Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 424

Chinese Puzzles

At the start of the 20th century, authors like Sax Rohmer (real name; Arthur Ward) were penning tales of imperial adventurers battling 'yellow peril' conspirators, amidst a prevailing fear that the Chinese were inherently criminal by nature. Ward was attacked for his racial stereotyping at the time of publication, and now the novels are dismissed [...]

Re:View – 'Detective Dee'

I've long been a fan of Robert Van Gulik's Judge Dee novels. The Chinese detective is a terrific creation, so I was pleased to discover that Tsui Hark has directed a Dee movie. It's closer to an Indiana Jones flick than any of the books, and yet it retains the complexity of plot that made [...]

Me & Hazel

Last week I posted a review of an excellent show called 'Girlfriends', which I had first seen many years earlier at the Playhouse Theatre, London. I was turning out some old photographs and found a shot of myself with Hazel O'Connor, the play's original star.

Hazel and I had been working on a film called 'Breaking [...]

Never Go On Holiday With Me

And I'd been thinking of going to Chile next. Skegness is suddenly looking appealing. They don't have volcanoes there, do they?

I'm taking a vacation from Thursday, and expect to be gone just over a week, during which time I won't have access to internet (or possibly even electricity), so for the first time since I [...]

Would A Touch-Screen Kindle Make Me Switch?

Frankly, yes. The Sony pocket eReader is a thing of beauty and a wonder, by far the easiest, most stylish and lightest eReader on the market, but to use it I have to download ePub copies from the appalling Waterstone's website, which feels like it was designed by someone who was kicked out of IT [...]

Re:View – 'Road Show'

Few plays have ever thrown money at the stage like this one; dollar bills literally leak from the characters until the audience is ankle-deep in the stuff. America is on the rise and there's money to be made for the opportunists. Spanning a period of 40 years, this is the true story of two fortune-seeking [...]

London's Coolest Film Club

It's weird, it's free and it's been going for five years, so how come you haven't heard about it?

Because Alex and Evrim, the mental cases who run it, have kept the Duke Mitchell Film Club below the radar, but now the secret is out. I went along last night and had a blast. You [...]

Bring On The Third Encounters!

A leading Russian astrophysicist has pronounced that as 10% of the known planets circling suns in the galaxy resemble Earth, we'll have alien contact within 20 years.

He thinks that although they may look human they may not be friendly. He doesn't just mean they'll be like people from Blackpool or something, he thinks they [...]

Why Do Women Make Such Good Hardline Right Wingers?

From Eva Peron to Imelda Marcos, from Sarah Palin to Michele Bachman, what is it in the female psyche that encourages destructive hardline conservatism to surface? There's more than a touch of Margaret Thatcher in Michele Bachman, although Thatcher generally got her facts right; a talent that clearly eludes Bachman, who just mistook John Wayne [...]

The Bryant & May Case: Competition Results

Well, that was fun! And what a lot of possible cases for Arthur Bryant and John May to mention in the adventure that will follow 'The Memory Of Blood', to be entitled 'The Invisible Code'.

I looked for a case that sounded as if there were possibilities within it to be explored, so that it might [...]