Whooo, dear listener. A significant word today, as we interview author Willie Meikle concerning his brand new collection The Ghost Club, from Crystal Lake Publishing. It’s a word which ties things together nicely, with ghosts in general, a particular story in the collection, and that old reprobate Oscar Wilde. So settle back as we ask Willie some literary questions (mostly), and Whooo!

The Ghost Club, due out on 9^th December, is very much a concept collection, and also one of those ‘found manuscript’ ones, where the annals of a very special club apparently come to light:

“Writers never really die; their stories live on, to be found again, to be told again, to scare again. In Victorian London, a select group of writers, led by Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker and Henry James held an informal dining club, the price of entry to which was the telling of a story by each invited guest.

“These are their stories, containing tales of revenant loved ones, lost cities, weird science, spectral appearances and mysteries in the fog of the old city, all told by some of the foremost writers of the day. In here you’ll find Verne and Wells, Tolstoy and Chekhov, Stevenson and Oliphant, Kipling, Twain, Haggard and Blavatsky alongside their hosts.”

As we have such a fondness for the history of weird and strange literature, it was a given that we’d want to talk about it.

Lying for Living

With both Twain and Wilde represented within, The Ghost Club reminded us immediately of the art of lying. For as writers we lie for money (well, greydog certainly does), and we study the subject most assiduously and in depth every day (which may be a lie). Even in the introduction to this book, doubt is cast:

“Of course, the discovery of this manuscript has been fortuitous, to say the least, for the owners of the club, and there have already been allegations of hoax and trickery.”

Some lies have their merit. In 1880, Mark Twain presented his essay ‘On the Decay of the Art of Lying’, in which he said:

“Lying is universal—we all do it. Therefore, the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others’ advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling.”

Oscar Wilde, more outrageously, questioned the value of truth, especially in literature, in his own 1891 essay ‘The Decay Of Lying – An Observation’. In the process he happens to mention some of the other writers included in The Ghost Club, which was very predictive of him:

‘Even Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, that delightful master of delicate and fanciful prose, is tainted with this modern vice, for we know positively no other name for it. There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true, and The Black Arrow is so inartistic as not to contain a single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of the Lancet. As for Mr. Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected of genius that when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels bound to invent a personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration…”

Both essays are well worth a read, though for quite different reasons. And if the stories in The Ghost Club are lies, they are entertaining ones. Let us turn to a living writer now, and hear more.

Willie Meikle on The Ghost Club

greydog: Good to have you back on greydogtales, Willie. We’ve known each other for a while now, and we share your love of many of the classic authors, especially the ones who ventured into the weird and supernatural. They told some damn fine yarns. So we lit up on news of this collection, keen to see what you’d done with them. What set you off on the concept?

willie: The idea came to me on Facebook, and it might have been Dave Brzeski who I was talking to about H Rider Haggard. I was asked whether I’d considered writing an Allan Quatermain story. I hadn’t. Then I had. I couldn’t get that to work, but I wondered what might happen if Haggard met Doyle, and that got me to the Club, which in turn got me to the dining table, then the stories. All too soon the concept was big in my head, and when it got to that point, I knew I was going to have to write it.

It was originally going to be a Dark Renaissance deluxe hardcover book, with full Wayne Miller illustrations. I’d have loved to have seen that hardcover, but that is not to be. But Crystal Lake have Ben Baldwin for the cover, and we’ll give it a big push, and see where it takes us.

greydog: Was there a cut-off point in terms of period? At a glance, these authors produced most of their publicly memorable works during the Victorian or Edwardian eras. Presumably you wanted that ‘old-style’ feel to be preserved, rather than wade too far into the twentieth century.

willie: The cut off point is the early 1890s, which I picked to get the maximum number of writers available, and alive, and able to visit London, at the same time. Originally I wanted to get Dickens in there too, but he was too dead, although I did consider having his ghost tell a story at the Ghost Club but discarded it.

