Author Spotlight: William Meikle

Scotsman William Meikle is one of those authors who gets it. He writes from the hip, with an admirable flourish and a classic arsenal of well-honed chops. Cornering him for this month’s Author Spotlight, I was thrilled to find him not only amicable and forthright, but a straight-shooter with an obvious love for what he’s doing – writing kick ass, pulp-inspired fiction.

Bob: For our readers who haven’t had the pleasure, tell us a bit about yourself.

Willie: I’m a Scotsman, turned fifty last year, and have been writing for nearly twenty years now. Back in the nineties and early noughties I was a regular in a great many UK and some US small press mags with my short stories.

Since then I’ve successfully quit smoking, and broken into pro markets, and I’m now comfortably into double figures in pro sales. Alongside that, I’ve had nine novels published in the small press, the most notable for the purposes of this interview being my Midnight Eye Files series from Black Death Books.

For the more curious of you, I’ve got an honours degree in Botany, and spent twenty five years working in software development and technical writing, much of it as a project manager.

I have lived in many different places in the UK from the far North East of Scotland down to Kent, and now live part-time up on the east coast of Newfoundland, Canada, sharing the time with a house in the NE of England.

I’m an Aquarius, I play blues guitar badly on a beat up Dobro, I can carry a tune, and I want to be an astronaut when I grow up.

I like beer.

A lot.

Bob: What inspirations have fueled your creative pursuits?

Willie: I grew up in the West Coast of Scotland in an environment where the supernatural was almost commonplace. My grannie certainly had a touch of “the sight”, always knowing when someone in the family was in trouble.

There are numerous stories told of family members meeting other, long dead, family in their dreams, and I myself have had more than a few encounters, with dead family, plus meetings with what I can only class as residents of faerie.

I have had several precognitive dreams, one of which saved me from a potentially fatal car crash.

I’ve also dabbled in Astral Projection until I started getting freaked out by some of the things that were happening.

Whether it was just my subconscious, or I was actually getting to another plane, it was seriously screwing with my perception of reality and I had to cut back. It was either that or end up in a padded room somewhere.

I have a deep love of old places, in particular menhirs and stone circles, and I’ve spent quite a lot of time travelling the UK and Europe just to visit archaeological remains.

I also love what is widely known as “weird shit”. I’ve spent far too much time surfing and reading fortean, paranormal and cryptozoological websites. The cryptozoological stuff especially fascinates me, and provides a direct stimulus for a lot of my fiction.

So, there’s that, and the fact that I was grew up with the sixties explosion of popular culture embracing the supernatural and the weird. Hammer horror movies got me young, and led me back to the Universal originals.

My early reading somehow all tended to gravitate in similar directions, with DC comics leading me into pulp and to finding Tarzan. Tarzan is the second novel I remember reading. (The first was Treasure Island, so I was already well on the way to the land of adventure even then.) I quickly read everything of Burroughs I could find. Then I devoured Wells, Verne and Haggard.

I moved on to Conan Doyle before I was twelve, and Professor Challenger’s adventures in spiritualism led me, almost directly, to Dennis Wheatley, Algernon Blackwood, and then on to Lovecraft. Then Stephen King came along.

There’s a separate but related thread of a deep love of detective novels running parallel to this, as Conan Doyle also gave me Holmes, then I moved on to Christie, Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDonald and Ed McBain, reading everything by them I could find.

Mix all that lot together, add a dash of ZULU, a hefty slug of heroic fantasy from Howard, Leiber and Moorcock, a sprinkle of fast moving Scottish thrillers from John Buchan and Alistair MacLean, and a final pinch of piratical swashbuckling.

Leave to marinate for fifty years and what do you get?

A psyche with a deep love of the weird in its most basic forms, and the urge to beat the shit out of monsters.

Bob: So, how much of writing do you think can actually be taught, and how much is dependent upon imagination and creative instinct?

