Charlie Fletcher (born 1960) is a British screenwriter and author.[1] After many years writing for film and television, he is now probably best known for his children's novel, Stoneheart.
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After studying English Literature at university, Fletcher began his career in the film business and then progressed to the BBC where he worked in film editing on everything from Drama to Current Affairs.
He then went to California where he became a screenwriter, having been awarded a Warner Brothers Fellowship in Screenwriting at USC School of Cinema and TV. He wrote screenplays for Tri-Star, MGM, Paramount and Warner Bros among others. He continues to write for the movies, and also television.
He also moved into other types of writing, including magazine features, a computer game and as a national Sunday newspaper columnist and a restaurant reviewer.
He met and married his wife, Domenica, a fellow Scot, in Los Angeles. They have two children, whom Fletcher calls his first, most important, and toughest audience. They’ve all now returned from California and live in Edinburgh with a terrier called Archie.
| Year | Film | |
|---|---|---|
| 1995 | Fair Game | |
| 2001 | Mean Machine |
| Year | TV Series |
|---|---|
| 2003 | Red Cap |
| 2004 | Steel River Blues |
| 2005 | Murder Investigation Team |
| 2005 | Taggart |
| 2005 | Afterlife |
| 2006 | Donovan |
| 2006 | Ultimate Force |
| 2008 | Wire in the Blood |
The Stoneheart Trilogy*
In ten years of learning and practising the screenwriter's craft in Hollywood, Fletcher found out all about the impossibility of the film showing in the cinema ever matching the version of it playing in his head. Only after he came back to Scotland to live in Musselburgh did he think about writing a project in which, just for once, what he wrote would be the last word. Not a film script, but a children's book.
His son Jack and daughter Ariadne were still at the age for bedtime stories. They were also, at the time, mini-Californians: London's antiquity – "a thousand years of built, lived-in, heritage" – surprised them.
So they gawped in something like awe as their father, on the top deck of the tour bus, pointed out monuments older than anything they had yet imagined. And he remembered how, when he was a child, his father had driven him through London. As they passed Hyde Park Corner, the bronze soldiers at the foot of the Royal Artillery monument had caught his eye too.
By the time, four decades later, he fleshed out that memory, making the Gunner and the Officer from the monument central figures in the war against the "taints", Fletcher had learnt a lot about the art of storytelling.
Far Rockaway is a standalone novel published in Sept 2011. It's the story of a feisty young woman who is injured with her grandfather in an accident and who wakes up in a world constructed from all the classic swashbuckling adventure novels he read her as a child. She has to make her way to the castle at the end of this world in order to rescue him, knowing that only by so doing will she enable survive back in the real world. The story takes place both in this fantasy world and in the modern Manhattan ER in which doctors fight for both their lives as their family look on.
Fletcher's novel, Stoneheart, was shortlisted for the Branford Boase Award in 2007. [2] He wrote two sequels, Ironhand and Silvertongue.