Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 90

Short Fantastic

Here’s a fun game; instead of trying to list your top ten films, try to make a list of half a dozen short films that were game-changers. I played this for an hour last night but only managed four until I had to look up more. Thousands of short films are written and produced every […]

Unforgettable In Shorts

Here’s a fun game; instead of trying to list your top ten films, try to make a list of half a dozen short films that were game-changers. I played this for an hour last night but only managed four until I had to look up more. Thousands of short films are written and produced every […]

Sunday Song

When the ‘Hamilton’ audience caused a furore in the White House for booing theatre attendee Mike Pence, it made Lin-Manuel Miranda a spokesperson for the migrant diaspora, so it feels right that the latest in Miranda’s series of Hamildrops should be written by the legendary John Kander, and should be pointedly aimed at the migrant […]

Another London Walk

It started off with this photograph, taken during the war. There’s a street in the City of London called Walbrook which was heavily bombed. After the site had been cleared, ready to build a new office building, there was an excavation that turned up – on the very last day of the dig – the […]

Movie Hatchet: ‘Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again’

Cher looks like a nylon-haired Barbie doll with fewer moving parts There’s a really creepy website called Plugged In that seems to be run by the Very White Far Right. It’s worth going on it just to count the number of times they say ‘family’ in a paragraph. In their review of the first ‘Mamma […]

Wanted: Braver Bloggers

 Book Bloggers, It’s Time To Raise Your Game I have always trusted the American press over its British equivalent – that is, until Mr Trump decided to invent a new form of the fourth estate by making shit up. Now I’m not sure whom I should trust, although I tend toward the New York Times […]

Paperback Incoming!

Writers who don’t listen to readers are idiots. My delightful editor for the Bryant & May novels is concerned about what readers like, and concentrates of making the covers particularly gorgeous. There’s a hint of modernisation going on in my Bryant & May paperbacks at the moment, with the cleaned-up non-retro typeface – and although […]

Night And The City

These days London’s Soho streets are not so mean. The faint undercurrent of corruption still lingers, but now it involves property speculators, not spivs and bookies. Once, though, London low-life writing involved getting in with the wrong people, rather than just hanging out in media clubs. The Jewish writer Gerald Kersh was the real deal, […]

My Home Library Part 3

I filled my entire house with built-in bookcases Yesterday’s comments reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about for years. When I moved into my last house in Kentish Town, it was in a cobbled backstreet mostly still filled with Irish families, and the properties were still council. Opposite me was – I kid you […]

My Home Library Part 2

Sometimes I have a houseguest who fails to remove a book from any of the shelves. Meanwhile, over in the shelves reserved for serious fiction, Dickens still remains the pack leader, mainly because I believe that characterisation is the single most essential element of fiction writing. My favourite Chucks are ‘Our Mutual Friend’, which adds […]