Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 67

Q&A 2

Some more answers to your questions, starting with one from yesterday’s comments (and another cheesy shot of me at some thing). Where is the best place to steal ideas from and get away with it? Film, book, TV, radio or a particular source/place/author. The answer may infuriate you. When I’m working on the main drafts […]

Q&A 1

I love good public Q&As, and with the peak book and film seasons coming up in the not too distant future, I’ll be booking myself in for as many Q&A events as possible. They’re best when the questions are original and the answers aren’t rote. Here are a few of the questions I’ve been asked […]

Q&A (Part 1)

I love good public Q&As, and with the peak book and film seasons coming up in the not too distant future, I’ll be booking myself in for as many Q&A events as possible. They’re best when the questions are original and the answers aren’t rote. Here are a few of the questions I’ve been asked […]

Life Without A Phone

Lily Tomlin once said, ‘New York is always knowing where your wallet is.’ It’s true of all big cities, and longtime residents tend to stay out of trouble not just because of what they know but how they look and which areas they wander into. When a couple I know recently visited from Australia for […]

Shocking! Sensational!

Writers suffer different levels of public amnesia. Chase’s name sounds familiar to many who have forgotten his books, perhaps because it distantly exists in the public memory, and there’s a reason; Chase became synonymous with a certain kind of disreputable crime novel, yet he was born in the Edwardian era. Why, then, did we associate […]

What Has The Internet Ever Done For Us?

As we now know, with the full acceptance of the internet came a great unshackling of information and inevitably, the rise of disinformation that gave us Russian meddling, whistleblowers, Cambridge Analytica and several disastrously compromised leadership contests. The latest heroes to be turned into villains are social media influencers, upon whom advertisers pounced because they […]

Hang On, Chaps, I’ve Just Had An Idea…

When a man reaches a certain age his thoughts turn to military history. I’m not sure why this happens. Just as a number of my female friends are venturing into books on crystal healing and Ayurvedic forest yoga, so their husbands are reading about forgotten battles or attending the Biggin Hill Air Show. Maybe it’s […]

My Halloween Brexit Launch Day Hell

  Monty Python understood a key national trait. The British don’t hate. We dislike, we are annoyed, or we Don’t Care Terribly Much For This Sort Of Thing. We rather like silly. But thanks to a set of algorithms that placed a tiny number of confused questionnaire-answerers into the grasping hands of an even tinier […]

The Brilliance Dims: Richard Williams Dies

When he died, he had just finished a full day’s work. He was 86, and living in Bristol, although he had been born in Canada. He was one of my true heroes, and I’d had the great pleasure of meeting him several times. Back in the 1960s, on the north side of London’s Soho Square, […]

The Curse Of The Curse

There are a couple of books that have entirely vanished in my occasionally ropey oeuvre. One is ‘Breathe’, a small press thriller I knocked out at great speed, and the other was a YA novel updating a Greek legend. ‘The Curse of Snakes’ was truly cursed. Timing is everything, and everything conspired against me in its writing. […]