RIP Christopher Fowler

Farewell To A London Original

The incredibly sad news reached us the early hours of this morning that Christopher Fowler, a writer, journalist and someone who Tripwire has interviewed over the past fifteen years has just died after a serious illness…

Christopher Fowler started his career working in film publicity in the UK, building up an impressive body of work over a number of decades. After he lost his business partner, Fowler decided to switch professions and he made his longform writing debut with urban fantasy novel Roofworld in 1988. Fowler was perhaps best known for creating elderly detectives Bryant & May, who starred in twenty books over the years.

He wrote a couple of comic projects, Menz Insana from Vertigo/ DC with artist John Bolton which was published back in 1997, and Keith Page illustrated a Bryant & May graphic novel which was published by PS Press back in 2013.

He also wrote two autobiographies, Film Freak and Paper Boy plus an irregular column for the Independent called Invisible Ink about authors who were once popular but fell out of the public eye.

Tripwire got to interview him a number of times and he was even kind enough to come along to our 21st anniversary event which took place at Foyles in London back in 2013.

He was always intelligent and warm and friendly whenever he gave us time for an interview and he will be sorely missed. He made good writing seem so easy. Tripwire would like to offer our condolences to his husband, Peter, and his friends.

Here’s a few excerpts from our interviews with him

“What I thought was ‘‘Wouldn’t it be nice in a graphic novel to do something we can’t do in the books rather than just extend the books.’ What’s clearly in the books is a nostalgic feeling for London. So what if it took place in a London we kind of wish existed. So it’s like the London of Ealing comedies and yet it’s also recognisably the modern London. So it’s a modern London where Irene Handl and Sid James are still around, as the landlady and the spiv. So Keith said ‘I would love to draw that.’ So that’s what I did. The idea is that it’s like the early days of Batman. I started an alternative timeline. I took a jumping off point which was an investigation in one of the non-canonical books, Soho Black. There’s a story about a man who’s murdered in a telephone box full of butterflies. Then I put a kind of gang in with characters like Benny the Spiv. Having got that, I then introduced some fantastical elements the way I did in Roofworld. The gang is picked off by this thing called the Soho Devil which appears in the sky, swoops down and takes them out. There’s a nice reveal and a logical explanation at the end. We’re going to call it the Casebook of Bryant & May No.1 Soho Devil and if we can get them up and running, we’re going to do a whole series. I’ve just been signed for two more Bryant & May books.”

“One of the reasons why my books read as very visual is because I’ve always been graphically orientated. This is my dark secret. I own every issue of Lois Lane; why, I have no idea. I’ve had them since childhood. I wrote this book called Paperboy and there’s a whole chapter in it on my Lois Lane obsession which is kind of disturbing. When I was a kid I drew comics as well which they printed on the inside in the hardback of Paperboy. So I was comic obsessed and often when I’m designing a book or when I’m planning a book, I actually draw it out. I plan out all the locations.”

“Reading should be like a performance. I did halloween this year at the London Metropolitan archive. I got up there and I assumed it was going to be like a 10 or 15 minute thing. When I got there, there was a big armchair on stage and they wanted an hour from me. I hadn’t brought enough material. I had just written a story and so I downloaded it very quickly and printed it out. And I read it but I did it as a performance piece. Because I wrote it as a monologue and I did it as a little performance. And everyone afterwards said ‘We really love the second bit you did.’ So with Paperboy, it was very standalone chapters, weird things about childhood. There’s a whole chapter about DC comics versus Marvel. It’s funny because whenever it’s reviewed by really straight laced reviewers they go ‘We love the book except that weird boring bit about comics’ and everyone else goes ‘We love that bit.’ So that was the first bit I wrote for that book and when it went down so well I ended up expanding it. So I am now doing this on the Southbank and I’m writing a sequel to Paperboy called Film Freak. So we’re going to try a piece from that, see how it plays and if it plays well aloud then I’ll carry on doing it.”

“I do them one [Bryant & May] at a time because they’re internally quite complex. Each one usually hinges around one big subject so I really want to stay in that subject. The next one’s going to be about class and that’s going to be quite a complicated thing to set up. I’m slightly dreading doing the research. It’s about class and codes. And this one that I’ve just done was largely about Punch and Judy. I’ve got a big collection of Punch & Judy books so that was relatively straightforward to write.”

https://www.christopherfowler.co.uk/