The former Herald editor, Mark Douglas-Home, has just had his first novel published – and has already earned one rave review.
Douglas-Home, who lives in Edinburgh and is married to Herald columnist, Colette Douglas-Home, was editor of The Herald for five years until six years ago. He had previously edited The Sunday Times Scotland.
According to reviewer, Chris Dolan, in yesterday’s The Herald Magazine, The Sea Detective features a new type of private eye for those addicted to crime fiction, Cal McGill: “…a shabby young eco-warrior operating out of an empty block of luxury flats between Leith and Granton. He has a needy ex-wife, a family background he doesn’t fully understand and the soft-shoe’s prerequisite sense of justice. In short, he works. McGill is hip, different and believable.”
Adds Dolan: “What’s your Scotland like, Liz Lochhead had her Corbie ask? Douglas-Home gives us two extreme versions: technologically advanced, internationally-minded liberal Scotland battles parochial, reactionary Caledonia.”
Says a Wikipedia entry about him: “The son of Edward Charles Douglas-Home and Nancy Rose Straker-Smith, he, along with his two brothers, was educated at Eton College and the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was the editor of the then fervently anti-apartheid student newspaper, Wits Student. (An unrepentant Douglas-Home was deported from South Africa in 1970 by the government of the day, following a series of anti-government cartoons that were deemed offensive by Pretoria.)
“He was a reporter for the North London Weekly Herald, the Sunday Express, and the Edinburgh Evening News. He went on to serve as Scotland correspondent for The Independent, news editor for The Scotsman, deputy editor of the Scotland on Sunday, and editor of the Sunday Times Scotland.”
