Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 81

London Stories: The Hearts of London

The spot where Farringdon Road (one of those routes to which we often attach a definite article) becomes New Bridge Street is not terribly interesting to look at these days, but it hides a formidable history. And for me, in an odd way, it is one of London’s hearts – one of its key crossing […]

London Stories: The Big Frieze

I set stories in London because when it comes to fables, legends and historical tidbits the city offers up an infinite and continuous supply. London has always been a working city, its streets, wards, neighbourhoods and boroughs defined by the trades of the people who lived in them – but no more. When everyone seems […]

London’s Bottomless Pit Of Stories

I set stories in London because when it comes to fables, legends and historical tidbits the city offers up an infinite and continuous supply. London has always been a working city, its streets, wards, neighbourhoods and boroughs defined by the trades of the people who lived in them – but no more. When everyone seems […]

Go Mad Or Go Home

Every time I sit down to write a novel I come up against the same question; how realistic should I make it? How fantastical? How believable should it be? How mad? How down to earth? I’ve written here before about how so-called ‘gritty’ thrillers and crime procedurals are usually nothing of a kind. We see […]

Vanished London Street Jobs

When I was a child my father and I would go to the East End’s Petticoat Lane and see the canary sellers, who had dozens of caged birds on display in the street. The last time I went to Bermondsey Market they still had sarsaparilla sellers, and it made me wonder which other jobs have […]

Writers’ Physical Problems Solved Here

Coleridge was a druggie, Joyce and Faulkner were functioning alcoholics, Sylvia Plath was bipolar, Swift, Milton, and Emily Brontë most likely had Asperger’s, Melville and Proust were depressed, Kafka was a mess. Most jobs carry a physical cost. In London my living room overlooks the Guardian building, and I see the journalists slumped at their […]

On The Tip Of Your tongue: More Forgotten Authors

  It seems I may have overestimated the number of readers interested in rediscovering forgotten authors, and it’s unlikely that there’ll be a second volume, which is a shame because it was finished and all ready to go – so from time to time I’ll pop a few of the authors in here, in the […]

BFI Puts London On Film

The British Film Institute is doing a great job of cleaning up, restoring and reissuing some overlooked British films at the moment, and it’s hard to watch them without mixed emotions – this is the world in which I grew up, now unimaginable and alien. In these films London is a character, overbearing and inescapable, […]

In Celebration Of World Book Day

Seeing as I keep getting friends wishing me happy World Book Day (something I barely knew existed because authors never hear about anything in the publishing world unless it’s really bad news), here’s a list of the books Arthur Bryant is happy promoting on this auspicious occasion. They stand on the shelves behind his desk […]

A Cover Is Not A Book…Part 2

It is perhaps the most imaginatively redesigned book of them all. George Orwell’s 1984 has become a symbol of surveillance and oppression that speaks out to everyone, even though it now reads very much as a reflection of its time. The US pulp cover above is probably the strangest attempt made at portraying the events […]