[16] Patrick Taylor-Martin, reviewing it, called the author "stylishly at ease with the louche, the camp, the intellectual, the vaguely criminal.
"[17] His second travel book: One Hot Summer in St Petersburg,[18] was the outcome of a period living in Russia's old imperial capital.
Michael Ratcliffe, the literary editor of The Observer, made it his Book of the Year: it "combines, as exhilaratingly as Christopher Isherwood's Berlin writings, the pleasures of travel, reporting, autobiography....
"[20] It was while living in St Petersburg that he wrote the first draft of the libretto for the opera Gormenghast, inspired by Mervyn Peake’s trilogy.
Schmidt was a member of Can and Fallowell had already written the lyrics to two albums of his songs: Musk at Dusk (1987) and Impossible Holidays (1991).
A third novel, A History of Facelifting (2003),[21] draws on his experience of the Marches, the border country in Herefordshire and mid-Wales, which Fallowell discovered in 1972 when he first visited Hay-on-Wye at the invitation of Richard Booth, the self-styled 'King of Hay'.
Jonathan Meades described it as having the ghostly atmosphere of de Chirico's paintings: "The text has the movement of a dream," he remarked in the New Statesman feature "Books of the Year 2008".
His books have been controversial – Bruno Bayley in Vice wrote that Fallowell has "penned novels that people seem to have a tendency to burn.
[24] As a journalist, Fallowell identified with the New Journalism movement, which advanced a literary form variously taking in reportage, interview, commentary, autobiography, travel, history and criticism.
His writings have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, Observer, Guardian, Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The American Scholar, the Paris Review, Tatler, Vanity Fair, Marie Claire, Playboy, Penthouse, Encounter, Tages Anzeiger, The Age, La Repubblica, New Statesman, Vice, and many other publications.
A collection of Fallowell's interview-profiles, Twentieth Century Characters[25] was described by Richard Davenport-Hines as "like Aubrey's Brief Lives in twentieth-century accents.
After taking legal action for plagiarism, Fallowell received damages, costs, and the reaffirmation of his intellectual property rights; and a public apology from the authors and John Blake Publishing was printed in The Bookseller December 1, 2006.
[28] The Independent on Sunday said Fallowell "writes like a spikier Sebald, alternating between acerbic witticisms and passages of voluptuous description.