M.C. Beaton
M.C. Beaton was a best-selling novellist and creator of the fictional detectives Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth. Born Marion McGowan Chesney in Glasgow in Scotland, she went from being a fiction bookseller to a crime journalist, eventually moving to work in London's Fleet Street. After moving to the United States, she made the move to become an author, penning her first historical romance novel Regency Gold. Many more Regency and Edwardian romances written under a variety of pseudonyms followed, but she rose to fame with the publication of Death of a Gossip, her first detective story and first Hamish Macbeth novel, using the name M.C. Beaton. She published over 60 detective novels during her lifetime, and saw her detectives adapted for radio and television. She leaves behind a huge body of work and legions of devoted fans.
In Depth
M.C. Beaton, or Marion McGowan Chesney, was born in Balornock in Glasgow in 1936. The youngest of the three children of David and Agnes Chesney, her father was a successful coal merchant. Her childhood was not a happy one, and she often sought solace in books, dreaming of one day becoming a writer.
Her first job was at John Smith & Son Ltd in St Vincent Street, Glasgow, which was the oldest bookshop in Britain. Bookselling was seen as a profession at the time, and sellers were expected to know something about every book in the shop. As staff were allowed to borrow books, she was able to read widely. By chance a customer, who was the features editor of the Glasgow edition of the Daily Mail, said she needed a reporter to cover a local stage play in which the editor's nephew was performing, but that all of her reporters refused to go.
Marion lied about her experience and offered to take the job, and this led to her eventually becoming the lead theatre critic at the age of nineteen. From there she became the fashion editor for Scottish Field magazine, before making the move to the Scottish Daily Express where she took up crime reporting.
Crime in Glasgow was terrible, and Marion found reporting on the razor gangs and axe men in a setting of such poverty challenging. By 1963, she had had enough, and she made the move to London and transferred to the Daily Express. Initially, she found herself back in fashion reporting, and it was several months before she could finally get herself moved back onto the news desk. She covered stories such as the Profumo Affair and the march of Oswald Mosely's blackshirts, rising to the role of chief woman reporter.
It was then that she met her later husband, Harry Scott Gibbons, a journalist who had lived in the Middle East working as a foreign correspondent, and who had worked as a double agent feeding misinformation to the Soviet Union. They left journalism and travelled thoughout Europe while he worked on a book. Back in London, Marion gave birth to her son Charles, and in the midst of financial hardship decided to move to the States, where her husband had been offered a job on the Oyster Bay Guardian.
When that role fell through, they found themselves in Florida, and then Virginia, taking whatever jobs they could to survive. For a time, she worked as a waitress at Steve's Restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia, during the day while her husband looked after their son, and then they would switch places while he worked through the night as a dishwasher. Eventually, they found work at a new paper, the National Star, that Rupert Murdoch had founded, and moved to New York City.
After leaving the paper to spend more time with her young son, she sought escape in the latest Regency romances, which were modelled on the works of authors such as Georgette Heyer and had begun to become popular. But she was horrified by the lack of historical accuracy, particularly in the accounts of speech and dress. When her husband suggested that she try to write one of her own, she wrote the first fifty pages and he took them to a agent who had just set up her own agency, Barbara Lowenstein. The book, Regency Gold, sold within three days.
After that, Marion began to write Regency and Edwardian romances. The pay was low, and at the beginning she would write as many as six books in a year to make ends meet. Each publisher wanted to have exclusive rights to an author's name, and so as well as writing under her maiden name Marion Chesney, she wrote works as Jennie Tremaine, Ann Fairfax, Helen Crampton, Sarah Chester and Charlotte Ward.
It was on a family holiday to Scotland that Marion first began thinking about writing detective fiction. They spent a week at a fly fishing school in Lochinver in a group of about a dozen people, she began to think that this would be the perfect setting for a murder. On return to New York, she pitched the idea to her editor Hope Dellon and Hamish Macbeth was born, with the first novel Death of a Gossip being published in 1985. In order to remove any comparisons between her historical romances and her detective stories, she chose a new pen name: M.C. Beaton.
Marion and her family had moved back to the United Kingdom in 1984. In 1990, they moved from London to the Cotswolds, and Hope asked if she could come up with another detective based there. Agatha Raisin, the middle-aged, irascible and politically-incorrect heroine of these novels was in some ways the antithesis of Hamish Macbeth, but readers loved the character despite her many flaws.
M.C. Beaton's career went from strength to strength, with the Hamish Macbeth novels being adapted for a BBC television series in 1995, and the Agatha Raisin novels following in 2014. Her novels had already been translated and sold in many Countries worldwide, but she shot to fame in France in her latter years, where Agatha Raisin became a runaway success. In the UK, she was for many years the most borrowed British adult fiction author in libraries.
M.C. Beaton died on December 30th 2019 after a short illness, leaving legacy of 179 novels and short works written over the span of forty years.