Christopher Fowler's Blog, page 16

Whenever I travel I spend the final hours before leaving in a frenzy of charging-up. It seems that travelling light now involves hauling 10 kgs of tech around, and it all has to be filled with ‘the new electricity’, as my great-grandmother called it. Thank god I gave up my car, otherwise I’d be charging […]

‘I got halfway through and stopped reading,’ said my New York agent. He was talking about my new manuscript. ‘There’s no market for it over here.’ ‘Things must be pretty bad when your own agent fires you,’ said a friend. ‘Why don’t you write to their market?’ ‘I don’t know what their market is anymore,’ […]

I’ve gone a bit Henry Miller today, for which I apologise in advance. It’s a work-in-progress from ‘Word Monkey’, the third part of my memoir trilogy, which began with ‘Paperboy’ and continued with ‘Film Freak’. So, you’ve been worried about your health for a while but you’re like Cleopatra, in denial. You think if you […]

In the last few years, the book-reading and publishing demographic has radically changed. In the press this week, Elisabeth Strout warned against the dangers of women writers dominating fiction as both authors and publishers. ‘We need to mix it up. I also wish there were more male readers of fiction.’ Overall, males are still ahead […]

I always write with music playing. I find that soundtracks can provide the perfect atmosphere in which to write. But where do you start?  Soundtrack music is created to enhance the emotion of visuals, so it makes an ideal accompaniment. I went through a phase of writing to Michael Nyman scores, particularly the Handel-like ‘The Draughtsman’s […]

Oh no, I thought, haunted paintings. Elderly men raising flickering candles to canvas as the figures move… It’s a supernatural genre that has never worked for me, except for Oscar Wilde’s coded parable, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, and even that falls apart when films literalise the painting to show not a nameless horror but […]

    They asked if we had seen a man in a chicken suit go past. That’s Soho for you. Edgar Wright’s new film is a psychological puzzler that’s a love letter to London’s Soho then and now. That’s its blessing and its curse. Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy are faint-voiced mentally fragile fashion student and […]

  No Spoilers I’ve been a fan of Korean cinema for many years but didn’t make the jump to K-TV until ‘Squid Game’. By now the figures speak for the series itself. Supposedly the No.1 show in over 90 countries (although Netflix refuse to release any figures so we’ll never know), viewed over 110 million […]

I was a fan of the deadpan dissector of New York life many years before Ms. Lebowitz became a national treasure like Dorothy Parker, able to make Martin Scorsese collapse in fits just by opening her mouth. I even remember the first joke of hers that I read; ‘The outdoors is the bit you go […]

There are a handful of modern composers whose identity can be clearly established across a crowded room. Obviously Phillip Glass is one, and Shostakovich perhaps. A recognisable style is presumably formed when a musician is compelled to reproduce their mental rhythms. Such a musician was Basil Kirchin. I had heard his music a very long […]