It’s an honour for me to hand over my humble blog, to my friend and fellow dark fiction writer William Meikle, as part of the master of pulps blog tour.
Without further ado, I leave you in Willie’s and The Midnight Eye’s capable hands.
The Origins of Derek Adams, The Midnight Eye.
I read widely, both in the crime and horror genres, but my crime fiction in particular keeps returning to older, pulpier bases. My series character, Glasgow PI Derek Adams, is a Bogart and Chandler fan, and it is the movies and Americana of the 40’s that I find a lot of my inspiration for him, rather than in the modern procedural.
That and the old city, are two of the main drivers for the Midnight Eye stories.
When I was a lad, back in the early 1960’s, we lived in a town 20 miles south of Glasgow, and it was an adventure to the big city when I went with my family on shopping trips. Back then the city was a Victorian giant going to seed. 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. To a young boy from the sticks it seemed like a grand place. It was only later that I learned about the knife gangs that terrorized the dance halls, and the serial killer, Bible John, who frequented the same dance halls, quoting scripture as he lured teenage girls to a violent end.
Fast forward fifteen years, and I was at University in the city, and getting an education into the real heart of the place. I learned about bars, and religious divides. Glasgow is split along tribal royalties. Back in the Victorian era, shiploads of Irishmen came to Glasgow for work. The protestants went to one side of the city, the catholics to the other. There they set up homes…and football teams. Now these teams are the two biggest sporting giants in Scotland, two behemoths that attract bigots like bees to honey. As a student I soon learned how to avoid giving away my religion in bars, and which ones to stay out of on match days.
Also by the time I was a student, a lot of the tall sandstone buildings had been pulled down to make way for tower blocks. Back then they were the newshiny 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 glossey expensively dressed bankers.
And underneath it all, the Old Glasgow still lies slumbering, a draming god waiting for the stars to be right again.
Derek Adams, The Midnight Eye, knows the ways of the old city. And if truth be told, he prefers them to the new.
Plus there are new antecedents-occult detectives who may seem to use the trappings of crime solvers, but get involved with the supernatural. William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel (the book that led to the movie Angel Heart) is a fine example an expert blending of gumshoe and deviltry that is one of my favourite books. Likewise in the movies, we have cops facing a demon in Denzil Washington’s Fallen that plays like a police procedural taken to a very dark place.
But I think it’s the people that influence me the most. Everybody in Scotland’s got stories to tell, and once you get them going, you can’t stop them. I love chatting to people, (usually in pubs) and finding out the -weird-shit they’ve experienced. Derek is mainly based on a bloke I met years ago in a bar in Partick, and quite a few of the characters that turn up and talk too much in my books can be found in real life bars in Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews.
He’s turned up in three novels so far, THE AMULET, THE SIRENS and THE SKIN GAME. The first two are out now in print and ebook at all the usual online stores, and THE SKIN GAME will be along in the next week or so. There’s also looking for funding to bring him to life, several short stories, and an anthology appearance in the forthcoming CTHULHU 2012 anthology from Mythos Books.
Links to Derek’s appearances can be found at my website at http://www.facebook.com/l/7b1a6Xz2liDISoXIkLZRu-2427w;www.wiliammeikle.com
Derek has developed a life of his own, and I’m along for the ride.
William Meikle is a Scottish writer with ten novels published in the genre press and over 200 short story credits in thirteen countries. He is the author of the ongoing Midnight Eye series among others, and his work appears in a number of professional anthologies. His ebook THE INVASION has been as high as number 2 in the Kindle SF chart. He lives in a remote corner of Newfoundland with icebergs, whales and bald eagles for company. In the winters he gets warm vicariously through the lives of others in cyberspace, so please check him out http://www.facebook.com/l/7b1a6Xz2LiDISoXIkLZRu-2427w;www.williammeikle.com
And it’s been worth the wait. As I sit here with my copy of the first edition of Creature Feature in my hands, I can honestly say this collection has it all and with quality. You want killer giant eels (courtesy of yours truly), moths on the rampage, beasts in the mist, devils of mons, creeping vines, evil plasma monsters and other things that live in dark places which human eyes should not set sight on, then this is the one stop book for you.
Stuart Neild 