Hello again people of earth. This week, my guest on Starfish and Coffee is the writer Keith A. Pearson. As you’ll come to see - I randomly came across Keith’s first book by chance and perhaps ten days later, found I had read six on the bounce. That’s good innings by any standard - this man’s words are like cracked cocaine for people who just can’t help themselves. For want of a better description, I would suggest his work is something like: “Richard Curtis writes Doctor Who” (and now that’s written in stone, he can steal it for public consumption). Having found them hyper-enjoyable in every way imaginable (and is that not, after all, the entire point of reading fiction), I figured let’s get this man on the show and see what makes him tick. Thus… here lies episode twenty-two of the podcast - it’s a good one. Aside from being fun, if you’re in the writing game yourself, you’ll find some useful business conversation going on too. You can find Keith’s website here. And from there you can figure it out yourself. There are plenty of  links to his books on amazon/audible - read them in order (as I am) or just dive in as you see fit. Thanks for tuning in again - be cool to each other.

This week, I’ve hooked up with Mark Hodkinson - author of one of my favourite books of the year, titled No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy (there’s an amazon link right there) - to be honest it was hard to resist. There are so many talking points, we probably could have gone on holiday together for a week and still not covered everything I wanted to dig around in.  As you’ll come to see, the main drag of the book is that of a working class man who somewhat unwittingly collected thousands of books throughout the course of his life, but more than that, it’s the story of how he got there when nobody in his family read - which for want of a better mirror to hold up, is a marked difference from my life. Digging into some highlights, we mostly talk books and music (natch), growing up in the north across the 70s and 80s, name-checking many of the greats along the way: Salinger, Bukowski, Henry Rollins, Sillitoe and er… Catherine Cookson for some reason (hey, it might be good for the algorithms - I don’t recall ever seeing a podcast that mentions her) before diving a little into what it takes to publish a book and some of the differences between going it alone and having a publisher drive the car. We even get to touch on lofty subjects such as whether there even is a class system anymore.  You can find Mark’s homepage here where you can find his books and links to other projects. He also does this (which we never talked about) and is responsible for this (which is the best thing Charlie Chaplin has done in decades). Thanks for tuning in. Be cool to each other.

This week, my guest is Alex Smith - author of the much loved (by me and many others) DCI Robbie Kett series of crime novels. Alex is an indie author, so much of our talk revolves around that and when we really get into it, you’ll see why so many authors prefer that route to the traditional one (though I did forget to mention that perhaps not everybody who can string 80,000 words together should publish - much like the long forgotten phrase “just because you can get into it doesn’t mean you should wear it”. The new Kett novel - Lucky Number Seven - is released this coming Friday (August 4th if you’re late to the party), so that’s my weekend sorted, but as I aways say, if you’re intrigued, you’ve got to start at the beginning. Footnote: We did this interview a few weeks ago but I figured it would be smart to hold it back until the new book was within striking distance, thus any mentions of said item ‘coming down the line’ are now null and void because it’s here. Here’s Alex’s page on Amazon And here’s his website: …the rest you can pick up from there. Thanks for tuning in.

I’ve looked forward to doing this one for a long time! The story of Gef The Talking Mongoose (late of the Isle of Man) sadly gets less notorious every year. I’ve tried my best to spread the word but this episode features Christopher Josiffe who is an actual expert on Gef - maybe between us, we can spread this incredible tale further afield in all the right ways… though as you’ll hear in the episode, a movie is coming down the line any time now featuring Neil Gaiman as Gef. I can’t beat that, but I can certainly back it up. In this episode, we dig into Gef and his brilliant story but if you want to know more, Mr Josiffe has written the book on Gef and you can find that right here. Between that and this, there’s not much more to know… Gef will always be a complete enigma. One thing I do know for sure though: Mr Josiffe will return - there’s far too much good stuff in his head to let him go that easily. You can find him on twitter: https://twitter.com/ChrisJosiffe and if you’re still confused, he has a website right here which will explain everything. Be cool to each other out there!

Sometimes you can dream a dream that’s so dumb, it just might come true. Paul Manzi is one such person. One day you’re belting out rousing renditions of Hellraiser and Fox On The Run on the top deck of the school bus… next thing you know, you find yourself standing next to Andy Scott and belting out those very same Sweet songs in front of thousands. I’m a huge fan of Sweet (or The Sweet if you prefer). As we discuss, they’re a strange band. Most often, they’re labelled as a glam rock band (which they were) with throwaway singles (which they very much weren’t) but dig into their albums and you’ll find a powerhouse rock band who drift in and out of prog rock, hard rock - damn, you name it and they pulled it in. The fact of the matter is, Sweet were a complex band both musically and internally - but then, what band isn’t, but even their glam rock hits have layers of magic pounded into them. So, I figured what better way to dig about in the modern day incarnation of the band than to quiz their singer… the rest you can find out by listening. For tour dates (and they’re quite extensive for 2023), head over the band website here, where you can also pick up all of the social media feeds.

