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The airy, modern house on the outskirts of Edinburgh shared by Val McDermid and Jo Sharp is surrounded by greenery and feels as though it was designed to provide enough space for two minds to think.
Both women are high achievers in their fields, a Scottish power couple made up of the Queen of Crime and the Scottish Geographer Royal. Happily for them, there is normally no overlap in their work.
“We’d always been very wary of working together because we’d quite like to stay together,” says Sharp wryly. She looks at her partner of 13 years. “You don’t generally like to work with others.”
McDermid responds: “No, my mother always used to say I don’t play well with others. She wasn’t far wrong.”
McDermid’s mother would have to admit that This Door of the Seas – the couple’s jointly written novella, published next week – is an exception. The book is a fictionalised account of the 1698 Darien venture, in which more than 2,000 Scots, mostly fleeing famine, embarked on an ill-fated expedition to modern-day Panama, hoping to establish a trading colony and provide an overland route between the Atlantic and Pacific.
It is no spoiler to reveal that the attempt bankrupted a struggling Scottish economy, hampered already by its overbearing neighbour, England. It propelled the country into signing the union agreement only seven years later, taking away Scotland’s parliament, its trading company and much of its pride.
From then on, Scotland became an intrinsic part of the union, including the later evils of transatlantic slavery, a role that can sometimes go unacknowledged north of the border.
Sharp says: “One of the things that we talked about a lot is that we didn’t want to be part of what is, I think, a bit of a whitewashing of Scotland’s history, to make us seem somehow not as culpable in terms of empire and around issues of race and racism.”
Sharp is a human geographer, with a background in geopolitics and international development. She is a professor of geography at the University of St Andrews, a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and became Scotland’s first female Geographer Royal in 2022.
Her civil partner, McDermid, has written 51 books, which have been translated into more than 40 languages, sold more than 20m copies and won a wealth of awards.
At 71, nearly four decades after her debut, Report for Murder, followed by immensely popular crime series including the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan books, and the Karen Pirie novels, she continues to run rings around her readers, laying breadcrumbs and pulling rugs.
The story came about through research Sharp was doing for a book festival talk. She was asked to speak about geography in Scotland, which she thought could be “quite dull”, and instead began researching the first Geographer Royal, who turned out to be “a really interesting character”.
“I discovered that shortly after he was appointed, Scotland had this endeavour to set up a trading colony in Panama, and although he didn’t go himself, he sent someone to be his eyes and ears on the ground. I just found this fascinating, because it was a bit of history I had not heard about.”
“I was telling Val all the things I’d found out about it and I said, ‘It would make a brilliant story, I just wish I could write it’,” says Sharp. “And Val then said, ‘maybe we should write it together,’ and before she got to the end of the sentence I had said yes.”
McDermid says: “My experience of writing books that have elements of historical significance in them is that what you want is something that’s got enough information to hang a story on but enough gaps to colour in.”
The aim is for the book to be “charmingly plausible”, a compliment once given to one of her historical novels. “That has been my watchword ever since. Make it charmingly plausible. Get the historical facts right and then colour in the bits around it.”
The story is told by Dr James Wallace, a scientist, in letters to his wife, Eliza, and his sponsor, Sir Robert Sibbald, the first Geographer Royal of Scotland, founder of the Edinburgh botanic gardens and physician to the king.
Sharp and McDermid worked on the structure during a rainy car journey back to Edinburgh. McDermid recalls: “You said, ‘how do we do this?’ and I said, ‘we’ll make it an epistolary novel’, and I had to explain what that was.” (“That’s not true!” interjects Sharp.)
“I was convinced someone might have had this idea already because the more excited I got about it the more I thought, surely someone’s thought about this,” says Sharp. The book felt like a good addition to the publisher Birlinn’s Darkland Tales series – reimaginings of Scottish historical and folk tales by different authors – for which McDermid had already contributed the Shakespeare retelling Queen Macbeth.
“Now the slight complication with all of this,” says Sharp, “is that about two months later, Val went in for open-heart surgery –”
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“– Which I hadn’t entirely anticipated,” McDermid adds. She needed an aortic valve replacement and two coronary bypasses to fix a condition spotted initially by her partner, who noticed her heart was skipping a beat.
Sharp continues: “But the advantage of that was that I’d taken time off work to look after Val in her recovery, and there was only so much time I could wander around in my nurse’s uniform.”
Sharp did the vast majority of the research – hunting down documents including letters and ship manifests at the National Library of Scotland – while McDermid was recovering, but the pair worked together on the writing, taking turns to write and then edit each other’s work.
Slowly they began to unpick many of the myths about the Darien venture being a bumbling attempt from Scotland to stand on its own two feet, many of which Sharp realised had come not from factual accounts at the time but from political pamphlets.
The truth was the landscape was considerably harder to navigate than they had been led to believe – the colony unexpectedly came under relentless attack from the Spanish settlers who occupied territory nearby, and more than 80% of the Scots who had travelled over died within a year, mostly from tropical diseases or famine.
“People also don’t understand that nations all around Europe were setting up colonies – nine out of 10 failed,” says McDermid. “So this wasn’t that only the Scots failed, everybody failed and everybody failed a lot.”
Sharp adds: “It feeds into that story that Scotland just isn’t good enough to go alone, that we need that support of a bigger neighbour and all that kind of stuff.”
The couple have worked together once before, editing an anthology, Imagine a Country, in which Scottish writers lay out their vision for a better future. With contributors including Alan Cumming, Ali Smith, Carol Ann Duffy, Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith, the collection came six years after the Scottish independence referendum, in a nation still struggling to heal from some of the divisiveness of the campaign. It was not a political book, but the pair are strong supporters of Scottish independence, believing Scotland should be given a chance to succeed on its own merits.
This Door of the Seas is more explicitly political: as the creeping sensation of betrayal by the English and Scottish landed gentry takes over, Wallace’s outrage seems to come freely to the book’s modern writers. It is a multi-generational bruise that lingers for many Scottish people more than 300 years later.
Readers will undoubtedly find similarities between those fleeing Scottish famine in the 1600s and modern refugees, many of whom do not fully comprehend the danger of the journey or the hostile environment they will be arriving in. The couple recognise the parallel.
“When the country that you’re living in offers you no hope,” says McDermid, “then the slenderest strands of hope you grasp, even if it’s not rooted in a reality.”
