{"id":715895,"date":"2026-07-28T19:04:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T19:04:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/715895\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T19:04:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T19:04:16","slug":"weve-always-been-wary-of-working-together-val-mcdermid-and-jo-sharp-on-writing-a-novel-as-a-couple-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/715895\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018We\u2019ve always been wary of working together\u2019: Val McDermid and Jo Sharp on writing a novel as a couple | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

The airy, modern house on the outskirts of Edinburgh shared by Val McDermid<\/a> and Jo Sharp is surrounded by greenery and feels as though it was designed to provide enough space for two minds to think.<\/p>\n

Both women are high achievers in their fields, a Scottish power couple<\/a> made up of the Queen of Crime <\/a>and the Scottish Geographer Royal. Happily for them, there is normally no overlap in their work.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019d always been very wary of working together because we\u2019d quite like to stay together,\u201d says Sharp wryly. She looks at her partner of 13 years. \u201cYou don\u2019t generally like to work with others.\u201d<\/p>\n

McDermid responds: \u201cNo, my mother always used to say I don\u2019t play well with others. She wasn\u2019t far wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

McDermid\u2019s mother would have to admit that This Door of the Seas \u2013 the couple\u2019s jointly written novella, published next week \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s parliament, its trading company and much of its pride.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Sharp says: \u201cOne of the things that we talked about a lot is that we didn\u2019t want to be part of what is, I think, a bit of a whitewashing of Scotland\u2019s history, to make us seem somehow not as culpable in terms of empire and around issues of race and racism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018I found it fascinating. It was a bit of history I had not heard about\u2019 \u2026 Jo Sharp (right) says. Photograph: Val McDermid\/Jo Sharp<\/p>\n

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\u2019s first female Geographer Royal in 2022.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cquite dull\u201d, and instead began researching the first Geographer Royal, who turned out to be \u201ca really interesting character\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI discovered that shortly after he was appointed, Scotland had this endeavour to set up a trading colony in Panama, and although he didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was telling Val all the things I\u2019d found out about it and I said, \u2018It would make a brilliant story, I just wish I could write it\u2019,\u201d says Sharp. \u201cAnd Val then said, \u2018maybe we should write it together,\u2019 and before she got to the end of the sentence I had said yes.\u201d<\/p>\n

McDermid says: \u201cMy experience of writing books that have elements of historical significance in them is that what you want is something that\u2019s got enough information to hang a story on but enough gaps to colour in.\u201d<\/p>\n

The aim is for the book to be \u201ccharmingly plausible\u201d, a compliment once given to one of her historical novels. \u201cThat has been my watchword ever since. Make it charmingly plausible. Get the historical facts right and then colour in the bits around it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Sharp and McDermid worked on the structure during a rainy car journey back to Edinburgh. McDermid recalls: \u201cYou said, \u2018how do we do this?\u2019 and I said, \u2018we\u2019ll make it an epistolary novel\u2019, and I had to explain what that was.\u201d (\u201cThat\u2019s not true!\u201d interjects Sharp.)<\/p>\n

\u201cI was convinced someone might have had this idea already because the more excited I got about it the more I thought, surely someone\u2019s thought about this,\u201d says Sharp. The book felt like a good addition to the publisher Birlinn\u2019s Darkland Tales<\/a> series \u2013 reimaginings of Scottish historical and folk tales by different authors \u2013 for which McDermid had already contributed the Shakespeare retelling Queen Macbeth.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow the slight complication with all of this,\u201d says Sharp, \u201cis that about two months later, Val went in for open-heart surgery \u2013\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201c\u2013 Which I hadn\u2019t entirely anticipated,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Sharp continues: \u201cBut the advantage of that was that I\u2019d 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\u2019s uniform.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sharp did the vast majority of the research \u2013 hunting down documents including letters and ship manifests at the National Library of Scotland \u2013 while McDermid was recovering, but the pair worked together on the writing, taking turns to write and then edit each other\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u2018Get the historical facts right and then colour in the bits around it\u2019 \u2026 Val McDermid (left) and Jo Sharp in their home. Photograph: Ryan Rutherford<\/p>\n

The truth was the landscape was considerably harder to navigate than they had been led to believe \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople also don\u2019t understand that nations all around Europe were setting up colonies \u2013 nine out of 10 failed,\u201d says McDermid. \u201cSo this wasn\u2019t that only the Scots failed, everybody failed and everybody failed a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sharp adds: \u201cIt feeds into that story that Scotland just isn\u2019t good enough to go alone, that we need that support of a bigger neighbour and all that kind of stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

This Door of the Seas.<\/p>\n

The couple have worked together once before, editing an anthology, Imagine a Country<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s outrage seems to come freely to the book\u2019s modern writers. It is a multi-generational bruise that lingers for many Scottish people more than 300 years later.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the country that you\u2019re living in offers you no hope,\u201d says McDermid, \u201cthen the slenderest strands of hope you grasp, even if it\u2019s not rooted in a reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

This Door of the Seas is published on 6 August. McDermid and Sharp will be speaking at Edinburgh international book festival<\/a> on 17 August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The airy, modern house on the outskirts of Edinburgh shared by Val McDermid and Jo Sharp is surrounded…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":715896,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-715895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=715895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/715896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}