The writing road leading to Agatha Raisin is a long one.
When I left school, I became a fiction buyer for John Smith & Son Ltd. on St. Vincent Street, Glasgow, the oldest bookshop in Britain—alas, now closed. Those were the days when bookselling was a profession and one had to know something about every book in the shop.
I developed an eye for what sort of book a customer might want, and could, for example, spot an arriving request for a leather-bound pocket-sized edition of Omar Khayyam at a hundred paces.
As staff were allowed to borrow books, I was able to feed my addiction for detective and spy stories. As a child, my first love had been Richard Hannay in John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. Then, on my eleventh birthday, I was given a copy of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Views the Body and read everything by that author I could get. After that came, courtesy of the bookshop, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Gladys Mitchell, Eric Ambler, Agatha Christie and very many more.
Bookselling was a very genteel job. We were not allowed to call each other by our first names. I was given half an hour in the morning to go out for coffee, an hour and a half for lunch, and half an hour in the afternoon for tea.
I was having coffee one morning when I was joined by a customer, Mary Kavanagh, who recognised me. She said she was features editor of the Glasgow edition of the Daily Mail and wanted a reporter to cover a production of Cinderella at the Rutherglen Rep that evening, because the editor’s nephew was acting as one of the Ugly Sisters, but all the reporters refused to go.
“I’ll go,” I said eagerly.
She looked at me doubtfully. “Have you had anything published?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, lying through my teeth. “Punch, The Listener, things like that.”
“Well, it’s only fifty words,” she said. “All right.”
And that was the start. I rose up through vaudeville and then became lead theatre critic at the age of nineteen.
After that, I became fashion editor of Scottish Field magazine and then moved to the Scottish Daily Express as Scotland’s new emergent writer and proceeded to submerge. The news editor gave me a tryout to save me from being sacked, and I became a crime reporter.
People often ask if this experience was to help me in the future with writing detective stories. Yes, but not in the way they think. The crime in Glasgow was awful: razor gangs, axmen, reporting stories in filthy gaslit tenements where the stair lavatory had broken, and so, as an escape, I kept making up stories in my head that had nothing to do with reality. Finally, it all became too much for me and I got a transfer to the Daily Express on Fleet Street, London.
I enjoyed being a Fleet Street reporter. I would walk down Fleet Street in the evening if I was on the late shift and feel the thud of the printing presses and smell the aroma of hot paper and see St. Paul’s, floodlit, floating above Ludgate Hill, and felt I had truly arrived.
I became chief woman reporter just as boredom and reality were setting in. That was when I met my husband, Harry Scott Gibbons, former Middle East correspondent for the paper who had just resigned to write a book, The Conspirators, about the British withdrawal from Aden.
I resigned as well and we went on our travels, through Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. Harry was now engaged in writing a book about the Cyprus troubles. We arrived back in London, broke, and I had a baby, Charles. We moved to America when Harry found work as an editor at the Oyster Bay Guardian, a Long Island newspaper. That was not a very pleasant experience.
But I longed to write fiction. I had read all of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances and thought I would try some of the new ones that were coming out. I complained to my husband, “They’re awful. The history’s wrong, the speech is wrong, and the dress is wrong.”
“Well, write one,” he urged.
My mother had been a great fan of the Regency period and I had been brought up on Jane Austen and various history books. She even found out-of-print books from the period, such as Maria Edgeworth’s Moral Tales. I remember with affection a villain called Lord Raspberry. So I cranked up the film in my head and began to write what was there. The first book was called Regency Gold. I had only done about twenty pages, blocked by the thought that surely I couldn’t really write a whole book, when my husband took them from me and showed them to a writer friend who recommended an agent. So I went on and wrote the first fifty pages and plot and sent it all to the agent Barbara Lowenstein. She suggested some changes, and after making them I took the lot back to her.
The book sold in three days flat. Then, before it was even finished, I got an offer from another publisher to write Edwardian romances, which I did under the name of Jennie Tremaine because my maiden name, Marion Chesney, was contracted to the first publisher. Other publishers followed, other names: Ann Fairfax, Helen Crampton and Charlotte Ward.
I was finally contracted by St. Martin’s Press to write six hardback Regency series at a time. But I wanted to write mysteries, and discussed my ambition to do so with my editor at St. Martin’s Press, Hope Dellon. “Okay,” she said. “Who’s your detective?”
I had only got as far as the rough idea and hadn’t thought of one. “The village bobby,” I said hurriedly.
“What’s his name?”
I quickly racked my brains. “Hamish Macbeth.”
I had to find not only a name for my detective but a new name for myself. “Give me a name that isn’t Mac something,” suggested Hope. She said that M. C. Beaton would be a good name, keeping the M. C. for Marion Chesney.
So I began to write detective stories. We moved back to London to further our son’s education and it was there that the idea for the first Agatha Raisin was germinated, though I did not know it at the time.
My son’s housemaster asked me if I could do some home baking for a charity sale. I did not want to let my son down by telling him I couldn’t bake. So I went to Waitrose and bought two quiches, carefully removed the shop wrappings, put my own wrappings on with a homemade label, and delivered them. They were a great success.
Shortly afterwards, Hope, who is very fond of the Cotswolds, asked me if I would consider writing a detective story set in that scenic area. I wanted the detective to be a woman. I had enjoyed E. F. Benson’s Miss Mapp books and thought it might be interesting to create a detective that the reader might not like but nonetheless would want to win in the end. I was also inspired by the amusing detective stories of Colin Watson in his Flaxborough novels and Simon Brett’s detective, Charles Paris.
Agatha Raisin will continue to live in the Cotswolds because the very placid beauty of the place, with its winding lanes and old cottages, serves as a constant to the often abrasive Agatha. I am only sorry that I continue to inflict so much murder and mayhem on this tranquil setting.