Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 426

Is That A Gun In Your Pocket?

Oh, sorry sir, yes it is. Thanks to PS Publishing and the excellent Conrad Williams, here comes 'Gutshot', a hefty tome of 21 terrific stories of the sinister Wild West (including a contribution from my good self) which should hopefully be arriving this year…

Goodbye Peter

And another good one goes…Peter Falk died at 83 yesterday. I never really watched Columbo, but I remember him in a million movies as a great character actor, and often as a support character in films like 'The Great Race' and 'It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World', a film about which I had a [...]

The Horror Of A British Summer

The rain. The trenches. The infections. The endless misery of waiting between burst of deafening noise – oddly not Ypres in the first Word War but the horror that is Glastonbury. It's not exactly 'Hair', is it? Festivals are a right of passage you undertake when you under 25 (if you're older, you really shouldn't [...]

Separated At Birth

I was trying to think who recent shots of Prince reminded me of, and realised who he's turned into – the young Shirley Bassey. Perhaps he should do the next Bond film.

Billy's Speech Comes True

James Cameron's 'Avatar' was described by the Guardian as 'the world's first attempt to fuse the aesthetic of Starship Troopers with the ambience of mid-period Enya', but it was huge. The film had more than 125 licensed products incorporating toys, clothing, books and video games which earned over an additional 100 million squids.

But that's [...]

All Downhill From Here

What angel awakes me from my flowery bed?
Bugger, it's the rain.
That must mean Midsummer's Eve is over and we start sliding backwards into winter.

Tradition says that the longest day of the year is the start of the English summer, but I'm not so sure. Different countries regard the equinox in different ways. Ireland considers [...]

Heads Up For Hammer

Last night I met two of the sculptors who work for a friend's company designing the high-end resin horror, SF and fantasy models you see in stores like Forbidden Planet. This is the work of Andrew Teal, who has just crafted heads of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee from Hammer's first Dracula film.

Andrew painstakingly [...]

The Mystery Of The Locks

For the first time in 15 years, St Paul's Cathedral was freed from its scaffolding this week. The £40m cleaning project coincides with the 300th anniversary of St Paul's being declared complete by Parliament in 1711. The smoke and dirt of three centuries of pollution had left the building blackened and damaged, but this has [...]

Memory & London

Why is the past so deeply embedded in London? It seems that for all its postwar rebuilding there's something to remember on every corner. Walking to the Royal Albert Hall last night I passed this street opposite the park, upon which nothing seems to have changed in 150 years (it was probably De Vere Gardens [...]

The Strangest TV Show Ever Made

Where do you get your ideas from?
Writers are frequently asked about the origins of their imagination. I grew up in the sixties, when creativity was king and demographics had yet to take a grip on writing. There was a lot of experimental work in the arts, not all of it successful, and as the decade [...]