Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 47

Brahms And List

I keep a list of the books which are guaranteed to make me smile. As everyone keeps evoking the Second World War at the moment I wondered, how did the British cheer themselves up during wartime? One of the ways was by turning to the sprightly comic novels of Caryl Brahms. Caryl (nee Doris Abrahams) []

Brahms And Booklist

As everyone keeps evoking the Second World War at the moment I wondered, how did the British cheer themselves up during wartime? One of the ways was by turning to the sprightly comic novels of Caryl Brahms. Caryl (nee Doris Abrahams) Brahms and Skid (ne Simon Skidelsky) met in a hostel and shared the same []

A Man About A Blog

So far self-isolation has proven, for us and our neighbours at least, a chance to pause and reassess where we stand. In all the time Ive been writing the blog Ive hardly ever looked back at it. Now I see there have been twelve years of almost daily articles that Ive never reassessed. The images []

Isolation Tales 6: ‘American Waitress’

When I suggested publishing a complete set of my short stories to a young editor, he gave me a wary look (because age) and said, There arent going to be any unpleasant surprises in there, are there? I thought Gee, I hope so seeing as theyre meant to be tales of urban unease, but I []

Whatever Happened To The Village Of Marylebone?

I was about to wrap up my potato peelings in a copy of the Financial Times when I caught sight of an article about the former London village of Marylebone. Reading it made me feel genuinely revolted. Marylebone is an ancient area that gets its name from a church dedicated to St Mary, built on the bank []

Isolation Tales 5: ‘A Century and a Second’

While Im posting your self-isolation stories here, I have to consider the format. If theyre too long theyll be hard to load and hard to read. A recent collection by Jeff VandeMeer solved the problem by stacking the text in newspaper-format columns, but I dont have that capability. Many of the tales I like best []

The Horror Story Is Dead: Official

If you made a list of your reading influences from the age of eight to eighteen, what would they be? Partly because we didnt have any kids books at home, mine reading included the simpler Dickens and Shakespeare tales (thankfully introduced to me at an early age), Mervyn Peake, Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury, Robert Louis []

The Marvellous Mr Moore

Brian Moore is my kind of writer, unplaceable, thoughtful, readable, moving. The Irish-Canadian novelist and scriptwriter wrote a number of haunting short novels (some 20 in all) often concerning life in Northern Ireland, exploring the Troubles and the Blitz. Born into a family of nine children in Belfast, 1921, he rejected Catholicism and explained his []

Isolation Tales 4: ‘The Most Boring Woman In The World’

So here we go with a fourth short story, this one from fairly early on in my timeline. Ive never understood quite why this tale has proven to be so popular over the years its been filmed at least three times and often comes up in readers conversations. Ive decided to delay Total Midnight: []

Press Could Have Risen To Occasion; Sinks Lower Instead

Over the last few days, to my mind one of the biggest disappointments has been the behaviour of the fourth estate. In a classic illustration of the Frog and the Scorpion fable, the British press, given a shining opportunity to show excellence and grow by informing and leading, turned tail and crept back into its []