An Interview with the author William Meikle

Ingo Löchel: Willie, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself for those that are unfamiliar with the author William Meikle?

William Meikle: I'm a sixty-something Scottish lad from Ayrshire originally. I'm a graduate of Glasgow University, in Botany, after which I had a career in IT in London, Aberdeen and Edinburgh before leaving the rat race behind.

I now live in a small fishing town on the eastern side of Newfoundland on the Atlantic shore with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company.

I didn't chose writing, it chose me. The urge to write is more of a need, a similar addiction to the one I used to have for cigarettes and still have for beer.

It's always been there, in the background. I wrote short stories at school, and dabbled a couple of times over the years, but it wasn't until I was in my 30s that it really took hold.

Back in the very early '90s I had an idea for a story... I hadn't written much of anything since the mid-70s at school, but this idea wouldn't leave me alone. I had an image in my mind of an old man watching a young woman's ghost. That image grew into a story, that story grew into other stories, and before I knew it I had an obsession in charge of my life.

So it all started with a little ghost story, "Dancers"; one that ended up winning a prize in a national ghost story competition, getting turned into a short movie, getting read on several radio stations, getting published in Greek, Spanish, Italian and Hebrew, and getting reprinted in The Weekly News in Scotland.

Since then I've sold over 300 short stories, including appearances in the likes of NATURE and THE WEEKLY NEWS among many others, and I've had over 30 novels published in the horror and fantasy genre presses, with more coming over the next few years.

I'm currently having a wee bit of late career success with the ongoing S-SQUAD series in both their English and German language editions, and they're keeping me going into my late '60s and hopefully into my '70s.

I went full time in 2007. Haven't starved us yet.

Ingo Löchel: Which novel marked your debut as a horror author, and how did the publication of your debut novel come about?

William Meikle: I spent the 90s writing short fiction. My first published novel was ISLAND LIFE in 2001.

The book was published by BARCLAY BOOKS in the States, and they went bust three months after publishing it, my first experience of the vagaries of publishing. Sadly, not my last.

I love monsters....especially black and white ones with the zips showing. Treat this novel like a fifties monster flick and you'll have a great time with it.

The book was out of print for many years after that initial publication flopped, but is now available again in print, ebook and audiobook from Gryphonwood Press.

Ingo Löchel: Where did the inspiration for the book come from?

William Meikle: Over thirty five years ago, I was on Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel for a mate's 30th Birthday. We had a great time in the wee local bar, appeared on Channel 4 who were there at the time with us pretending, stiffly, to be locals, and stayed in a converted lighthouse sets next to a burial ground and a neolithic chambered tomb. Much fun was had negotiating a pee off the top of the lighthouse while drunk after midnight, and dealing with the wailing banshee that lived in the stairwell.

I lined up a photograph to have standing stones in the foreground and the lighthouse in the background. Then I started to wonder who would live in the lighthouse and what was under the standing stones, and a story began to run. 

That turned, eventually and more than ten years later, into "Island Life" and, as a bonus, the publisher agreed to my picture of the lighthouse being used on the cover, so it went full circle.

Ingo Löchel: How long did you write your debut novel?

William Meikle: They used to come fast to me. I think Island Life took three months in total. But the whole idea was in my head all the time. I knew where it was going right from the start.

Ingo Löchel: Your novel “The Amulet” was published in 2005. How did you come up with   the   idea   of   writing   a   mixture   in   the   style   of  the  crime  novels  by  Raymond Chandler   and   Dashiell   Hammett   and   in   the   style   of   the   works   of   author   H.   P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu cosmos?

William Meikle: My series character, Glasgow PI Derek Adams, is a Bogart and Chandler fan, and it is the movies 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 on to 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.

Ingo Löchel:  Unfortunately, only the first book of your "Midnight Eye" series have been published in germany so far. Please tell your german readers and fans how the adventures of the private eye Derek Adams will continue?

William Meikle: 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, THE AMULET was among the earliest things I wrote back in late 1992, and the last, THE FAIR AFFAIR was written in early 2025.

He's turned up in three novels, six novellas and a bunch of short stories so far,  all available collected in three THE MIDNIGHT EYE OMNIBUS Volumes on Amazon in English language editions. ( Sorry, as you said, only THE AMULET is available in German. Haven't had any takers yet for any of the rest of the stories.

There will be more Midnight Eye stories to come. Derek has a life of his own, and I'm along for the ride.

Ingo Löchel:  How did you come up with the idea of continuing the Carnacki adventures of the author William Hope Hogdson?

William Meikle: For me, ghost stories are all about the struggle of the dark against the light. The time and place, and the way it plays out is in some ways secondary to that. And when you're dealing with archetypes, there's only so many to go around, and it's not surprising that the same concepts of death and betrayal, love and loss, turn up wherever, and whenever, the story is placed.

