M.C. Beaton obit

Marion Chesney, a.k.a. Mystery Writer M.C. Beaton, Dies at 83

Her popular crime solvers Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin were the focus of dozens of books, as well as TV series. 

She was not on the list.

MC Beaton, the prolific creator of the much loved fictional detectives Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth, has died after a short illness at the age of 83.

The news of her death on 30 December was announced by her son, Charles Gibbons, who said that “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”.

Beaton, a pseudonym for Marion Chesney Gibbons, was widely known as the queen of cosy crime, selling more than 21m copies of her books around the world and regularly being named the most borrowed adult author from UK libraries. But the novelist, who was born in Glasgow, was not a fan of the “cosy” moniker.

“It is patronising and implies that my books, which are easy to read, must be easy to write. Nobody calls Agatha Christie cosy,” she told the Crime Hub in 2019. “To keep writing in clear well-balanced sentences takes a lot of hard work and if anyone doesn’t want a Glasgow kiss, swallow that opinion and put it where the sun don’t shine.”

Crime authors paid tribute to Beaton. Val McDermid remembered her “generous and wicked sense of humour and her intention was to enjoy life to the full for as long as she had it.” And Stuart McBride, a close friend of Beaton’s, told the Guardian: “Marion will be missed, not just by her friends and family, but by the millions of people who loved her writing. It didn’t matter if she was writing Hamish Macbeth, Agatha Raisin, or her regency romances, every one of her books was filled with warmth and humour and a deviously satirical eye. And that wasn’t authorial artifice, it’s what Marion was like in real life too. She was a force of nature, a great writer, witty, generous, and one of the nicest persons it’s ever been my privilege to know.”

Beaton started out in bookselling, moving into journalism as the theatre critic for the Scottish Daily Mail before becoming a reporter for the Daily Express. She and her husband, Harry Scott Gibbons, moved to the US after the birth of their son. Marion turned to writing Regency romances in order to spend more time with her young son, and had written almost 100 before she began to write detective stories under the MC Beaton pseudonym.

Her Hamish Macbeth stories, about a quick-witted but unambitious Highland village policeman, were inspired by a fishing holiday in Scotland, with the first published in 1985 and later televised with great success. They were followed by the Agatha Raisin books, about an advertising executive who retires to the Cotswolds and finds herself investigating a poisoning at a village fete. The Agatha Raisin novels have been adapted for television starring Ashley Jensen.

With more than 160 novels written by 2019, Beaton said that she was “not yet tired of Agatha or Hamish and have not lost the drive to write about them … Of course if the readers get tired of them, I shall kill them with a nice painless death,” she said. “If you really want to be a writer, then nothing will stop you. Nothing stopped me.”

Beaton’s publisher Little, Brown said that the author had been working on new Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth titles before her illness, so there were more books to come.

Beaton’s editor Krystyna Green of 23 years described her as “quite wicked - when she went on stage I would sit there thinking ‘oh god what’s she going to say?’ At Cheltenham literary festival she told the filthiest joke about Alex Salmond and said, ‘I see my editor sweating over there’.”

“I’m going to miss her dreadfully as after 23 years I’d grown from being in awe of her, to thinking she was absolutely wonderful – and very kind under her rather fierce exterior,” she added. “She was forthright and uncompromising and never afraid to express a view, no matter how unfashionable. She was funny, wise, and truly an inspiring, utterly unique individual. This is just such a sad end to the year.”