While working in the British film industry he authored fifty novels and short story collections, including the Bryant & May mysteries, which record the adventures of two Golden Age detectives in modern-day London.
Fowler was born in Greenwich, London, the son of a legal secretary and a glassblower and manufacturer of scientific instruments.
[6] The Bryant & May series is set primarily in London, with stories taking place in various years between World War II and the present.
Hall of Mirrors is set in 1969; at one point, the characters discuss the events of that summer: the Woodstock music festival, the Moon landing, and the Manson murders.
Seventy-Seven Clocks contains references to Gilbert and Sullivan throughout the narrative, while The Victoria Vanishes has deliberate similarities with The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin.
His story "The Master Builder" was filmed as Through the Eyes of a Killer,[11] starring Richard Dean Anderson, Marg Helgenberger and Tippi Hedren.
His tenth short story collection, Old Devil Moon, won the Edge Hill Audience Prize 2008.
[12] Put into different temporal settings, some elements of his original 2008 story "Arkangel" from Exotic Gothic 2[13] reappear in his 2012 frame-novel Hell Train (a book called "must read now!” by SciFiNow[14]), including the Polish town of Chelmsk, the physical descriptions of its white gold-rivetted damnation train Arkangel and the town's yokels.
His collection Red Gloves consisted of 25 new stories marking a quarter-century in print, two graphic novels and a Hammer horror radio play.
He also wrote a Sherlock Holmes audio drama for BBC 7 entitled The Lady Downstairs and the War of the Worlds videogame with Sir Patrick Stewart, for Paramount.