Val McDermid

What would be your ideal scenario to enjoy a dram?

Up in a cottage in Wester Ross or Sutherland, sitting in the window, watching the sunset over the Minch, with a faint shadow of Lewis in the background. Can’t beat it.

Favourite whisky-drinking music?

Something instrumental, because I don’t want it to interfere with my enjoyment of the whisky. I like some of the Nordic composers like Jóhann Jóhannsson, so I’d have that on in the background.

Best box set?

I’m last off the block with this one, but we’re currently working our way through Better Call Saul. We started watching it when it first was on, and for some reason we didn’t really take to it. But everybody kept telling us, ‘It’s so good, it’s so good.’ We went back and after two episodes, we went: ‘What did we not like about this?’

Fantasy whisky-tasting companion?

I have a strange fascination with Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. I’ve written a play about the last day of his life, which was commissioned by the Lyceum but for various reasons couldn’t be put into production. So I’m hoping that will be picked up somewhere else. But I’d love to sit down and share a dram with someone who died far too young. My friend Emma Smith, who’s a professor of Shakespeare at Oxford, says that at the point Marlowe died, he was a better dramatist than Shakespeare. He was stabbed in the eye in the course of a day’s drinking, he was a wild boy, there’s no doubt about that, but he was an extraordinary writer. I’d love to have a dram with him and talk about the projects he never got to do.

Most memorable dram?

The first time I had a Bowmore on Islay, it was probably back in the early 1980s, I’d gone to Islay for a wee holiday, I wanted to see if I could track down family graves and things like that ‘cause my great-grandfather came from Islay. And I can remember sitting, watching the sunset with my first dram of Bowmore on Islay. That was memorable…