The bestselling crime writer Val McDermid and her partner Jo Sharp, Scotland's first female Geographer Royal, have long kept their professional lives separate to preserve their relationship. ‘We’d always been very wary of working together because we’d quite like to stay together,’ Sharp said. McDermid added: ‘My mother always used to say I don’t play well with others. She wasn’t far wrong.’
A chance discovery sparks collaboration
The couple's joint novella, This Door of the Seas, published next week, emerged from Sharp's research for a talk on geography in Scotland. She discovered that the first Geographer Royal, Sir Robert Sibbald, had sent an observer to the 1698 Darien venture – an ill-fated Scottish attempt to establish a trading colony in modern-day Panama. More than 2,000 Scots, mostly fleeing famine, embarked on the expedition. Within a year, over 80% died from tropical diseases or famine, and the failure bankrupted Scotland, propelling it into the union with England in 1707.
Sharp said: ‘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”. And Val then said, “maybe we should write it together,” and before she got to the end of the sentence I had said yes.’
Writing through recovery
The project gained urgency after McDermid underwent open-heart surgery – an aortic valve replacement and two coronary bypasses – spotted by Sharp. Sharp took time off to care for her partner and did most of the research at the National Library of Scotland. They wrote in turns, editing each other's work. The result is an epistolary novel narrated by Dr James Wallace through letters to his wife and to Sibbald.
McDermid aimed for ‘charmingly plausible’ historical fiction, a phrase once used to praise her work: ‘Get the historical facts right and then colour in the bits around it.’ The pair also sought to avoid whitewashing Scotland's role in empire and slavery. Sharp noted: ‘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.’
Political undertones
The book challenges myths about Scottish incompetence, highlighting that nine out of ten European colonial ventures failed. For McDermid and Sharp, strong independence supporters, the story resonates today: ‘When the country that you’re living in offers you no hope,’ McDermid said, ‘then the slenderest strands of hope you grasp, even if it’s not rooted in a reality.’ This Door of the Seas is published on 6 August, and the authors will speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 17 August.
