Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 357

Coming Soon: Another London Treasure Hunt!

I vowed I would never do it again, but last time I met so many interesting readers that I’m having another go to celebrate the launch of ‘Bryant & May and the Invisible Code’. After all, if you can’t create puzzles around a book with the word ‘code’ in the title, when can you?

Yes, the [...]

It Came from the Stores

Were you ever creeped out by the Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode ‘The Jar’? Or any of Ray Bradbury’s weird carnival tales? Well, on the night of Tuesday 17th July at 6.30pm in the JZ Young Theatre, Anatomy Building, University College London, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT, the Grant Museum Curator Mark Carnall will be performing an [...]

Believing The Horror Stories

Believability is something all genre writers must grapple with. We write about the undead, vampires and ghosts, and are expected to provide plausible explanations for mankind’s oldest fears, which were really only the summation of one fear – the fear of death. The fact that we are irrational creatures should absolve us from providing explanations, [...]

Rain Stops Play

Kensington Roof Gardens is one of the country’s most astonishing venues. Situated on the roof of a building in Knightsbridge, London, it is a block-long collection of century-old gardens filled with fully grown trees, streams, bridges, arches and flamingoes.

Unfortunately it is now a private members’ club at night, and above it is a truly appalling [...]

Ghost Stories On Film

I recently watched ‘The Woman In Black’. I’d read Susan Hill’s book many years ago and the play, a cheap two-hander popped into the Fortune Theatre to fill a programming gap, has now been running half as long as ‘The Mousetrap’, thereby closing off that lovely little theatre forever.

I can see why it’s a success. [...]

It’s Good To Talk

My US agent told me that the best years of one’s life were between fifty and sixty, and for a while I didn’t really see what he meant. I’ve always had a widely-aged crowd of friends, from children to people in their eighties.

Then, one undesirable side-effect of ageing appeared; I noticed that a certain [...]

Selling Off The Silver?

It now appears that Hamleys, the vast and somewhat peculiar toy store whose flagship is in Regent Street, is to be flogged off to the French for £60m. When I was a kid I loved going through the tunnel that connected the back of the store to its annexe, and spent my time between there [...]

It Came From Behind The Shelf No.5

I tend to get billed as the most English of writers, but there’s another side to this. From a very early age I was utterly immersed in US culture.

I knew the rules of baseball and what a ‘rain check’ was. I could name most American cars and movie stars. I read Huck Finn and Tom [...]

The Suspension of Disbelief

The crime genre is divided into many different subsections. The one I currently find myself inhabiting, it seems, is ‘Golden Age’/'Fantastic’, although I’m not quite sure why this label has been attached, as it seems very arbitrary. I’m doing a panel at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival later this month, and have a slot which [...]

Neglected Films No.5: ‘The Twelve Chairs’

When you think of Mel Brooks, you probably come up with ‘The Producers’, ‘Blazing Saddles’ and ‘Young Frankenstein’ as being career highlights. But Brooks’ second film is a real surprise. Before he switched to solely making parodies, he made another film like ‘The Producers’, i.e. a film which derived comedy from character. Brooks clearly wasn’t [...]