Val McDermid and Jo Sharp on writing with your partner and rethinking the failed Darien Scheme
While on a long drive to Edinburgh, Val McDermid and her partner Jo Sharp decided to co-write a novel about Scotland’s ill-fated attempt to establish a colony in the 17th century. They tell Susan Mansfield about having vigorous discussions, but no fallings out
It’s a long drive from Assynt to Edinburgh. Long enough, it turns out, to come up with a book idea you will write together with your partner, decide how you’re going to write it and work out how you’re going to get it published.
As they travelled, best-selling crime writer Val McDermid and her partner, Jo Sharp, who is Geographer Royal for Scotland, found themselves discussing the Darien Scheme, Scotland’s ill-fated attempt to build a trading colony in Panama in the 1690s, which Sharp had read about while preparing a talk on the first Geographer Royal, Robert Sibbald.
“I just said it would make a fabulous story if I knew how to write it,” Sharp says. “And you made the cardinal mistake of saying, ‘Maybe we should do it together?’ And before Val had got to the word ‘together’ I said ‘yes’. By the time we got home, we were really quite excited about it!”
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Their only hesitation was that they had pledged never to try to write together. “My mother always said ‘You don’t play well with others’,” McDermid says, wryly. “And I think she was right.”
“And I really like our relationship,” adds Sharp, “and I really didn’t want it to come an end.”
A little over a year later, we’re talking in the offices of publishers Polygon. The book, The Door of the Seas, is just out in their Darkland Tales series and, happily, McDermid and Sharp are still together. They don’t finish one another’s sentences, but they interweave their answers. There is moderate joshing, but it’s generally good-humoured.
“Honestly, we didn’t have any falling outs,” McDermid says. “We’d one or two vigorous discussions.”
“But that’s just normal life for us,” says Sharp. “I am not precious about my writing. As an academic I can’t be because the review process is brutal. I saw this as an opportunity to learn.”
Sharp took the lead on the research, and they discussed the structure of the book thoroughly before starting to write, then took turns to write sections. “I did breathe a sign of relief when I realised you could write,” admits McDermid. “I did have to get you out of the habit of academic writing. I had to insert punctuation and paragraph breaks.”
“There were times when I had to be brave and edit you,” says Sharp, softly. “A daunting task.”
“I enjoyed reading what Jo had done,” MacDermid adds, “and thinking ‘Where do I take this next?’”
The book is an epistolary novel drawing on a fictional cache of letters left by Dr James Wallace, a historical figure sent on the expedition by Geographer Royal Robert Sibbald to report on the new land. Five ships sailed from Leith in July 1698 with hopes riding high. The expedition was financed by public subscription, and masterminded by William Paterson, a Scot who had founded the Bank of England.
Accounts of Darien appeared to promise a sun-soaked and fertile land, ideally situated on a narrow isthmus with land access to both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Paterson argued that “this door of the sea… the key of the universe” could not fail to restore their fortunes at a time when Scotland was suffering famine and harvest failures. A fifth of the country’s liquid assets were invested in the scheme.
Wallace’s early letters reflect that optimism, even after a tough, three-month voyage. However, hope gradually drains away as the land proves hard to cultivate, leaders bicker, supplies dwindle and more and more lives are lost to illness: 80 per cent of those on the first expedition died within the year.
After two disastrous attempts to found the colony, the beleaguered survivors returned to Scotland in February 1700. Most historians agree that the failure in Darien paved the way for political union with England in 1707. One writer even argues that the whole scheme was engineered by the English to that end.
While there’s no question that Darien was a painful failure, McDermid and Sharp want to address the way the story has been told. Many studies have drawn heavily on a pamphlet by Walter Harries, a ship’s surgeon on the first expedition, who wrote a damning account dismissing the Scots as incompetent idiots. “Those books make it sound like something out of Blackadder: everything we could have done wrong, we did,” says Sharp. “I kept thinking, there has to be more to the story than this.
“As a researcher, I was fascinated that the story seemed so cut-and-dry and so inevitable. There was no single reason it failed, it was a concatenation of events. There was incredible bravery and ingenuity as well. But for some reason we’ve lost that in history, because certain versions of the story have come to dominate.”
Some of the accounts of Darien barely mention what might have been the most important factor in its failure: the decision by King William III, who was anxious not to anger the Spanish, to issue an edict to forbid English merchants and England’s colonies from trading with or resupplying the Scots. McDermid and Sharp’s book ends with James Wallace in New York, bitterly disappointed at the King’s “betrayal” of his Scottish subjects, and with William Paterson, who returned home and became a staunch supporter of the Union.
McDermid says: “I think it’s about setting the record straight in a way that accommodates what we know to be true, as opposed to the versions of events which have been passed down to us over the years. I think there were decisions taken at particular points which might have gone the other way, it wasn’t that we were doomed to failure.
“I think, in Scotland, in the last 20 years or so, people have become much more interested in the truth of our history, not the versions that have been peddled in myths and movies. And to have a sense of who we are in the modern world, we have to understand how we got here.”
“For me it’s about opening up the story,” Sharp says. “If you look at history through a history book, there’s an evitability of going from there to here. By telling it as a contemporary story, nothing looks as predetermined. There was a politics to it, there was a struggle. There were alternatives that might have happened. I hope it gets people to look into it, either because they really like what we said, or they disagree.”
“Because we’re trying to tell a story from the beginning looking forward, as opposed to from now looking back,” McDermid says.
“I think that’s what I was trying to say, but not quite so succinctly,” adds Sharp,
McDermid cracks a smile. “That’s alright, you’re an academic, you can’t help it. I was a tabloid journalist, I can say it in ten words!”
Val McDermid and Jo Sharp will be talking about This Door of the Seas at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, in the McEwan Hall, on 17 August at 3pm
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