Caroline Tudor - better known as CJ Tudor to her readers - is killing it.  From The Chalk Man across to her fifth novel, The Drift, she’s publishing quality work every time. Not just quality, but also different. I like the way she pushes herself to be a different version of herself each time a book comes out - it might not sound like much - maybe you’d expect it to be the case all the time with writers - but it’s not. I rate her highly and if you like thrillers that are dipped in er… something other-worldly, I think you will too. In this feisty episode - which includes dogs barking from both sides of the mic (which is thoroughly encouraged) - we go from Enid Blyton to Stephen King in 60 seconds, talk about publishing, foreign book covers, getting your book picked up for TV… and then it actually happening, hard work, Star Trek, agents, Yellowjackets, what your parents think of you, what your kids think of you and well… it’s basically just a great, fun hour talking about books and writing. You can find her on twitter here and her official site is here.

It’s always a good day when you get to speak to Jason Bieler. Jason is probably most well known from that period in the early nineties when his band Saigon Kick where making waves in the world. This, of course, is a good place to start but since those halcyon days, Jason has gone on to work up quite a collection of songs for his Owl Stretching project and more recently under his own name - Jason Bieler And The Baron Von Bielski Orchestra - which has delivered two superb albums (available at all the usual places blah, blah but you should probably go buy them at his bandcamp page linked down below). Across this far too short hour, we talk about Saigon Kick (natch), how Owl Stretching came into being and how he played it for creativity rather than cash, how he gets along with bandcamp as an online home, his home studio set-up and of course, his new album and hitting the road with his buddy Jeff Scott Soto. Let’s get it on… You can find his homepage here (and links to his social feeds):  https://jasonbieler.com His bandcamp page is here (and holy of holies, if it ain’t stuffed full of magic): https://jasonbieler.bandcamp.com

Today, I got to chat to a couple of the world’s biggest Ouija Board nerds on the planet: Robert Murch (known throughout the episode as ‘Murch’) who is Chairman of the Board for the Talking Board Historical Society (Colorado) and John Kozik from the Salem Witch Board Museum (in Salem, funnily enough). The Ouija Board is a staple of modern horror movies, but it has a varied past that goes right back to the late 1800s - a past these two gentlemen have spent their entire lives unravelling, researching, hunting, arranging and making available to the public. This is where we begin our conversation. I’ve assumed a lot of prior knowledge on behalf of the listeners here - there’s no in depth discussion about the dead/demons/spirits/whether it’s fake or real. Sit yourself down in front of one with some friends and figure it out or yourself. We did. I’ve always loved the Board and the mystery behind it. How such a simple thing - sold as a mass production game - could single handedly (well, maybe with a little help from That Movie) kick-start the Satanic-Panic movement (can we call it a movement?) is absolutely worth buying somebody a beer over. If you want to go digging your own rabbit hole on the subject of the Ouija, here’s the related links for you - if you wish, you can find the socials on each of the individual sites: Talking Board Historical Society: https://tbhs.org The Salem Witch Board Museum: https://www.salemwitchboardmuseum.com Robert Murch: https://robertmurch.com And if you want to fall down the rabbit hole and stay there, there’s some damn nice custom boards available on Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/uk/market/ouija_board If you’re more of a cheapskate, amazon can probably fulfil your needs.

And so it came to pass that Episode 14 is an episode with a man from the very heart of my own pop-culture existence: Mr Shannon Wheeler - cartoonist extraordinaire and creator of the most anti-hero of all anti-heroes in the shape of Too Much Coffee Man.  It’s entirely possible that you’ve never heard of Too Much Coffee Man - and I'm here to tell you, you really missed out - it was after all the underground of the underground but for a brief period in the mid nineties - which is when music started to suck but all of the things that satellite around it where better than ever - TMCM was a real find. Damn these comics were hard to find in the UK but somehow, much like all those banned movies we weren’t supposed to see and the Japanese album releases with different tracks on board, there was always a way. Anyway, in this episode we discuss - amongst other things - shooting comics with guns, the Black Panthers, the cult leader Jim Jones, indie publishing, photocopiers and the harrowing story of the kid with a micro-penis. Yep - you read that correctly. You can find Shannon's website here, his substack here and his Etsy store here where you can grab yourself a pdf version of the first nine issues of Too Much Coffee Man for less than £10. If you want to find him on social media, you'll have to find those yourself. Oh... and Starfish got itself a new theme tune. Things are looking up!

...or as I like to call him - The Exorcist, though as you'll discover as you listen to the interview, the instances of genuine demonic possession that I've been searching for are a little thin on the ground. Still, I found it quite fascinating that some of the topics Jason talks about are actually stranger than an actual 'haunting'. I guess if you say "that's definitely a ghost", there's nowhere else to go because a ghost is a ghost, but to ascribe bizarre happenings to humans is another thing entirely. We covered a lot of bases here, though I totally forgot to ask about the work he did for the TV adaptation of Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins (far too short lived) ITV series which I thoroughly recommend you go and read along with the rest of Rickman's catalogue. You can find Jason's book - Deliverance - on amazon here in various formats.