Willie: Well I’m not the man to answer that, as I never had any lessons beyond high school English classes. There certainly is a style of writing that can be taught, and you see a lot of it at the literary end of the market.

But for me, it’s all imagination and instinct.

I believe it gives my writing more immediacy, but I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not one for naval gazing or psychological explorations in my fiction, and I’m not trying to win any awards for style.

I’m in it for the entertainment value.

For me, it is a strangely visual process. Almost all of my work runs in my head like a movie that is constantly being re-edited as it goes along. Sometimes it feels like David Lynch is at work in there.

I can see the characters, and hear them talking. All I do then is write it down. I think some of this comes from the creative visualisation techniques I learned while practicing yoga, and some from watching –way- too many B movies.

Bob: Here at the Occult Detective we have a deep seeded love for that whole genre and one of our favorite occult detectives is Derek Adams.

Tell us a bit about his genesis and the two books, The Amulet and Sirens, that have been released thus far. Any future plans for Glasgow’s favorite son?

Willie: Derek Adams grew from my love of detective fiction, particularly the old school. I had a “what if?…” moment when I mixed Sam Spade, Glasgow and Chaos Magick, and the Midnight Eye was born.

Derek starts off in The Amulet as a skeptic.

He’s a down on his luck PI working in the West End of Glasgow. The appearance of a Lauren Bacall look-alike perks him up, and when she hires him to find “The Johnson Amulet” he’s off and running. He soon has to confront the occult when everyone he talks to dies in brutal fashion and he finds that various factions of the occult community are after the Amulet.

Stir in an ancient Arab, rituals and some Lovecraftian entities from beyond, and Derek’s first case proves an eye-opener in his occult learning path.

He’s soon confronted by more high strangeness in The Sirens, when he’s hired by an old lady to fetch her son back from the Isle of Skye. Trouble is, her son has been seduced by a mermaid and is now the figurehead for an ancient fisher cult known as “The Sons of Loki”.

He’s also a shape-shifter with no control of his abilities.

Soon a beast is terrorising Glasgow, and Derek must get it back to Skye, to the source, and confront “The Sons of Loki” before they can raise an even stronger ancient evil from its long captivity.

Both the above have been published by Black Death Books, and both have also been optioned as movies, with Dark Window Films in Ireland in pre-production for a low-budget version of The Amulet at the moment.

Derek isn’t finished yet. His third case, The Skin Game, has him confronting werewolves and dark elves in Glasgow and Newfoundland, and is currently under consideration by Black Death Books.

There is also a short Lovecraftian Midnight Eye file, Call and Response, which will appear in a major pro anthology in 2010 but I can’t talk about that yet.

I have ideas for many more Midnight Eye Files. The rogue PI is a great “hook” to hang stories from, and I’ll keep going back to him for more.

Bob: You’ve described yourself as a modern pulp author, which almost seems to be a pejorative these days.

I have an unquestioned devotion to the pulps and I think that’s one of the reasons I took to your writing style so quickly and you jumped near the top of my list of favorite authors. You’re a classic storyteller who is unabashedly writing in a genre you clearly love.

Why do you think the pulp fiction style is catching so much heat and what do you plan on doing to change peoples perceptions of the genre?

Willie: There’s a fair degree of snobbery in our genre, where writers who are not deemed “literary” are looked down on. I have a great quote on my web page from one such writer who thinks of himself as highbrow. It sums up exactly what I’m talking about.

(William Meikle is…) the author of the most cliched, derivative drivel imaginable…the critical acclaim he receives from his peers is virtually non-existent.

It’s the last bit that I find interesting. I don’t write in order to get critical acclaim from my peers, and when I’ve encountered writers that do they are mostly pretentious, boring, wankers who frequent message boards where they can massage each others egos.

Then there’s the fact that pulp has always had a bad name, but I think you have to have grown up with pulp to -get- it. A lot of writers have been told that pulp=bad plotting and that you have to have deep psychological insight in your work for it to be valid.

