MC Beaton has written over 33 Agatha Raisin books alone, but has hundreds of other books to her name.
The novelist has an extraordinary life from her days on Fleet Street, her emigration to the US and her retirement in the Cotswolds.
Here’s everything you need to know…
What is MC Beaton’s real name?
MC Beaton is a pen name of Marion Chesney, as she published her series Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin under the name.
She originally published Georgian-set period novels under her own maiden name, Marion Chesney, but stopped writing the Georgian novels under pressure to create more Macbeth and Agatha books.
Marion Chesney’s early life and tough childhood
Agatha Raisin writer Marion Chesney was born in Balornock, Glasgow in 1936.
She had a tough upbringing and in 2015 told the Scotsman: “My parents had decided I was never going to come to anything, and I would stay at home and look after them, but I thought, “I’ll show you.”
She was able to secure a job as a bookseller in charge of the fiction department at John Smith & Sons Ltd.
From there, she started to review variety shows for the Scottish Daily Mail and became their theatre critic.
She worked at Scottish Field magazine as a secretary in the advertising department, before quickly being appointed its fashion editor.
She then moved to the Scottish Daily Express where she reported mostly on crime.
Agatha Raisin writer MC Beaton’s days on Fleet Street
Her years at the Scottish Daily Express were a time of fierce competition between rival newspapers.
Marion later moved to London and became chief women’s reporter at the Daily Express.
There, she met the paper’s Middle East correspondent Harry Scott Gibbons and in 1969 the two married.
They emigrated to the US where they first had to a work at a diner in Virginia, before landing jobs at Rupert Murdoch’s new tabloid The Star.
They lived in Brooklyn and when Marion left The Star to bring up her son, she began to write fiction.
She made her debut with My Dear Duchess in 1979, published under the pen name Ann Fairfax.
It was the first of some 150 historical romance novels, published under her own name and several other pen names including Jennie Tremaine, Sarah Chester and Helen Crampton.
MC Beaton series – Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin
Her first book as MC Beaton was Death of a Gossip in 1985.
It introduced Hamish Macbeth, the village constable of the fictional Lochdubh in northern Scotland, whose main ambition in life – to avoid promotion – is frequently endangered by his knack for solving murders.
It was inspired by her family’s move back to Scotland, in Sutherland.
More than 60 more titles followed under the Beaton name.
The series was turned into a popular BBC One series in the 90s with Hamish played by Robert Carlyle.
Marion Chesney loathed the series, however, saying she regarded it as an act of “infanticide”.
The first Macbeth novel she wrote after the series ended was rather cheekily called Death of a Scriptwriter.
After her son finished university, Marion and her husband retired to the Cotswolds which inspired the setting for Agatha Raisin,
She wrote her first Agatha Raisin novel, Agatha Raisin and the Deadly Quiche – about a PR executive who abandons the rat race for a new life in the Cotswolds, where she repeatedly stumbles across corpses – in 1992 and published a further 31 in her lifetime.
She was much happier with Agatha Raisin’s adaptation saying: “I know Ashley Jensen on television doesn’t look like Agatha, but she is Agatha in character.
“And it’s family viewing which is what I wanted. So I’m happy with that. I can separate them in my mind.”
If this has whet your appetite for the series too, you can learn everything there is to know about Agatha Raisin on Acorn TV.
Marion Chesney’s success in later life and death
For much of her writing career, Marion was comfortable and relied upon writing for a living.
But after a new craze for cosy crime hit in the 2010s, she shot to fame in her seventies.
From 2011 she enjoyed an unbroken run as the most borrowed British author for adults in UK libraries, and the Beaton titles have now sold 21 million copies worldwide.
Agatha Raisin: Hot to Trot was the first book in the series not to be written solely by M C Beaton.
Due to her ill health, Beaton enlisted the help of her long-time friend and writer R W Green to help complete the book.
On December 30 2019, she passed away at the age of 83 after a short illness. Her husband passed away in 2016.
Her son, Charles Gibbons, announced her death on Twitter, saying: “The support of her fans and the success she enjoyed in her later years were a source of great pride and satisfaction to her.
“And for that, I will be eternally grateful.”
All episodes of Agatha Raisin are available on Acorn TV.
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