The Will Stebbings Collection

The Podcast This podcast is available to listen on all major social podcast platforms, search Talking Books hosted by J T Crowley. The video is available on YouTube search Talking Books by J T Crowley and now on Roku and Amazon Fire TV cable channels under ExpertsandAuthors,tv. E&Atv Click TALKING BOOKS SHOW. The Author Will […]

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The Podcast

This podcast is available to listen on all major social podcast platforms, search Talking Books hosted by J T Crowley. The video is available on YouTube search Talking Books by J T Crowley and now on Roku and Amazon Fire TV cable channels under ExpertsandAuthors,tv. E&Atv Click TALKING BOOKS SHOW.

The Author

Will Stebbings was keen to point out that he was born at a very early age, weren’t we all is my response to his opening line about himself. This satirical comical tone is very much in evidence throughout all of his books, it becomes natural to him, probably because he’s had years to hone his dry acerbic wit to a fine art. (Grumpy old man living with a delightful lady Wife) would probably be the sign above his front door in order to ward off unwanted personages. He was born in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, a small town on the East Coast of England, where he was raised by what he proudly describes as working-class parents along with three other siblings. In 1960 he passed the eleven plus exams that entitled him to attend the all-boys King Edward VII grammar school which he left five years later with six O levels. His early working life was varied but he would describe those days as lacking in excitement. In 1977 he was made redundant and was forced as he so ardently puts it to seek employment in the computer industry, an industry albeit with numerous employers saw him through to retirement in 2013.

Coincidently in the same year that he was made redundant (1977)) he married Yvonne and moved to Swaffham and then in 1979 to Little Melton outside of Norwich. In 1983, he and his wife Yvonne moved to an idyllic village in Rutland an area of the UK renowned for its natural wildlife and countryside, and to this day they still live there. Will has two sons David, married with two children lives in Sheffield where he has his own business, and John who lives a little closer to home is a professional jazz musician who performs with several bands including his own Jay Stebb Jazz Quartet. He has published books on jazz tuition. Yvonne his wife has also published work in her own name around illustrated stories for pre-school children.

Check out our video chat here!

The Books

There are Seven books in the collection, three stand alone and four that make up The Mark Barker chronicles (Quadrilogy)

Let’s start with the Mark Barker series:

Off the Mark

The story is set in Norfolk in the 1960s and evolves around the experiences in life of Mark Barker the main protagonist who is sixteen and as just left school. The story starts with his last day at school and all the good-byes followed by his ride back home on his clapped-out old bike. The year is 1965 and like many young teenagers of that period and age range he had no clear path as to what to do with the rest of his life. Like most sixteen-year-olds with no or little experience with the adult world or with girls, Mark over the summer months sets out for himself four objectives to be achieved and they are:

Get a decent Job.

Get some decent clothes.

Get more experience with girls.

Get a new Bike.

Having accomplished his targets, the story opens to reveal all his exploits of how he goes about executing his future aspirations from his first day at work prior to modern technology to his many attempts to engage with girls. Mark a shy sensitive boy from a working -class background fumbles his way around the daunting world of women as his attraction to the wrong type of women and ill-judged blind dates get him nowhere. For many this first book in the series will set the groundwork for the other books that follow which complete the series mapping Marks Barker’s life out until almost the present day. Again, for many this series of books will be a trip down memory lane and a lot of us will be able to identify with so many of the characters that feature here. What, is dominant throughout the books is the humour, the jokes, of which Mark relies on so heavily to get him through all his exploits, affairs and life in general.  

Further Off the Mark

This amusing Sequel to Off the Mark, finds Mark Barker who’s now nineteen has moved on from his innocent awkward days but yet his dalliances with young lady’s ranges from woeful, disastrous, again ill-judged and mis-timed to occasionally promising, and when you read the book you can’t but feel that Mark is developing a penchant for older women with whom he feels more comfortable as he adopts a more liberal approach to his sexual desires. 

The story also reveals Mark’s career in the office where he works faltering, his frustrations are quite apparent, and he starts to look for new opportunities with the new departments. The Disco scene which was so prevalent in the seventies is very much in evidence in the storyline as Mark an avid Soul lover with all his treasured vinyl records DJs at various nightclubs as a means of getting out to meet people in particular young girls. Again, many of us will resonate with the characters and the storyline especially for guys Mark’s trouble with his cars, for as we all know in those days cars where badly made and after a few years on the road they were nothing but glorified rust-buckets that required an awful amount of patching up. There was nothing more embarrassing when going out on a date the car would breakdown or parts would fall off on the road as you drove from A to B. The book for many will be a great stroll down memory lane. For me the book is full of humour, and I particularly laughed at the story of the young hippy lady trying to entice Mark to partake in some good old weed. Al the chapters in the book each have a heading relating to a sixty’s soul record representing the contents within.

