder of the Jodrell Bank observatory, did more than give us a brilliant bit of rhyming slang. He believed that during a trip to the Soviet Union in the early 1960s the Communist authorities tried to kill him with lethal radiation because they [...]

When Authors Work Together

Having been involved in two volumes of ‘Zombie Apocalypse’, in which a worldwide epidemic is given a factual genesis and relayed in the form of emails, notes, recordings and other methods of communication, I know how difficult it is to get right. Funnily enough, the easiest part was fitting my part of the story with [...]

Neglected Films No. 12: ‘Dreamchild’

Alice in Wonderland always puzzled me. Plotless and picaresque, dreamlike but cold and uninvolving, it gained a foothold in the American heart because its author was embraced by a US university. In England it was considered by its critics as rather unsophisticated children’s fare despite its huge commercial success, but the endless reprints appealed to [...]

Today’s Favourite Word: Mutoscope

Before the arrival of films, New York City had over a thousand mutoscopes housed under one roof. You could find them on any seaside pier, and a handful were still in operation when I was a kid. They’re better known as ‘What The Butler Saw” machines.

A mutoscopes was a mechanical flip book with about [...]