An Interview with The Midnight Eye author William Meikle

Welcome to Up Around the Corner, William. Please, tell us a little about yourself and your writing.

I'm Willie, a Scotsman in his early sixties writing full time with over thirty novels published in the genre press and over 300 short story credits in thirteen countries.

I live in Newfoundland with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company and when I'm not writing I drink beer, play guitar and dream of fortune and glory.

When I was at school books and my guitar were all that kept me sane in a town that was going downhill fast. The local steelworks shut and unemployment was rife. The town suffered badly. I could have started writing about that, but why bother? All I had to do was walk outside and I'd get it slapped in my face. That horror was all too real.

So I took up my pen and wrote. At first it was song lyrics, designed (mostly unsuccessfully) to get me closer to girls. I tried my hand at a few short stories but had no confidence in them and hid them away. And that was that for many years.

I didn't get the urge again until I was past thirty and trapped in a very boring job. My brain needed something to do apart from writing computer code, and fiction gave it what was required. That point, getting close to thirty years ago now, was like switching on an engine, one that has been running steadily ever since.

I was on my way.

Tell us a little about The Midnight Eye series?

My series character, Glasgow PI Derek Adams, is a Bogart and Chandler fan, and it is the movies and Americana of the '40s that I find a lot of my inspiration for him, rather than in the modern procedural.

That, and the old city, are the two main drivers for The Midnight Eye stories.

It is often said that the British Empire was built in Glasgow on the banks of the river Clyde. Back when I was young, the shipyards were still going strong, and the city centre itself still held onto some of its past glories.

It was a warren of tall sandstone buildings and narrow streets, with Edwardian trams still running through them. The big stores still had pneumatic delivery systems for billing, every man wore a hat, collar and tie, and steam trains ran into grand vaulted railway stations filled with smoke.

By the time I was a student in the late '70s, a lot of the tall sandstone buildings had been pulled down to make way for tower blocks. Back then they were the new shiny future, taking the people out of the Victorian ghettos and into the present day.

Fast forward to the present day and there are all new ghettos. The tower blocks are ruled by drug gangs and pimps. Meanwhile there have been many attempts to gentrify the city centre, with designer shops being built in old warehouses, with docklands developments building expensive apartments where sailors used to get services from hard-faced girls, and with shiny, trendy bars full of glossy expensively dressed bankers.

And underneath it all the old Glasgow still lies, slumbering, a dreaming god waiting for the stars to be right again. It can be found in the places where Derek walks, in bars untouched by time, in the closes of tenement buildings that carry the memories of past glories, and in the voices of older men and women who travel through the modernity unseen, impervious to its charms.

Derek Adams, The Midnight Eye, knows the ways of the old city. And, if truth be told, he prefers them to the new.

Derek has been with me from very close to the start of my writing career; the first short story, THE JOHNSON AMULET that later turned into the first novel, was among the earliest things I wrote back in late 1992. He's turned up in three novels so far, THE AMULET, THE SIRENS and THE SKIN GAME, all still available singly in ebook at all the usual online stores, in print in THE MIDNIGHT EYE OMNIBUS Volume 1 and in individual shiny audiobook editions, all available from Gryphonwood Press.

There are a handful of Midnight Eye short stories collected in the omnibus editions, in the second of which they are alongside three novellas; RHYTHM AND BOOZE (also in my Dark Melodies collection), DEAL OR NO DEAL (also available as a free sampler in ebook from Gryphonwood Press), and FARSIDE (also in the OCCULT DETECTIVE QUARTERLY PRESENTS anthology from Ulthar Press.)

My GREEN DOOR novella on Amazon represents the start of the next stage of work for Derek and is his introduction to my Sigils and Totems mythos.

Derek has developed a life of his own, and I'm along for the ride.

What authors have influenced your writing?

Back in the Sixties as a kid I graduated from Superman and Batman comics to books, with people like Robert Louis Stevenson and Conan Doyle figuring large and I was a voracious reader of anything I could get my hands on. A few years later Alistair MacLean, Michael Moorcock, Nigel Tranter, Ed McBain, Raymond Chandler and Louis D'Amour all figured large. Pickings were thin for horror apart from the Pan Books of Horror and Dennis Wheatley, which I read with great relish. Then I found Lovecraft, then King and things were never quite the same. All of the aforementioned are influences in one way or another.

The covers for the series are distinctive. How did they come about?

I wanted something with both a noir and pulp feel, so the darker theme came out of that. I had the idea that Derek, The Midnight Eye, was a shadowy figure on the outskirts of society, and included him as a dark shadow that became a motif on all of the covers. The concept grew from there.

What do you have coming up?

I’m working on a couple of things. Operation Congo is the latest ( the ninth ) in another series of mine, the S-Squad series for Severed Press, which feature sweary Scottish squaddies (possibly friends of Derek's) fighting monsters around the world. There's that pulp influence again.

I'm also working on a new Midnight Eye novella, Hellfire, which sees Derek involved in a very traditional Dennis Wheatley style Devil worshiping sect case in Glasgow.

As for books coming, the next thing in the pipe is a new Carnacki collection from Dark Regions Press, which is where I indulge my Edwardian ghost story fetishes.

As we’re coming to the end of our interview, is there anything you’d like to say or add?

Just a wee bit more insight into where Derek comes from.

A big part of it is the countryside, the history and weather of my home country. All those lonely hillsides, stone circles, ancient buildings and fog are ripe for stories to be creeping about in.

Then there's all the fighting. A country that's seemingly been at war with either somebody else or with itself for most of its existence can't help but be filled with stories of love and loss, heroism and betrayal.

The fact that we've always been England's scruffy wee brother, and have been slightly resentful of the fact for centuries adds another layer – the wee chip on the shoulder and the need to prove yourself is always a good place from which to start an adventure.

Added to that that we're a melting pot of Lowlander's, Highlanders, Islanders, Scandinavians, Picts, Irish, Dutch, English, Indians, Pakistanis and Chinese and everybody else who has made their way to the greatest wee country in the world, all with their own stories to tell and to make.

What does it all add up to?

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

Please share where readers can find you on the internet and where they might locate The Midnight Files and your other works.

My home port is at williammeikle.com where I keep all the book details up to date, and you'll find a dedicated Midnight Eye page there.

If you fancy a blether, I mostly hang out on Twitter@williemeikle. Mostly. I’m also on Facebook, but not as often.