The ghost story is no different in utilising the archetype of the return of the lost from the great beyond, but a good one needs verisimilitude.

If the reader doesn't believe wholeheartedly in the supernatural element, even if only for the duration of the story, then they'll be looking for the Scooby-Doo escape, the man in the mask that means everything before was just smoke and mirrors.   

Hodgson wasn't above  using the man in the mask escape himself of course, but those ones never appealed to me much. It's my belief that to pull off a good ghost story, you need to get past that, and engage the reader at an emotional level with their fears.

Carnacki's meetings with the supernatural resonated with me at that emotional level on my very first reading many years ago. On top of that, several of the stories have a Lovecraftian viewpoint, with cosmic entities that have no regard for the doings of mankind. 

The background Hodgson proposes fits with some of my own viewpoint on the ways the Universe might function, and the slightly formal Edwardian language seems to be a "voice" I fall into naturally.

Long story short, I write them because of love, pure and simple. 

You may notice while reading that Carnacki likes a drink and a smoke, and a hearty meal with his friends gathered round. This dovetails perfectly with my own idea of a good time. 

And although I no longer smoke, writing about characters who do allows me a small vicarious reminder of my own younger days. I wish I had Carnacki's library, his toys, but most of all, I envy him his regular visits from his tight group of friends, all more than willing to listen to his tales of adventure into the weird places of the world while drinking his Scotch and smoking his cigarettes.

Ingo Löchel:  Unfortunately, these Carnacki books have not yet been published in Germany. Are your Carnacki adventures also short stories or longer stories?

William Meikle: So far I've written 50 Carnacki stories which appear in 4 collections. 49 of them are short stories, and one THE DARK ISLAND is a novella. He seems to lend himself more to the short form for me. 

I'd love to see them published in German editions, but so far haven't been able to get any publishers interested.

Ingo Löchel: In 2017, your first “S Squad” novel, “Infestation” was published. How did you come up with the idea of having a special army unit fight monsters around the world and where did the inspiration for the book and the series come from?

William Meikle: Big beasties fascinate me. Some of that fascination stems from early film viewing. I remember being taken to the cinema to see "The Blob". 

I couldn't have been more than seven or eight, and it scared the crap out of me. The original incarnation of Kong has been with me since around the same time.

Also around then my local fleapit was showing a variety of things that stayed with me, from Mechakong to Godzilla, from "The Valley of the Gwangi" to "One Million Years B.C.", from "Jason and the Argonauts" to "The Golden Voyage of Sinbad" that have left me with a lifelong passion for dinosaurs, stop-motion monsters, and indeed, everything Harryhausen related.

Similarly, not long after that period, somewhere around the late 60's, early '70s. I remember the BBC showing re-runs of classic creature features late on Friday nights, and "THEM!" in particular left a mark on my psyche.

I've also got a Biological Sciences degree, and even while watching said movies, I'm usually trying to figure out how the creature would actually work in nature -- what would it eat? How would it procreate? What effect would it have on the environment around it?

On top of that, I have an interest in cryptozoology, of creatures that live just out of sight of humankind, and of the myriad possibilities that nature, and man's dabbling with it, can throw up.

All of this means I can't avoid writing about the beasties, from Giant Crabs in "CRUSTACEANS", to Yeti in "BERSERKER" and "ABOMINABLE", man-eating seaweed in "THE CREEPING KELP", another big blob in "THE PLASM", killer shrooms in "FUNGOID" and Giant Ants in "GENERATIONS".

The S-Squad series is a tribute to those interests, and several other things from my growing up. But mostly it's for the love of big beasties. Mostly.

So far the team's various members have come up against giant Isopods, revenant Nazis in a UFO base, a variety of Ice-Age beasties in Siberia, bloody huge snakes in Amazonia, a legend in the waters of Loch Ness, raptors in the Congo, death worms in Mongolia, giant spiders in an ancient desert city in Syria, big bugs in the Sahara, a blob in the London underground system, Selkies in Orkney... among other things.

There are more close encounters of the big beastie kind in their futures. (The series is also currently underway in German language editions with Luzifer Verlag)

Ingo Löchel:   In “Antarctica” the second book in your “S Squad” series, Carnacki appeared during the plot. Did Carnacki also make guest appearances in any of your other novels?

William Meikle: He makes an appearance in the Midnight Eye novellas HELLFIRE and GREEN DOOR, with Derek Adams picking up loose threads of some old cases in the present day.

His electric pentacle is also found in the present day in my novella PENTACLE. And FUNGOID makes reference to his meeting with Professor Challenger in THE KEW GROWTHS story.