Completely Off the Mark

This is the third book that the author wrote, and it tells the story of Mark Barker’s journey in life from 1971 a young twenty-five-year-old to 2016 Mark now retired in his sixties. The book is predominately set in the 1970s the era of hot pants, flares, Oxford Bags, disco music and power cuts due to the miners’ strikes in the UK then. Mark is in the doldrums, his relationships with women are very much hit and miss, his Job prospects as a computer programmer are tenuous and of course more trouble besets him with his bad choice cars which keep falling apart a bit like his own life. Will things settle and turn around for Mark Barber, I’ll let you the reader find that out for yourselves. Again, the title headings of the chapters within this book are linked to soul records of the sixties and seventies.

Having looked at this series I can’t but wonder how much of the character of Mark Barker is the author himself really reliving his own like through the characteristics he gave the protagonist Mark. Hmm…

Mark’s out of Eleven.

Now, oddly enough despite this being the fourth book in the series that Will Stebbings wrote, it’s the prequal to the entire series, why you might well ask? Well having chatted to Will about this he decided having written the previous three books he felt the Life off Mark Barker was incomplete, so he wrote this book which covers Mark’s young teenage years at secondary school from the age of eleven through to sixteen. Mark has won a place at the all-boys Parkside grammar school. Having two sons at an English grammar school places huge financial constraints on his parents who are hard working-class folk. Mark must wear his older brother’s hand me down school uniform, while those around him turn up at the start of term with brand new Uniforms. The school’s rigid, strict and somewhat draconian discipline rules which are pretty much in keeping with that 1960s era are challenging for Mark Barker, a sensitive young character. The teaching methods and practices of some of the teachers are highly dubious to say the least but they were attitudes and ways that were deemed acceptable at the time, now-a-days those standards would be questionable if not banned outright. With it being an all-boys school at the start Mark finds that easy to get a long with, but when puberty issues kick in and having no girls at school or very much in his life Mark starts to see life from a different perspective and doesn’t like most boys of his age back then adjust easily, he’s apprehensive and nervous around the opposite sex. It’s a great book that will take many readers back in time but the humour that Will Stebbings has instilled in the pages is well worth exploring.

The Stand-Alone Books Are

Tess of the Dormobiles

Theresa Finbow is an author who has taken a cottage in a quiet area of Norfolk while she starts work on her next novel which is to be called Tess of the Dormobiles. The central character Tess is an adventurous woman to get into Tess’ way of thinking Theresa Finbow needs to model herself on her character. However, there are pitfalls with this approach which inevitably brings her into contact with some unsavoury characters like Billy the nearby farmer worker who is prone to fits of violent outburst and is embroiled or shall I say implicated in the death of his ex-girlfriend. Having faced an unpleasant scenario with Billy. Theresa asks her estranged husband to rescue her from this precarious situation she landed herself in, but that time is limited, and her husband soon returns to his own life, leaving Theresa to face her demons alone and that includes Billy’s older brother who is more ruthless and sinister. It’s an eye-catching read, with many twists to the plot. I enjoyed it, the characters blend very well together and really makes the plot realistic and tense as a book of this nature should be.

A Bang on the Head

What an endearing story line. Rob Lennard a is playing football in his back garden with his grandson Barney when he’s unfortunate enough to slip backwards and bang his head. The book starts off with Rob waking up in hospital completely unaware as to what has happened and oblivious to the fact that he has been in a coma for two days at least. Having gone through various tests to make sure he’s physically fine the doctor’s discharge him. The outcome of this event leaves him with his immediate short-term memory intact, plus his memory when he was twenty when he was dating Kate who died in a car accident. The years in-between are a complete blank to him, he doesn’t even recognise his own wife Julie of some considerable time nor his children and grandchildren. It takes Rob to adjust to modern life as all that has been wiped away, the only thing that he remembers is Kate the girl he planned to marry when he was in hie twenties. It takes a car journey to jolt his lost memory to be restored, the outcome has a severe knock-on affect for him. If you want to know what happened, well you’re going to have to read the book. A great story Will.

Happy is a Grumpy Road

I loved this story of Ralph a grumpy old gentleman who having lost his wife Alice five years ago, having spent a lifetime together is very much stuck in both in the past and in his ways. His daughter in law suggests that he registers with some dating app platforms to see if he could hook-up so to speak, with some ladies of his age range for companionship and may be something else. Reluctant at first, Ralph warms to the idea and registers with one platform to start with. His dates that generally start off in the local coffee shop are interesting to say the least, however the experiences he has on those dates vary enormously from being taken for a ride, being led up the garden path to some of his dates opening his mind to the fact that some of these ladies aren’t quite what he’s expecting. Having had little or no luck with those on this dating app after several months, he decides to register with another dating app to widen his horizons so to speak. The experiences and dalliances he has with each date are entertaining and of course infused with humour which you come to expect from Will Stebbings the author. What I found amusing was the male banter between himself and Jack and old workmate he has reconnected with after many years, there pub gossip over several pints about each of Ralph’s dating encounters is encapsulating and outright hilarious.

Social Media Platforms

https://www.facebook.com/will.stebbings.71

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100075629246918

https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-stebbings-97344956/

Thank you, Will, for giving me the golden opportunity to chat to you about yourself and your books. It’s been a blast!

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