Douglas-Home was born on 31 August 1951. The son of Edward Charles Douglas-Home and Nancy Rose Straker-Smith, he was educated at
Eton College and the
University of the Witwatersrand, where he was the editor of the then 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 work as Scotland Correspondent for
The Independent, news editor and assistant editor for
The Scotsman, deputy editor of the
Scotland on Sunday, and editor of
The Sunday Times Scotland. Douglas-Home was appointed editor of
The Herald, a nationally circulated
broadsheet newspaper in Scotland, in 2000. During his tenure the paper introduced new daily themed magazines, and continued to sell more than
The Scotsman. It was announced on 1 December 2005 that he was leaving the paper. In the months before this, budget cuts imposed on the paper by owners
Newsquest and he had been resistant to these. His first novel,
The Sea Detective, was published by Sandstone Press in May 2011. A new edition was published by Penguin in November 2015.
The Scotsman said it 'raises the bar' for Scottish crime fiction. The sequel,
The Woman Who Walked into The Sea, was described as 'simply intoxicating' by the
Library Journal in the USA. The third and fourth in the series,
The Malice of Waves and
The Driftwood Girls, were published respectively in May 2016 and January 2020. As a journalist, he is best known for having been the
editor of
The Herald newspaper in Scotland. The noble title, the
Earl of Home in the
Peerage of Scotland, belongs to his family, and his cousin,
David Alexander Cospatrick Douglas-Home is the current holder. His uncle, the previous holder, was
Alec Douglas-Home, a former
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He is married to Colette Douglas-Home, a psychotherapeutic counselor, who was formerly a journalist and columnist. The couple have two children called Rebecca Douglas-Home and Rory Douglas-Home. ==Bibliography==