Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 51

Writing That’s So Bad It’s Good

There’s a healthy market for bad books. Game of Thrones fans were so upset by the final series of the epic show that they started trolling the two scriptwriters. When you Googled ‘bad writers’ that month, the first thing that came up was a photograph of the pair. Viewers were upset that their invested time […]

Inside Writing 4: You Never Escape Yourself

They say it’s always too late to jump on a bandwagon; by the time you see it coming it has passed. But for the writer, originality comes with its own problems. If your book presents something too fresh it can’t be slotted into a category, nor can it be summed up in a line, so […]

Films With Surprise Endings

It’s not enough for the twists in mystery novels to be unguessable – after all, there’s a frisson that accompanies the feeling that you may be able to name the murderer – the solutions to mysteries need to feel natural and unforced. Left-field answers are fun, but organically arrived-at solutions are more satisfying. This rules […]

When The Characters Take Charge

It took me years to realise that books are made by characters, not plots. Yet sometimes characters are so overpoweringly real that they go in search of the author – beware of creating fictional figures that might spring to life when you least expect it… In The Land of Laughs Jonathan Carroll’s hero is an […]

I’m Not There, I’m Here

It’s been a long winter so far; a combination of workload, never-ending flu and not enough down time left me feeling wiped out, so I’ve gone away for one week. I’m in Hispaniola for a few days of whale-watching, rum drinking and tropical doodadery, back Saturday, unforch. As someone who saw Barbados transform itself from […]

Hipsterism For Beginners

‘If you’re woke, you dig it.’ Well, that answers the question; the word ‘woke’ first appeared in 1962, after William Melvin Kelley said it in a New York Times article that suggested beatniks had appropriated slang from African-Americans. Kelley was 24 at the time and lived ‘uptown, way uptown.’ He was interested in idiomatic language, […]

Oranges & Lemons – Date And Cover

I now have a publication date for ‘Oranges & Lemons’, the next Bryant & May mystery. It’ll be out on July 23rd in time for your summer holiday reading. That’s a tad later than usual because last year there were two new B&Ms, so the paperback versions of both ‘The Lonely Hour’ and ‘England’s Finest’ […]

Cheers! No. 1: Secret Drinking

This occasional series about fine places of refreshment starts off with a nod to secret drinking. London is particularly fond of hiding its more interesting establishments away from casual eyes, with cocktail bars protected by passcodes and hidden messages and odd names for speakeasys like The Mayor Of Scaredy Cat Town. Even a few pubs […]

Review: The Visit

Olivier, National Theatre, London ‘The Visit, or The Old Lady Comes To Call’ has the feeling of a timeless fable that has always existed. That’s why Swiss-German playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1956 play gets revised and globally performed – adaptors have seen in it a vehicle for different messages. Songwriters Kander & Ebb had the audacity […]

No Longer Brutal, Just Beautiful

If you’ve ever been hypnotised, you’ll know that you’re told to imagine a place where you feel calm and safe and happy. I would pick London’s South Bank complex, home of the National Theatre and the Royal Festival Hall. This is what was written about the formation of a national theatre in 1904 by William […]