Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 352

Junkfood, Jayzus and the Cute Cat Theory

There’s a political theory, first applied to online petition signing, that suggests people only care about an issue when it directly affects them. A Labour counsellor wants to allow a needle exchange to be opened next to a school, say, or Tories plan to turn your street into a dual carriageway. Suddenly you’re galvanized into [...]

Re:View – ‘Intouchables’

One of the most purely pleasurable Gallic films in recent years has divorced the critics from the public as never before. Francois Cluzet and Omar Sy star as the mismatched Philippe and Driss; the former being a quadraplegic millionaire, the latter his ex-con helper from a Paris banlieue. Some reviewers detested the film for its [...]

Happy Birthday, John and Arthur!

Today is the launch of my tenth Bryant & May novel, not too shabby for a series I was told could never take off in a million years because it didn’t have enough sex and violence.

A charming, if alarming, review has appeared in the ever-excellent Crimetime by the equally excellent Barry Forshaw, author of the [...]

He Was Gore Vidal, Whom No Man Would Ever Possess

His work could be frustratingly opaque, long-winded or confusing, but by God he was never boring. Gore Vidal was aristocratic, arrogant and cold-blooded, but craved attention. His long-time adversary Norman Mailer hit him on the head with a glass before a talk show, William F Buckley Junior threatened to punch him in the face after [...]

Where Did Everybody Go?

So the ‘Black Hole Of Calcutta’ scenario painted by the press, with zillions of peeps all crammed into the city unable to breathe, failed to materialise thanks to redirects away from the centre.

Only it was too successful, and now the place is the quietest it has been for years. I’ll be hitting town today [...]

Miscellany 2: Electrons and Paper

1. First today, the writer’s tools. Okay, Mac Mountain Lion OS installed, and the first reaction is – it’s bloody fast and more intuitive. I like the search engine being built into the URL and smoothness of operation, still don’t get Mission Control, and like the dock-based Reminders, which replaces the need for Stickies (although [...]

Miscelleny 2: Electrons and Paper

1. First today, the writer’s tools. Okay, Mac Mountain Lion OS installed, and the first reaction is – it’s bloody fast and more intuitive. I like the search engine being built into the URL and smoothness of operation, still don’t get Mission Control, and like the dock-based Reminders, which replaces the need for Stickies (although [...]

New Interview

Alan Morgan has posted an interview with me chatting about Bryant & May on his site, and you can find that here. You’ll find all sorts of oddities there involving nerds, book trailers and bath salts, all couched in his very quirky writing style. And you thought I was ‘Deep English’.

The Mythology of a London Olympics

My friend Jan writes to remind me of a point about the siting of the Olympics that I should have picked up on, as I come from that area. She says;

‘When you think of the history of that particular site – it is essentially Bow Back rivers and its environs – you probably remember that [...]

Re:View – ‘Black Pond’

From the DVD sleeve of ‘Black Pond’ (it shot in and out of cinemas too quickly for me to catch it), this looked like a murder mystery – a number of glum people standing around a corpse in a binbag. Nothing quite prepared me for the film, shot on a budget that wouldn’t constitute the [...]