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An airy, modern house on the outskirts of Edinburgh shared with Val McDermid and Jo Sharp is surrounded by greenery and feels as if it was designed to provide enough space for two minds to think.
All women are very successful in their fields, a powerful Scottish family made up Queen of Crime and Scottish Geographer Royal. Fortunately for them, there is often no overlap in their work.
“We were always afraid to work together because we wanted to be together,” Sharp said wryly. He looks at his 13-year-old friend. “You don’t usually like working with others.”
McDermid replies: “No, my mother always said I didn’t play well with others.”
McDermid’s mother has to admit that Door of the Seas – the couple’s joint book, published next week – is different. The book is a fictional account of the 1698 Darien venture, in which more than 2,000 Scots, mostly fleeing starvation, embarked on a journey to present-day Panama, hoping to establish a trading post and provide a land route between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
It is not a spoiler to reveal that this attempt has affected the Scottish economy, already hampered by its oppressive neighbour, England. It led the country to sign the treaty just seven years later, removing the Scottish parliament, its trading company and its pride.
From then on, Scotland became a major part of this alliance, including the evils that followed transatlantic slavery, a part that sometimes goes unnoticed north of the border.
Sharp said: “One of the things we talked about a lot was that we didn’t want to be part of the history of Scotland, maybe to show that we are not wrong about the monarchy and the 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.
His best friend, McDermid, has written 51 books, which have been translated into more than 40 languages, sold more than 20m copies and won numerous awards.
At the age of 71, almost forty years later, Report for Murder, followed by the best-known crime novels including Tony Hill’s and Carol Jordan’s, and Karen Pirie’s novels, continues to circle its readers, placing crumbs and pulling carpets.
The story came about through research that Sharp was doing about the book festival. He was asked to talk about geography in Scotland, which he thought “would be boring”, and instead began researching the first Royal Geographer, who turned out to be “a very interesting person”.
“I found that shortly after his installation, Scotland had the intention of establishing a trading post in Panama, and although he did not go alone, he sent someone to be his eyes and ears on the ground. I just found this interesting, because it was a history I had never heard of.”
“I was telling Val everything I found and I said, ‘It would make a great story, I just wish I could write it’,” says Sharp. “And Val said, ‘maybe we should write it together,’ and before he could finish the sentence I said yes.”
McDermid says: “My experience with writing books that have a historical background is that what you want is something that has enough information to keep the story going but with enough room for you to enjoy it.”
His aim is for the book to be “intriguingly clear”, a compliment given to one of his historical works. This has been my motto ever since.
This story was told by Dr James Wallace, a scientist, in letters to his wife, Eliza, and his assistant, Sir Robert Sibbald, the first Geographer Royal of Scotland, the founder of the gardens of Edinburgh and physician to the king.
Sharp and McDermid worked on the construction during the rainy car journey back to Edinburgh. McDermid recalls: “You said, ‘How do we do this?’ and I said, ‘we’re going to do an epistolary book’, and I had to explain what it was. (“That’s not true!” interrupts Sharp.)
“I was convinced that someone already had this idea because I’m so excited about what I thought, so someone thought about it,” says Sharp. This book felt like a great addition to the publisher Darkland Stories of Berlin series – suggestions of Scottish historical legends by various authors – which McDermid had already given Shakespeare in his retelling of Queen Macbeth.
“Now the little problem with all of this,” says Sharp, “is that two months later, Val went in for heart surgery—”
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“- Which I didn’t expect,” adds McDermid. He needed a valve replacement and two intravenous lines to fix the problem his friend had noticed earlier, who noticed his heart was racing.
Sharp continues: “But the good thing was that I got time off work to look after Val while she was recovering, and I had a lot of time to walk around in my nurse’s uniform.”
Sharp did a lot of research – searching for documents including letters and train exhibits at the National Library of Scotland – while McDermid was convalescing, but the two worked together on writing, exchanging notes and exchanging assignments.
Little by little he began to produce many myths about Darien as a desperate attempt from Scotland to stand up for itself, many of which Sharp realized were not based on actual news at the time but in political publications.
The truth was that the area was much more difficult to navigate than they believed – the region was unexpectedly constantly conquered by the Spaniards who lived nearby, and more than 80% of the Scots who passed through died within a year, mostly due to heat illness or starvation.
“People also don’t understand that countries around Europe are setting up zones – nine out of ten have failed,” says McDermid. “So it’s not just the Scots who have failed, everyone has failed and everyone has failed badly.”
Sharp adds: “It touches on the fact that Scotland is not good enough for us to go it alone, we need the help of a big neighbor and all that sort of thing.”
The two have previously worked together, editing an anthology, Consider the Worldin which Scottish writers put their vision of a better future. With contributors including Alan Cumming, Ali Smith, Carol Ann Duffy, Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith, the collection comes six years after the independence referendum in Scotland, in a country still struggling to heal the divisions of the campaign. It was not a political book, but the pair are strong supporters of Scottish independence, believing that Scotland should be given the chance to succeed in its own interests.
The Sea Gate is clearly political: as the emotion of the betrayal of the English and Scottish landed gentry takes hold, Wallace’s anger seems to come freely to the modern writers of the book. It is a multi-faceted streak that remains with many Scottish people more than 300 years later.
Readers will undoubtedly find parallels between those fleeing the Scottish famine in the 1600s and modern refugees, many of whom do not fully understand the dangers of the journey or the harsh environment they are arriving at. The family recognizes the similarity.
“When the world you live in doesn’t give you hope,” says McDermid, “then you get very little hope, even if it’s not grounded in reality.”
