The airy, modern home shared by Val McDiarmid and Joe Sharp on the outskirts of Edinburgh is surrounded by greenery and looks as if it was designed to provide enough space for two minds to think.
Both women are high achievers in their respective fields, a Scottish power couple made up of a crime queen and a Scottish geographer royal. Happily for them, there is generally no overlap in their work.
“We were always very wary of working together because we loved being together,” Sharp says sarcastically. She looks at her partner of 13 years. “You generally don’t like working with others.”
McDiarmid responded: “No, my mother always said I didn’t play well with others. She wasn’t far wrong.”
McDiarmid’s mother has to admit that This Door of the Seas – the couple’s jointly written novel, published next week – is an exception. The book is a fictional account of the 1698 Darién Enterprise, in which over 2,000 Scots, mostly fleeing famine, set out on an ill-fated expedition to modern-day Panama, in the hopes of establishing a trading colony and providing an overland route between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
It goes without saying that this effort bankrupted the struggling Scottish economy, which was already hampered by its overbearing neighbor England. This led the country to sign the Union Agreement only seven years later, stripping Scotland of its 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 could sometimes be unacknowledged north of the border.
Sharp says: “One of the things we talked about a lot is that we didn’t want to be a part of, I think, whitewashing Scotland’s history a bit, making it seem like we’re not in any way to blame in terms of the empire and the issues of race and racism.”
Sharp is a human geographer with a background in geopolitics and international development. She is Professor of Geography at the University of St Andrews, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 2022 became Scotland’s first female Geographer Royal.
His civil partner, MacDiarmid, has written 51 books, which have been translated into more than 40 languages, sold more than 20 million copies and won numerous awards.
At the age of 71, almost four decades after his debut, Report for Murder, followed by hugely popular crime series including the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan books and the Karen Pirie novels, she continues to follow her readers around, laying out breadcrumbs and pulling up rugs.
This story came about through research Sharp was doing for a book festival talk. He was asked to speak about geography in Scotland, which he thought might be “quite dull”, and instead he began researching the first Geographer Royal, who turned out to be “a really interesting character”.
“I learned that shortly after his appointment, Scotland had attempted to establish a trading colony in Panama, and although he had not gone himself, he had sent someone to be his eyes and ears on the ground. I just found it fascinating, because it was a bit of history I hadn’t heard about.”
“I was telling Val all the things I had learned about it and I said, ‘This would make a great story, I wish I could write it,'” says Sharp. “And then Val said, ‘Maybe we should write it together,’ and before she even got to the end of the sentence, I said yes.”
McDiarmid says: “My experience of writing books with elements of historical significance is that what you want is something that has enough information to hang a story on but enough gaps to add colour.”
The aim is to make the book “charmingly plausible”, which was a compliment once given to one of his historical novels. “That’s been my motto ever since. Make it charmingly plausible. Get the historical facts right and then color in the pieces around it.”
The story is told in letters written by Dr. James Wallace, a scientist, to his wife Eliza and his sponsor Sir Robert Sibbald, Scotland’s first Geographer Royal, founder of the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, and physician to the king.
Sharp and MacDiarmid worked on the composition during a rainy car trip to Edinburgh. McDiarmid recalls: “You said, ‘How do we do this?’ And I said, ‘We’ll make it a historical novel’, and I had to explain what that was.” (“That’s not true!” Sharp interjects.)
“I was sure someone had already had this idea because the more excited I got about it, the more I thought, surely someone must have thought of it,” says Sharp. This book seemed like a nice addition to the publisher Berlin’s Darkland Tales The series – reimaginings of Scottish historical and folk tales by various authors – to which MacDiarmid had already contributed a retelling of Shakespeare’s Queen Macbeth.
“Now the slight complication in all this is that about two months later, Val went in for open-heart surgery,” Sharp says.
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“—which I totally didn’t expect,” says McDiarmid. She required aortic valve replacement and two coronary bypasses to correct the condition, which was initially noticed by her partner, who noticed that her heart was beginning to beat faster.
Sharp adds: “But the advantage was that I took time off work to look after Val as she recovered, and that was the only time I could walk around in my nurse’s uniform.”
While MacDiarmid was recovering, Sharp did most of the research – documents including letters and ship’s manifests were discovered in the National Library of Scotland – but the pair worked together on the writing, taking turns writing and then editing each other’s work.
Gradually he began to expose many of the myths about the Darien enterprise, a herculean effort on the part of Scotland to stand on its own two feet, many of which Sharp realized came not from factual accounts at the time but from political pamphlets.
The truth was that navigating the landscape was much more difficult than they had anticipated – the colony unexpectedly came under constant attack from Spanish settlers who had taken over the nearby area, and more than 80% of the Scots who made the journey died within a year, mostly from tropical diseases or famine.
“People don’t even realize that nations across Europe were colonizing – nine out of 10 failed,” says McDiarmid. “So it wasn’t just the Scots that failed, everybody failed and everybody failed a lot.”
Sharp says: “It reflects that story that Scotland is not good enough to go it alone, we need the support of a bigger neighbor and all that sort of thing.”
The pair have worked together once before, editing an anthology, imagine a countryIn which Scottish writers present their vision for a better future. With contributors including Alan Cumming, Ali Smith, Carol Ann Duffy, Iain Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith, the collection comes six years after the Scottish independence referendum, in a country still struggling to recover from some of 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 on its own merits.
This Door to the Sea is more explicitly political: as a growing sensation of betrayal by English and Scottish landowners takes over, Wallace’s outrage comes out openly to the book’s modern writers. It is a multi-generational wound that remains for 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 danger of the journey or the hostile environment they will reach. Couples recognize equality.
“When the country you’re living in gives you no hope, you grasp at even the tiniest glimmer of hope, even if it’s not rooted in reality,” says McDiarmid.
