Christopher In His Own Words
24 February 2009
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, a London guild school founded in 1653, 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 enjoy my time there, and eventually headed home. Our company gained a reputation for opening ‘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 now split my time between London, and the French Riviera.
Writing Career: I have a peculiar mix of literary influences and/or mentors, including JG Ballard, BS Johnson, John Collier, Chuck Palanhiuk, Ray Bradbury, Charles Dickens, EM Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Magnus Mills, Alan Bennett, Joyce Carol Oates, Joe Haldeman, Peter Barnes, Alan Sillitoe, and Keith Waterhouse (‘Billy Liar’ is in my top ten books).
I love stories that create fatally flawed humans. I don’t like the ghettoisation of genres. Many of the stories I consider to be horrific, mysterious or funny do not fit into easy categories. I grew up in an experimental golden period in 60’s Britain, and don’t enjoy much ‘comfortable’ mainstream fiction. This creates a problem for me, because I drift across the genres into new areas, and it confuses readers looking for a consistent backlist. I have trouble with the supernatural, and tend to avoid it 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 autobiographical book ‘Paperboy, appears in spring 2009, and pretty much explains the rest.
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. It is generally said that I have too many ideas – something that has brought down a great many authors.