Monthly Archives: March 2013

This is a big shut-out of thanks to everyone who posted a review of ‘The Casebook of Bryant & May’ on Amazon, only to find no book there. It would seem that the very lovely limited edition volume is still not up on Amazon because, thanks to a change in their working practices, Amazon needed […]

The US literary horror boom of the 1970s didn’t go unnoticed over here. Publishers suddenly saw that there were some excellent writers emerging, including Michael McDowell, Jeffrey Konvitz and Thomas Tryon, and striding above them all was Stephen King. The most famous genre writers are rarely the best (compare JK Rowling to Susanna Clarke) but […]

This is an old show from the celebrated comedy troop, currently revived at the Leicester Square Theatre, one of the least-known but nicest London venues, home to old stars (Joan Collins and Julie Felix are there next month) and stand-ups. Spymonkey have tailored some of their silliest routines into a Gothic horror Old-Dark-House story involving […]

Several people have asked me about the picture on the wall behind me in the ‘Film Freak’ photograph. It comes from the excellent Wanrooj Gallery in the Netherlands and is by Pepyn Langedijk. His works are often darkly humorous, and feature wolves, sharks and other creature in strange, atmospheric locations. The one I bought is […]

Oooh, ooh, there’s nothing as nice as getting the first copy of your new baby…’Film Freak’ is rolling off the presses right now, with its sexy spot-gloss cover and my head stamped over Alec Guinness’s body. It’s a sort-of memoir that contains Mild Nudity, Lying Producers, Drunk Actors, references to Michael Winner and Lots of Foolishness. […]

A reader gets in touch to tell me there’s a mistake in an early Bryant & May novel – Chessington Zoo was shut by the time one of the books came out. Readers are usually tolerant enough to wave a certain amount of nonsense through the logic checkpoint but there’s a natural slippage in books […]

There’s a moment sometimes when you realise that the Hollywood film you’re watching is specifically aimed at troubled, violent children with learning difficulties. Last night I had to attend the premiere of ‘GI Joe: Retaliation’. The cinema had the desperate air of having been papered up, with an unusually large number of ad agency runners and […]

Rio Ferdinand and Gilbert O’Sullivan may not seem to have much in common – jobs, decades, singing ability – but dressing like your grandad is the ubiquitous Hoxton look. Walking into the Electricity Showroom in Hoxton it’s sometimes hard to tell if you might be in an achingly hip joint or just surrounded by people […]

NO SPOILERS If Steven Soderbergh follows through on his threat to give up directing, Hollywood will have lost its best player, certainly on the evidence of this, his supposedly last film. It starts as an ominous long-take character study of a tormented woman. Rooney Mara’s husband spent four years in prison for insider trading and […]

I said this to my press agent Lynsey recently and she asked me what I meant. I explained that it referred to double-billed movies. A lot of people have expressed surprise that that films were ever shown in double bills. Indeed they were, right across the nation, remember, older peeps? As we’re prepping the launch […]