Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 82

A Cover Is Not A Book…(Part 1)

…so open it up and take a look,’ sings Lin Manuel-Miranda, but in the hands of a good designer a cover can be a powerfully persuasive tool. In a modern bookshop with limited space covers must communicate a lot to browsers, and I have often been compelled to buy a book by its cover. Natasha […]

Back To Work! Here’s What’s Coming Up…

First, a few details about the book which is landing here in just three weeks’ time… ‘The Lonely Hour‘ is the biggest Bryant & May novel yet, and sees the detectives back in the present day after the sixties romp of ‘Hall of Mirrors’. In fact it picks up right where Wild Chamber ended, with […]

What I Did On My Holiday

  It seems inevitable that after failing to check my calendar we should arrive on a quiet week away in the middle of Mardi Gras, and that our hotel would be at its epicentre. This is a quick look at the island of Gran Canaria from my perspective, being that of a middle-aged man who […]

London Ceremonies & Rituals

Still no pictures! In the absence of a laptop I’m at the Christopher Columbus museum in Las Palmas.  I ended up here by default; Gran Canaria has never been high on my list of places to visit, but Spanish friends told me to avoid the beaches and head for the capital, which proved to be […]

Admin Screws Up – Talk Among Yourselves

A few days of pleasant weather and some nice meals, I thought, a mini Holliday and I can get the thriller finished, run the blog, chill out. When I got to the airport I opened my laptop case and discovered I’d left my laptop charging at home.  As a result, you’re off the hook for a […]

Why Does London Have Amusement Arcades?

In King’s Cross, opposite the railway station, there once stood a big dipper, and this wooden roller coaster was surrounded with funfair booths. Today there is still an amusement arcade on the opposite corner at the end of Euston Road. In Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus there are still amusement arcades filled with fruit machines […]

The Girl Who Loved French Films

I’m off for a week, heading to a small hotel in the sun to decompress before returning to finish my thriller and start the 2020 Bryant & May novel, which I hope is going to be a cracker. This means a little less blogging this week, although I’ll have my laptop and nearly 2,000 books […]

Collectors Beware!

In the book world, things got a lot better for collections of the rare and arcane; suddenly you could get hold of the most obscure out-of-print editions for mere pence. But the pleasure of finding a favourite edition is mitigated by the feeling that we’re in an endgame for paperbacks in particular, killed off by […]

Kafkaesque

It’s interesting that in all of the Brexit arguments no-one has brought up the word ‘Kafkaesque’. ‘Byzantine’, ‘paradoxical’, ‘labyrinthine’, yes. But Brexit is Kafkaesque in every way – populated by perverse people, based on impossibilities, an insoluble knot filled with barely glimpsed mysteries. The poor little Prague clerk-turned-writer Franz Kafka, in death as in life, has […]

The Books You’ll Never Finish

The illusion of choice is particularly applicable to books because you can buy them for small change when you’re tempted by momentary fancies. They’re still the best value impulse purchase of all. Trouble is, you sometimes put your book on a shelf where it sits for years, unopened. For me it’s even worse, because writers […]