Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 62

Thinking About Film 2: Unreal & Over-Familiar

Stars make love fully dressed and shrug off bullets as if they were mosquito bites One of the problems with present-day entertainment is that Hollywood long ago won a determined and heavily funded cultural war. American lifestyles dominate global TV and film to the point where we hardly see anything else. I’ve watched too many […]

Thinking About Film 1: Too Much Sugar

A maid leans out of an upstairs window, calling to the lady of the house, who is in the garden clipping roses. MAID: Oh Ma’am! I’ve swallowed a safety pin! LADY OF THE HOUSE: Oh so that’s where all my safety pins go. A Victorian cartoon illustrating very British humour. We don’t do sentiment but […]

Adventure With A Brain

Nobody seems to remember this most unusual author anymore. Van Greenaway was a lawyer-turned-novelist who wrote topical, political, satirical thrillers. At his best he combined popular fiction with a rare passion and erudition. This kind of thought-provoking action novel was a genre all its own that now appears to have vanished entirely. Van Greenaway started […]

A Ten-Minute Argument With PD James

  Phyllis Dorothy James was, everyone will tell you, the grande-dame of crime writing, and once issued her top ten tips for writing novels. It’s heresy to contravene the rules, but what worked for PD James was clearly not what works for every aspiring or professional author. Let’s have a look at them and see […]

Tales Of The Cities

England has just come second (after Bhutan!) as the world’s best place to visit as voted by Lonely Planet, and their reasoning is strong. I’ve been feeling for a while that it’s time for me to explore the UK a bit more, not just on PAs. I gave up my car years ago, so I’ll […]

London In Autumn: Now The Fun Begins

Autumn in the countryside means the arrival of mud, the less enjoyable vegetables (turnips, anyone?) and the countryside’s only advantage, scenery, being obscured by freezing rain. Mercifully for Londoners it’s the start of the Season – sport, theatre, music, literature, all the arts burst into bloom from the Tate to the V&A, the West End […]

The Echo Of Wormwood

America’s prime serious documentarian is Errol Morris, a man who does not merely recount events to a timeline but who brings a profound artistic sensibility to the gradual unfolding of truth. From ‘The Thin Blue Line’ and ‘The Fog of War’ to ‘Standard Operating Procedure’, the story of Abu Ghraib, Morris’s films are mood pieces […]

Books! Books! Books!

  Do non-readers ever truly understand readers? I suspect not. Last night we happy few were ensconced in Heffers, one of the nation’s most delightful bookshops, talking about the crime genre. But newly returned from Cambridge, my head is still filled with Harry Potter. I did not personally enjoy the two volumes I read but […]

Living In A Box

You can have your genetic code analysed to find out where you’re from, but it can’t tell you who you are. I recently had dinner with some very nice social-data analysts, who told me that statistically I was an outlier who didn’t fit their paradigms. The press is full of data telling us about how we […]

We’re Going Where The Sun Shines Brightly: Travel Horror Stories

Today I’m slipping through the eye of the hurricane between the Catalan protests and the General Strike planned for Friday. The road to the airport has been unblocked and I’m outta here. Oddly, despite my bad experiences in seven years of owning a flat in Barcelona (mugged, robbed, insulted, caught up in terrorist attack etc) […]