They’ve also been told that pulp=bad writing, and they believe it. Whereas I remember the joy I got from early Moorcock, from Guy N Smith, and from almost forgotten people like John Blackburn (and further back, A E Merritt and H Rider Haggard).

I’d love to have a chance to write a Tarzan, John Carter, Allan Quartermain or Conan novel, whereas a lot of writers I know would sniff and turn their noses up at the very thought of it.

Too many people have never known the sheer pleasure of a fast moving, action based monster story… not in print anyway. I blame movies for -some- of this, and good old fashioned elitism and snobbery for the rest.

The good news is, I have publishers who –do- get it. Black Death Books let me indulge my occult PI leanings, and I’ve now found an outlet for my creature features. Ghostwriter Publications in the UK are a new publisher, with big ideas, and a pulp ethos. They’ve recently given me a contract for a reissue of my B-movie novel, Island Life. (in hardcover…. Whoo-hoo!)

And I’m writing a “Viking versus Yeti” novel for them at the moment that has me very happy.

Bob: I had the pleasure of reading a synopsis for one of your upcoming projects and it really blew me out of the water. Tell us a bit about it and what else you have in the works.

Willie: Patty Doyle holds the secret to eternal life, but it may only bring her an early death. Patty is a cataloguer of rare manuscripts, working on part of a newly discovered journal of a 14th Century alchemist.

Just another dull day on the job.

But after mentioning it in her blog she gets to the office to find everyone brutally murdered. Now she’s on the run with the incomplete journal, trying to find the rest, pursued by a killer who wants the secret of eternal life it contains.

The quest leads her halfway across the world to the castles and misty history of Scotland. She thinks she’s looking for a manuscript. But the things she learns on the journey all point to the 14th Century alchemist himself, a man who is still very much alive.

Provisionally titled The Twelve Concordances of the Red Serpent, this one’s a bit of a departure for me, being a caper novel in the vein of the Hitchcock thrillers I loved in my youth.

It centers around the McGuffin of a 14th Century alchemist’s journal, and has skullduggery in a multi-national pharmaceutical firm, a blonde in distress, a stranger who helps her and who knows more than he should, and some baffled cops who get there eventually.

I had great fun writing it.

I was struggling with the two main characters for the first ten pages or so, but once I got them in my head it all went very quickly. If this were a movie they’d probably be Ewan McGregor and Keira Knightley.

It plays out like a slightly more erudite version of National Treasure, without the treasure, and I love it.

It’s currently being queried round the top three on my wish list of agents, and two of them have asked to see sample chapters, so keep everything crossed for me.

Coming up, Black Death Books are re-issuing my Watchers trilogy in omnibus editions. The trade paperback edition is out this summer, with a limited edition hardcover to follow in the winter.

This one came from my love of swashbucklers in the Errol Flynn tradition.

In 1745 a vampire Bonnie Prince Charlie leads an army of vampirised Highlanders south from Scotland to a reinforced Hadrians Wall where defenders await.

Also forthcoming this summer will be the aforementioned hardcover of Island Life, an audio book of the same and, all going well, the Viking novel. Plus some more short stories (including one of my favorite stories where Jane Austen meets the Deep Old Ones in Permuted Press’s Cthulhu Unbound 2), a couple of short films and anything else I can swing in the meantime.

Bob: It’s all about the world wide web these days. So where do you hang your shingle?

Willie: I vowed early this year I would stop pissing my time away on the internet. When I think of all the time I -could-, -should-, have been working on more productive things, it makes me ashamed. OK, so I got some laughs and LULZ, but is poking trolls for giggles really a worthwhile way for me to be spending my time? So now I’m a changed man. Since Xmas I’ve been plotting out my time, and spending it, arse on seat, writing as much as possible. That said, I hang out on MySpace and Facebook, but should really just focus on my site and my blog, so here they are. Come on over and say hi. I only bite on Sundays.

http://www.williammeikle.com

http://williammeikle.blogspot.com/