Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 95

How The Bryant & May Series Works – Part 3: Where To Next?

(This is the last part of a 3-part article) )Having reached the end of a second arc – that’s two arcs of six books apiece – I once again felt I had peaked. I was especially pleased with ‘The Burning Man’ because it matched the mood of my city. I had got caught up in […]

How The Bryant & May Series Works – Part 2: Going The Distance

(Continued from yesterday) If I’d felt the series was going to run out of steam (the publisher’s nightmare, that an author invested in fails to deliver with consistency) I needn’t have worried. By pegging the characters to a more recognisable world I could lightly reflect current events and always have something new to write about. […]

How The Bryant & May Series Works – 1: What Am I Up To?

I’m up to Book 18, if you must know. Seriously, it crossed my mind the other day, what am I up to with these characters? Writers are meant to have a plan, but I started out with a crime novel set in World War II, inside a venerable theatre. I had already created (I say […]

Perfect Company

In 1970, composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim had a show called ‘Company’ open on Broadway which, unusually for him, caught the tone of the times. The hippy era was ending, the swingers had swung and commitment loomed. ‘Company’ was a musical comedy presented in a fugue state, taking place between an intake of breath and its exhalation […]

Predicting The Future From The Past

The science fiction author JG Ballard predicted that writers would soon become obsolete. They would be like Victorian stock characters, with no discernible purpose in the world. He suggested that given external reality is now a fiction, you don’t need to invent it anymore. It’s an idea echoed by Adam Curtis, a Ballardian documentary-maker, here; […]

How Writers Handle Success

In rom-coms, all the effort is put into finding a mate and falling in love. The film usually stops at the altar, as if this is where life ends instead of being where it begins. So with writing; all the effort is concentrated on finding inspiration, writing and getting something published, not on what happens after, […]

Last Of The Crazy Houses

Not long ago I went to a place called Pyramiden, an abandoned Russian mining town in one of the northernmost points in the Arctic Circle. You have to carry rifles because of polar bear attacks, and the temperature reaches minus 40 degrees. The icy wasteland has kept the deserted settlement intact, and there’s a cinema […]

Could Box Sets Kill The Crime Novel?

At this time of the year crime books metaphorically hit my doormat in increased numbers, and a lot of them look the same; blocky white sans-serif typeface on moody landscape shot, a copy line that reads something like ‘She awoke from a coma to find her daughter dead…but what if she’s still alive?’ Inside the […]

A New ‘Forgotten Author’

Here it comes, on October 3rd – the snappy paperback version of ‘The Book of Forgotten Authors’. But the stories of 99 missing authors are now the stories of 100. I’ve revised the hardback, updating it with any publication changes that have happened in the one-year interim between the editions, and decided to add a […]

Bonkers New Books For Autumn

October, the time when all the weird books come out (including mine – more on that tomorrow). Last night the legendary Scala Cinema in King’s Cross rolled back the decades for the launch of my pal Jane Giles’s awesome Scala book, the definitive volume on this epoch-defining club/cinema/crazy space, covering everything from its punk years […]