I was born in Greenwich, London, in 1953. We’re all Londoners in my family (all centred around the river and its activities). I have a brother seven years younger. I lived in Los Angeles from 1980 - 1984. I’m a self-confessed film-obsessive I also design graphics and paint. I possess no numerical ability whatsoever.
I attended Colfes, one of the old London guild schools founded in the early 1600s, studied languages including Russian, left in 1972 and decided to train as a advertising copywriter.
I wrote disastrously as part of a comedy team for the BBC, but did a few things I always wanted to do, including cutting a record, writing a stage show, creating a graphic novel for DC Comics, and selling a collection of short stories on my first try (I still wonder how that happened).
After working in half a dozen agencies, including J Walter Thompson, I teamed with a producer and began creating campaigns for movies. I went to LA to head up an office in Beverly Hills, but did not really enjoy my time there, and eventually headed home. We expanded with a full art studio and edit suites, and gained a reputation for opening small ‘problem’ films like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover, Reservoir Dogs, Trainspotting, Moulin Rouge and the Mike Leigh films. I loved working on the Bond films because we travelled the world. I’ve fulfilled a few childhood fantasies; I’ve appeared as a villain in a Batman graphic novel, I’ve stood in as James Bond for Pierce Brosnan, I’m in the legendary Pan Books of Horror. I’ve written scripts for Jude Law and Jonny Lee Miller. I now split my time between London, and the South coast of France just outside Monte Carlo, where I have a house.
Writing Career: I have a peculiar mix of literary influences and/or mentors, including JG Ballard, BS Johnson, John Collier, Ray Bradbury, Dickens, EM Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Magnus Mills, Alan Bennett, Joyce Carol Oates, Henry James, Joe Haldeman, Peter Barnes, Alan Sillitoe, and Keith Waterhouse (Billy Liar is in my top ten books).
I hate horror’s late misanthropic streak, and love stories that create fatally flawed humans. I don’t like the ghettoisation of the genre, and many of the stories I consider to be horrific do not fit into easy horror categories. I tend to think that literary horror passed through an experimental golden period in 60’s Britain, and don’t enjoy much ‘comfortable’ mainstream horror fiction. This creates a problem for me, because I drift across the genre into other areas, and it confuses readers looking for a consistent backlist. I have trouble with the supernatural, and tend to avoid it now because reality holds more useful keys to unsettling psychological situations.
If you look for recurrent themes in my fiction you’ll find pairs and opposites, usually two characters complementing or cancelling each other’s personalities. This stems from my habit of creating warring forces within single characters and them splitting them into twos. Mostly urban settings, present-day, blackly comic situations. Psychoville is my most overtly biographical book (to the point where my parents took great offence), but elements of my life are present in Soho Black, which was written as a catharsis just after I survived a near-death experience, and Calabash, about then horrible seaside days I had as a child.
My biggest problem arises in the choice of subject matter; how to balance real life with grand guignol, which I am strongly drawn towards, but I think I’ve found a way to do it with the Bryant & May books.
by Christopher Fowler at Amazon.co.uk
Ten-Second Staircase
01 Sep 06
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