MC Beaton

The creator of the Agatha Raisin series of crime novels...

Marion Chesney is known primarily for the more than 100 historical romance novels she has published under her own name and under several pseudonyms: Helen Crampton, Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, and Charlotte Ward. But M.C. Beaton is the pseudonym she reserves for her mystery novels.

Marion Chesney was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1936. She has worked as a fiction buyer for a bookseller, as women's fashion editor for the magazine Scottish Field, as a reporter and theater critic for the Scottish Daily Express (Glasgow), and as a reporter for the Daily Express (London). Like her amateur sleuth Agatha Raisin, Chesney lives in a cottage in the English Cotswolds.

According to Willetta L. Heising in Detecting Women 2, the idea for the first Hamish Macbeth novel came to Chesney while she was learning to fly cast for salmon at a fishing school in northern Scotland. Macbeth is the town constable in Lochdubh, a small village in the Scottish Highlands. He keeps a low profile, preferring to have people assume he's of limited competence and intelligence. But, despite the intervention of more high-powered police officials, he's able to solve crimes by careful observation of the people involved. Hamish Macbeth's quiet but steady process of investigation has lead one reviewer to say of a novel in this series,"The pleasures of the book are akin to those of a good gossip session with a perceptive old friend."

Beaton's later mystery creation, amateur sleuth Agatha Raisin, is a middle-aged public relations dynamo who retires to a village in the English countryside. She's more self-important and assertive than Hamish Macbeth, but both series deal with life in a small village. Each town presents an isolated, insular community that doesn't take kindly to strangers - perhaps because the arrival of outsiders often causes trouble and upsets the status quo. Like Hamish Macbeth, Agatha Raisin solves crimes by observing and analysing the people around her, but unlike Macbeth she's pushy, nosy, and manipulative.

The latest addition to the Agatha Raisin series is Agatha Raisin and a Spoonful of Poison .

• Read more...Agatha Raisin Series Information...

Fact file

Name: M.C. Beaton

Date of birth: 1936

Place of birth: Glasgow

Current Home: Cotswolds/Paris

Similar Authors: Jacqueline Winspear, Agatha Christie