Ingo Löchel:  In the “S Squad” novel “Operation Loch Ness” Captain Banks' team gets help from a guy named Alexander Seaton. Does Seaton show up in any of your  other novels?

William Meikle: The Seton family have been a recurring motif in my work almost since the beginning.

The first one, Alexander, turned up in my Watchers vampire trilogy as a Scottish alchemist working on the philosopher’s stone and the mysteries of immortality. (That original mention was based on a real historical figure who was purportedly the first man to succeed in an alchemical quest and achieve immortality. Port Seton on the outskirts of Edinburgh is named after him)

Since then other Alexanders, who may or may not be the same man, have turned up in The Concordances of the Red Serpent thriller, several of the S-Squad books and several of my Sherlock Holmes works. There’s a version of him who is now a Selkie somewhere off the coast of Orkney. 

Then there’s a relative, Augustus, another Seton, a swordsman and warlock in 16th C Scotland for who I’ve written a dozen short stories and who turns up in the present day meeting Derek Adams.

There’s a Seton woman in present day Glasgow, again meeting the Midnight Eye in the Farside novelette, and one, young John, working as a street magician and bar singer in L.A in Faster Than The Hound ( I stole the title from a favorite song on the Horslips album, The Tain. Don’t tell anybody.)

The Concordances of the Red Serpent ( also available in German from Luzifer Verlag) is about a book that is similarly a recurring motif, the book having been written by another, or maybe the same, Alexander Seton, around the time of the battle of Bannockburn.

The family history, and the history of the book, have all got a bit sprawling and out of hand if truth be told.

But the most recent Midnight Eye novella, "THE FAIR AFFAIR" is a wee attempt by me to tie up at least some of the loose ends…

Ingo Löchel: How important is research for your books?

William Meikle: Not very. The correct answer, of course, is I make shit up, in my head. But the clarity that brings an idea forward into a plot and a story or novel is the end of a process that’s a bit more convoluted in nature.

For me, it starts with the drift.

And that starts as soon as I’ve finished a piece, or even sometimes during. My mind goes blank, almost empty, and I fill it with random stuff; snatches of music, images from films, bits and pieces from books, song lyrics and poetry and general nonsense from my memories ( there’s a lot of that.)

Sometimes this drift lasts for weeks, sometimes it’s only a matter of minutes. If I’m receptive, an image comes to me, like a still from a movie, or a photograph, one that is usually either the start, or the end of a story. And once that image starts to move and the soundtrack kicks in, that’s when I know I’ve got something I can work with.

Occasionally though, I get too many of these static images at once. Writing them down in a notebook helps, as I can then go back later, read the notes, and see if it still grabs me. Often, I’ve lost interest by that time though. If they then come back again later, I’ll take a closer look at them, but if nothing says ‘write me’ in big letters, I go back to the drift.

I’m in the drift today.

Ingo Löchel: Do you have any literary role models who inspire or have inspired you in your novels?

William Meikle: Back in the Sixties as a kid my reading graduated from Superman and Batman comics to books, with people like Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur 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 in the mid 70s Stephen King came along and things were never quite the same.

All of the aforementioned are influences in one way or another.

Ingo Löchel: In your opinion, what distinguishes your novels from other works in the horror genre?

William Meikle: I write at the pulpy end of the market - adventure stories for people, like me, who never quite grew out of their youthful reading habits. 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 Mickey Spillane and further back, Abraham E Merritt and Henry Rider Haggard. I'd love to have a chance to write a Tarzan, John Carter, Allan Quartermain, Mike Hammer or Conan novel, whereas a lot of writers I know would sniff and turn their noses up at the very thought of it.

I've written horror, fantasy, science fiction, crime, westerns and thrillers. Plus the subgenres, like ghost stories, occult detectives, creature features, sword and sorcery etc.

And in my case, it's almost all pulp. Big beasties, swordplay, sorcery, ghosts, guns, aliens, werewolves, vampires, eldritch things from beyond and slime. Lots of slime.

But I don't really think of them as being different. It's all adventure fiction for boys who've grown up, but stayed boys. Like me.

Ingo Löchel: What projects are you currently working on? Can you tell the readers of the online magazine little bit about it?

William Meikle: I have a contract in hand to bring the S-Squad to Germany. Just started thinking about it, but it will be a werewolf story, and set in Bavaria.

Currently working on a Newfoundland-based horror novel about a fae-creature that emerges during a severe winter storm to terrorise a small town much like the one I now live in. That too has only just begun, but I have a full outline done and am about to start in on it over the coming winter here on the cold shore.

Ingo Löchel: Willie, thank you very much for answering the questions.

William Meikle: Thanks for having me on, and I hope I passed the audition. There's more info for anyone interested on my website.