I’ve always had trouble with titles. For this volume, the fourth and last in my Devil’s Quartet, I borrowed the title of a beautiful but forgotten song from a peculiarly whimsical sixties musical about racism, socialism, drugs and, er, leprechauns, called ‘Finian’s Rainbow’.
This was my return to the short-story format after an absence of five years, and with twenty-two stories it is one of my longest and most diverse collections. But don’t let me do all the talking, here’s what the Guardian said: ‘He repeatedly challenges the reader to redraw the boundaries between innocence and malevolence, rationality and paranoia. His strength lies in the way he unveils the darker side of the ordinary.’
In this collection, a geologist trapped in an African town without water is lured into a desperate escape plan, a boy plans a murder in an eerie funfair, a cop witnesses an inexplicable plague of madness, and a teenager learns a deadly trick with his mobile phone. There’s also ‘The Lady Downstairs’, a Sherlock Holmes story told from the perspective of the great detective’s long-suffering landlady, Mrs Hudson. It was later recorded by the BBC with the excellent Hannah Gordon playing Mrs Hudson. And there’s a grim revenge story, ‘The Threads’, in which an arrogant British tourist to North Africa gets out of his depth.
I tried new ideas: the parody ‘That’s Undertainment!’ set out to eviscerate modern popular culture. ‘Old Friends’, a modern ghost story, paid homage to old British film stars like Terry-Thomas and Diana Dors. In ‘The Spider Kiss’, an outbreak of insane human behaviour in Miami proves to have its origins in the animal kingdom, and ‘Exclusion Zone’ focuses on a father’s estrangement from his daughter’s anarchic rebellion.
‘The Uninvited’ is about touching evil. It has a black narrator who finds himself at a series of Hollywood parties in the late 1960s, at which a strange incident always seems to occur, and a strange group of guests no one seems to have invited always seems to be present. One critic wrote, ‘I didn’t think Fowler would actually go there.’ But I did. For me, one of the best (and briefest) stories is ‘All Packed’. Many readers will have already forgotten the early days of the AIDS panic, which the government exacerbated with confusing, sinister messages. A reviewer called it ‘Beautiful and haunting, with a gorgeous closing sentence I lingered over, savouring the sensation of release and completion.’ Which is nice.
I miss sitting down to write a whole book of short stories, which is what I usually did, knocking down ideas like dominoes, one after the other, but it’s a format that has virtually disappeared now. Those of us in the short-story trade generally knew one another, and would have barely filled a café. It’s an elusive, demanding form; it’s easy to write a passable tale, and very hard indeed to pen one that lodges deep in the brain. It must be honed and polished until it gleams. I’ve written close to three hundred short stories, and only a few of them have such a diamond-like sparkle, by which I mean that I am entirely happy with them.
Christopher Fowler, 2016