Mervyn peake

A gloom-laden tale: The Foot on the Crown, by Christopher Fowler reviewed

Christopher Fowler was almost absurdly prolific, for much of his life combining fiction with a hectic job heading a film promotion company (he wrote the Alien tagline ‘In space no one can hear you scream’). His debut, the horror novel Roofworld, was inspired by the view from the top of his Soho office building. Soho Black took a satirical poke at the film world, while Spanky set a sexy demon loose in London. More novels, many collections of short stories and three memoirs followed. The millennium saw a switch to crime fiction, with Full Dark House, which introduced his elderly detective duo, Arthur Bryant and John May, of London’s Peculiar

The gentle genius of Mervyn Peake

To be a good illustrator, said Mervyn Peake, it is necessary to do two things. The first is to subordinate yourself entirely to the book. The second is ‘to slide into another man’s soul’. In 1933, at the age of 22, Peake did precisely that. Relinquishing his studies at the Royal Academy Schools to move to Sark, in the Channel Islands, he co-founded an artists’ colony and took to sketching fishermen and romantic, ripple-lapped coves. He put a gold hoop in his right ear, a red-lined cape over his shoulders, and grew his hair long, like Israel Hands or Long John Silver. The incredible thing was that he had yet