Christopher Fowler's Blog

Read this on The Guardian website I was asked by The Guardian to write about my reaction to reading Chris’s book and what happened after his death…. My author spouse never let me read anything he wrote before it was finished. But after his death from cancer, I found myself choosing funeral flowers at the […]

By the way, back in May Chris won the Last Laugh Award at CrimeFest, the International Crime Festival convention, for Bryant and May’s Peculiar London.  Really!  Chris would have been both delighted and amused at the irony… The Husband

Hurrah!  I finally plucked up the courage to read my copy of Word Monkey at our favourite spot on the beach in Barcelona.  It’s taken me a long time to get to this point but I felt the time was right.  It was a very emotional read, but it was so nice to ‘hear’ his voice […]

 A book is forever. In August 2008, I set up a blog with Simon Moore, the London creative art director I hugely respect, to cover books, films, the arts and – it turns out – to spark impromptu discussions about Britain’s collapsing social fabric. OK, that part hadn’t been planned but you could hardly avoid […]

Men On Ink When I was putting together the complete short stories (1984-now) my new young editor, who often looked worried, eyed the vast number of pages with trepidation. Some of the stories were nearly four decades old. ‘There’s nothing in these pages that’s going to come back and bite me in the arse, is […]

Kenneth Williams: ‘Raining again, I see.’ Tony Hancock: (After a considerable pause) ‘Oh, so that’s what’s making the roads wet.’ I felt less horrible than normal, I told myself this morning. Today was the day I’d go for a walk. Now, this is a big deal for me. The challenge starts when I leave the […]

Captain’s bridge here. Supply chain problems are causing gaps in your regular blog service, I’m afraid. Thanks to an unexpected downturn in productivity (inflammation of the liver requiring a complex new drug regime) three jokes a page are being rationed to two, the cost of sarcasm has risen prohibitively and a number of less familiar […]

There weren’t any. I mean, let’s be honest. We’d be better off listing the least worst things, but even their most shining moments were tarnished. Why didn’t the good people of London Town drag ‘Spaffy’ de Pfeffel Johnson out by his fat little ear and shut him in the stocks? Because we need people with […]

What do writers think about when they’re not writing? They think about writing. They try to imagine impossible dilemmas for their characters. I once spent five months trying to unknot a stubborn plot twist in a short story. I failed because I was at fault, not the story. For me Bryant & May were always different, […]

In Barcelona I had a wonderful Polish friend call Joanna, one of those friendly people you instantly click with. If you think my life is full of incident, you should hear about hers; buses going over cliffs, trapped on sinking boats, caught up in terrorist attacks etc. When I met her she was working for […]