I also had to do some sleight of hand to cram H G Wells in before he actually published anything. But I set myself the task of keeping the background bits as accurate as I could, so that meant picking who got involved was actually made a bit easier. I also didn’t want to pick anyone who I hadn’t read myself, so that winnowed the field down a bit too.

greydog: Given the title, do we assume that the stories are all directly supernatural ones, or did you include what Hugo Gernsback called the wonder of ‘scientifiction’ as well?

willie: They’re almost totally supernatural, even the Verne one. Again, I made it one of the ‘house rules’ of the Club, so once I had that established, I stuck to it, although both the Wells and Verne ones are ‘scientific experimentation gone wrong’ tales as you might expect. And the Verne one has a rocket to the moon in it, so I had some fun along the way.

greydog: It’s quite a range of names. We notice you haven’t just settled for the more obvious ones, like Wells, Kipling and Verne, who lend themselves to pastiche. Does the selection of writers represent personal favourites from your own reading past, or those you thought would be most accessible to a broad readership?

willie: As I mentioned above, much of it came from who was available in the year I chose for the club to convene, and restricted to authors I had read for myself. There was a certain degree of thinking that I needed ‘names’ that people would recognise, but the main driver really was whether I thought I could get away with writing a story by that author without getting bitten on the arse.

Plus there was an awful lot of self-doubt along the way on this one. I’m not sure I want to put myself through that kind of mental anguish again for a while.

greydog: Who was the most enjoyable to emulate?

willie: I had a lot of fun with Wilde’s one, as I decided to go light and frothy, something a bit out of my normal comfort zone. I read Dorian Gray again, but it was more in Wilde’s short, comic stories that I found inspiration for this one, a tale of a boy, a maiden aunt with an answer for everything, and a thing rattling at the bedroom window.

I also enjoyed the Doyle one a lot since I went for a Lestrade story, which was a nice change for me after writing so much dynamic duo fiction over the last few years.

greydog: And which author did you find most difficult to tackle, in terms of being faithful to their approach?

willie: Tolstoy was a bugger. I reread War and Peace to try to get his style, then started a story that had fifteen pages of description of the Russian court, political shenanigans and the people who supplied it with food and alcohol, and I hadn’t even got to a plot point. So I tracked backward, had a closer look at one of the suppliers to the court, and discovered a Scotsman there who allowed me a way in to the Empress’ ballroom without going through all the turgid Russian political stuff.

I think I got away with it.

greydog: We’re amused that you included both Henry James and Oscar Wilde. James disliked Wilde’s airs and self-publicity, calling him a “fatuous fool”; Wilde much later wrote, in ‘The Decay of Lying’, that James “writes fiction as if it were a painful duty” (although he credits him with a “neat literary style”. We’re not huge fans of Henry James, who we find can get rather tedious at time. How do you get on with his stuff?

willie: I had a lot of trouble with his extended way with a sentence, It’s about was far from my natural writing style as I could get. But again a character spoke to me who allowed me a way into the story without getting too close to the windbag that the story was really about. It kept me at enough distance to get the job done. I was helped here by Dan Simmons of all people. I read his THE FIFTH HEART, which is a Henry James meets Holmes novel, and it was his Jamesian conversational voice that I heard as I was writing the story rather than James’ sometimes overly turgid prose.

greydog: Noting that Margaret Oliphant, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle were, of course, all Scots, like yourself, do you feel a particular empathy with classic Scottish writers? Did you grow up with them ‘around’ you?

willie: Doyle and Stevenson were very much part of my growing up. Treasure Island was among the first things I remember reading, and I reread it so often I could probably still recite large passages from heart. Kidnapped was also high up on the favorites list. With Doyle I started with The Lost World rather than Holmes, and that too got read and read under the blankets with a torch.

Other Scots from that time of my reading still stick around too, John Buchan in particular then, a few years later on around the age of twelve, I had a thing for Alistair MacLean’s thrillers and devoured all of them avidly.

I also in later years read a lot of Scottish crime novels. William McIllvaney’s Laidlaw in particular was a direct influence on Derek Adams.

Although Sue has several of her books, I didn’t read Margaret Oliphant until fairly recently, when I discovered a collection of her supernatural stories in hardcover and was delighted to find she had a sharp wit and a nice way with a ghost.

greydog: You probably know our interest in how theosophy interacted with early weird fiction, so we were amused to see Madame Blavatsky included. Did you draw on her theosophy and ‘astral communications’ from Tibetan masters, or did you go straight to her supernatural fiction for this one?

willie: I have a tulpa, adventures on the astral plane, some musings on the ether and, yes, a meeting with a master. It’s an everything and the kitchen sink job, told in her ‘this is real so you have to believe it’ fictional style. I had a lot of fun with it.

greydog: For the close atmosphere of a ghost story session, with the lights low, we might have added M R James, but from what you’ve said already, he would be excluded by the time frame. Have you ever toyed with Jamesian pastiche?

willie: Not really. I’ve read quite a lot of it, and enjoyed much of it. But Steve Duffy in particular said all of that stuff so much better than I could, so I’ve mostly, deliberately, stayed away, especially from the English academe aspects. I’m more at home with Doyle, Stevenson and Hodgson for my ghost stories.

