My father Bill had a problem with Christmas. Although he appears in old photographs to possess a whippy, muscular frame, he was actually a frail man and usually managed to cause some kind of drama just before the festivities began. Christopher Fowler Read Quote
Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to crime: the realistically detailed police procedural, usually grim and downbeat, and the more left-field, joyous theatre of ideas in which past masters once specialised. Knowing that I would never be able to handle the former, I set about reviving the latter. Christopher Fowler Read Quote
As a child marooned in a post-war South London backwater with no ready cash and a bafflingly dysfunctional family, I had to glean my amusement wherever I could. Christopher Fowler Read Quote
I left school on a wet Thursday afternoon, found a room in a shared house in North London, and started my first job on the following Monday as a courier for an advertising agency. Christopher Fowler Read Quote
By the time I reached the sixth form at my local grammar school, my father would glower at me every time I passed him with a stack of books under my arm, warning me there was no money to go to university. Christopher Fowler Read Quote
There’s a melancholy sense of things lost in the shabbier British seaside towns; of comfortable failure and better times long gone. Christopher Fowler Read Quote
I didn’t bother with television myself because it consisted largely of windmills, puppets and pottery wheels, interspersed with elderly men smoking pipes while they discussed Harold Macmillan in Old Etonian accents. Christopher Fowler Read Quote
Reality TV has blown away the need for a roster of familiar faces in films. Plus, films became franchise and didn’t need stars. But the real difference between stars and celebrities is that stars have training and talent, and celebrities just have exposure. Christopher Fowler Read Quote
