A kilted Doctor Who sidekick inspired the Outlander saga
Diana Gabaldon set her time-travel romance in Jacobite Scotland because of a Doctor Who companion: Jamie McCrimmon, a kilted Highlander she found oddly endearing. Her hero took his name, and the resulting Outlander novels have sold more than 50 million copies and spawned a long-running television drama.
Gabaldon started the first book in the late 1980s, and Outlander came out in 1991; readers in Britain, Australia and New Zealand first met it as Cross Stitch. Its heroine, Claire Randall, is a 20th-century British nurse who slips back to 18th-century Scotland and falls for the Highland warrior Jamie Fraser, leaving behind her husband Frank. Later books widen the cast to include their daughter Brianna, an engineer, and her husband Roger, a historian who becomes a minister.
Nine of a planned ten novels have appeared, the ninth, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, in November 2021. In May 2025 Gabaldon announced the title of the tenth, which she has hinted may close the saga: A Blessing for a Warrior Going Out. Around the main books sits a web of extras, including short stories and novellas such as Virgins, set in 1740 France with a 19-year-old Jamie working as a mercenary, and a crossover in which Steve Berry's hero Cotton Malone meets Jamie.
One secondary character got a series of his own. Lord John Grey anchors three novels and five novellas, historical mysteries set between 1756 and 1761. Gabaldon also turned the first third of Outlander into a graphic novel in 2010, and a 14-song cycle, Outlander: The Musical, came out that year after she laughingly approved what she called the screwiest idea she had heard.
Television gave the books their biggest boost. Starz ordered 16 episodes in June 2013, filming began in Scotland that October, and the show premiered in the United States on August 9, 2014, with Caitríona Balfe as Claire and Sam Heughan as Jamie. Renewals stretched it to eight seasons, and in January 2023 Starz commissioned a prequel, Blood of My Blood, about the couple's parents. In a neat loop, Frazer Hines, the actor who played McCrimmon, appears in the first season.
Source: Outlander (book series)