Besides, I was actually quite glad that he didn’t fit in chronologically, as I could then safely ignore him.

greydog: And no William Hope Hodgson, which we suppose is also an issue of the chronology. You write a wide range of adventure, horror, speculative and supernatural fiction, but in some circles you’re known for your sideline of writing Carnacki adventures. Was it time for the old chap to have a break?

willie: Yes, Hodgson again just didn’t fit in. I toyed with having Doyle encounter him as a boy, and be told a story, but I couldn’t make myself believe it, so it didn’t get written.

I have had thoughts of doing a volume 2, twenty years on that would let Doyle still be around and have a new set of Edwardian stories to collate, but that way lies that self doubt I mentioned up above, and eventually, madness.

greydog: If you did it again, which other author would you most like to try?

willie: I wanted to do a Jack London, wild Yukon story along similar lines to Blackwood’s The Willows but was disappointed to find on research that he was also far too young for this one. He’d fit in nicely in volume two 2. Dammit, I’m thinking about that again.

greydog: It is a tempting thought. On a personal level you are, after all, a man of taste. As you sit back in your leather chair and listen to the voices of old, what accompanies you? A well-aged brandy, a particular malt? Or a pint of eighty-shilling?

willie: I’m restricted by what I can buy out here in the sticks in Newfoundland in a small supermarket’s liquor section. That said, I can usually get The Glenlivet, which is a good all rounder in the single malt front, although I’d kill for a bottle of Ardbeg.

On the beer front, it’s mostly mass produced Canadian stuff and although we have a local microbrewer, it’s still bottled with a lot of fizz in it. I live for the infrequent Hobgoblin promotions that turn up every so often.

And damn you for mentioning 80/-. 

greydog: Sorry about that. Finally – a quick plug. Any idea what you’ll be working on next, or is it all shrouded in the Land of Mist (cheap Conan Doyle reference)?

willie: I’ve been forging alliances with fantasy writers this year, and this has taken me into the writing of a big historic fantasy trilogy along with a name writer. We’re two books in and I’ll be working on the third this winter, then we’ll be setting about finding the right publisher for it. I haven’t tried anything like it since the Watchers trilogy more than fifteen years ago, and my writing has moved on a tad since then. It’s been great fun so far.

We’ve also got the VEIL KNIGHTS fantasy series to finish off, and although my novel in the series has already been published, as a collective we’ve got the big finish to coordinate and advertise coming up.

There’s that, and another horror pulp adventure book for Severed Press with the Scottish soldiers from Infestation and another menace to face.

I’ve got three new novels ( and a big batch of the DarkFuse reprints) coming from Crossroad Press, which includes THE BOATHOUSE, another in my Sigils and Totems works, RAMSKULL, a new Scottish Hammer horror tribute about satanism and bloody mayhem on a Hebridean island, and DEEP INTO THE GREEN, a Newfoundland based dark fantasy about miners delving where they shouldn’t.

One thing I’m quite excited about is a novella appearance in I AM THE ABYSS, a huge anthology from Dark Regions, mainly because I’m sharing page space with some great writers, and I get a double page color artwork from the great Les Edwards. I spoke earlier about feeling as if I’d made it? This helps.

I’ve also had a whisper of interest about a new Victorian ghost story collection. Don’t know if I have time for it, but you know me…

I’ll be 60 in January. I always thought I’d either be dead or slowed right down by now, but I’m still here, and it seems I still have stories to tell.

greydog: You do indeed. Many thanks for joining us, and the best of luck with The Ghost Club. It’s a very enjoyable read.

willie: Thanks very much for having me on.

You can pre-order The Ghost Club now, and as we say, it’s out on 9^th December.

Amazon UK http://amzn.eu/gPKLsHI

Amazon US http://a.co/9DMTBHB

Listeners may care to note that Willie Meikle is also one of the key authors in Occult Detective Quarterly Presents, a thrilling anthology of new, longer supernatural fiction coming out next year. If you back the ODQ Presents campaign, which has already hit its main target, you get a free contemporary novelette by Willie in epub or mobi format as an extra.