Agatha Raisin Companion (15 page)

Harry Beam

Mrs Freedman’s nephew, who first appears in
Perfect Paragon
wearing a nose stud, dressed from head to toe in black and sporting a shaven head. Agatha believes
he will be useless but gives him a day’s trial. He impresses his potential boss by finding three cats and a dog in a few hours, and neglects to tell her that they were all at the animal
shelter. He helps Agatha through his gap year before going to Oxford University and turns out to be a huge asset, particularly when cases involve hanging round in nightclubs. He also manages to win
over potential suspects when he smartens up and turns out to be quite good-looking when dressed normally.

Toni Gilmour

A young girl from a rough council estate in Mircester who answers an ad for a trainee detective in
Kissing Christmas Goodbye.
Although she is not sure at first,
Agatha is swayed by Toni’s success in getting snaps of a cheating husband. She rescues her new employee from life with a violent brother and alcoholic mother and sets her up in a flat, giving
her driving lessons and even buying an old car for her to drive.

Despite being sensible for a seventeen-year-old, Toni is almost raped on her first case when she agrees to meet a pub landlord at midnight, but Agatha follows her and
comes to the rescue.

Pretty and blonde with ‘pale-blue eyes fringed with thick, fair lashes in a neat-featured face’, Toni is good at her new job and often gets to the answer before her boss. She brings
out an almost maternal instinct in Agatha, who is torn between caring for her and jealousy at her youth and detecting success.

Toni’s feelings about Agatha are equally mixed, soaring between gratitude for the difference she has made to her life, and the desire to be around younger people and to advance in the
business without being tied to one agency. This dilemma is solved when, prompted by jealousy when Toni steals the limelight, Agatha suggests she helps the girl set up her own agency. However,
Agatha’s former employee, Harry Beam, steps in and offers to fund it himself, meaning the rival firm is now out of Agatha’s control.

After a former classmate becomes their accountant and rips her company off, Toni returns to the fold, bringing best friend and colleague Sharon with her. However, she is still restless and fed
up with being handed the minor cases. After confronting Agatha, who in a rare, honest moment admits she is jealous of her young colleague and promises to change, Toni feels, more than ever, that
she can’t leave.

Sharon Gold

Toni’s best friend, who joins Agatha after the collapse of the second detective agency. Agatha finds her appearance off-putting. Sharon is a large girl who squeezes
herself into inappropriately tight clothing and frequently changes the vibrant colour of her hair. But she is bright and sharp-witted, and is useful to Agatha because she fits in amongst the teens
at trendy nightclubs and pubs, and therefore doesn’t raise suspicion.

Paul Kenson and Fred Auster

After Toni and Sharon find a teenager who has gone missing in a highly publicized case, business is booming. Agatha decides to take on the two new sleuths, both in their
forties and keen to leave the police force. Paul is ‘thin, gangly and morose’ and Fred is ‘chubby and cheerful’, but they are both excellent detectives.

Never a feline fan before moving to the Cotswolds, Agatha is given her first pet by new friend Bill Wong. The gift of a tabby kitten comes after his mum’s cat has a
litter, and is intended to save it from a watery death. Agatha is initially dismayed by the odd present, and vows to get rid of it as soon as possible. However she soon falls for the cute creature,
which she names Hodge, and worries that she has been ‘reduced to the status of a village lady, drooling over an animal’.

On a trip to London, where she has temporarily rented a flat, she loses Hodge and, after searching high and wide, tracks him down in Cornwall Square. On her return to the flat, she finds the
real Hodge lying contentedly on the kitchen chair and realizes the other tabby is a stray. As the pair seem to get on, Agatha decides to keep him and takes him back to Carsely Having learned that
Hodge was the name of Samuel Johnson’s cat, she keeps up the literary reference by calling the newcomer Boswell, after Johnson’s biographer.

Although she is not a natural pet lover, Agatha’s cats Hodge and Boswell are the one permanence in her life and she cares deeply for them. She sees no irony in
the fact that she cooks them fresh fish and chicken livers for dinner, while happily dining on microwaved curries herself. She often plays with them and pampers them, and their instinctive reaction
to danger has saved her from certain death on many occasions.

In
Witch of Wyckhadden,
Agatha adopts a third cat after finding it wandering on the promenade, starving and dirty. She believes it to be the creature which attacked her when she found
Francie Juddle’s body, and takes it back to her hotel, where she feeds it up and calls it Scrabble. When she returns to Carsely, however, she feels it is unfair to her other two cats to keep
it, so her kindly cleaner, Doris Simpson, takes Scrabble in.

Although she spends the greater part of her time there, Agatha’s adventures are by no means confined to the Cotswolds. Murder and mayhem occur wherever she travels,
whether it is in the UK or abroad. She enjoys foreign travel, although she insists on five-star treatment wherever she goes, and she has occasionally taken breaks – willingly or otherwise
– in English resorts.

Wyckhadden

Agatha hides in the old-fashioned seaside town while her hair, destroyed by a vengeful hairdresser, grows back. ‘There is nothing more depressing for a middle-aged,
lovelorn woman with bald patches on her head than to find herself in an English seaside resort out of season.’ A windy promenade displays torn posters and old summer bunting and a cobbled
side street boasts holiday homes painted in pastel colours. The prosperity of the town in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has disappeared as cheap foreign holidays entice people
abroad.
Agatha stays in a faded Victorian boarding house called the Garden Hotel and drinks in a dingy pub, The Dog and Duck.

Fryfam

After a wrecked engagement to Jimmy Jessop, and still pining for lost love James, Agatha seeks solace in this tiny fictional Norfolk village, where she has rented a house
called Lavender Cottage. Fryfam has a large village green surrounded by flint cottages, a pub called the Green Dragon and a church, and is something of a step back in time when it comes to values.
The locals are a tight-knit, superstitious and often unfriendly bunch.

Snoth-on-Sea

Fictional Sussex seaside town where James enjoyed idyllic holidays as a child. After returning to his cottage in
Love, Lies and Liquor,
he takes Agatha on a mystery
break, only to find that the town has become dirty and shabby and the Palace Hotel, the
grand guest house of his youth, is now a grim B&B. To top it all, the pair are
caught up in a murder when Agatha’s scarf is used to strangle another guest.

Hewes and Downboys

Hewes is an attractive market town in Sussex, built along a river, where Agatha and her friends go to attend James and Felicity’s wedding in
There Goes the
Bride.
It also boasts a picturesque marina and a pleasant pub-cum-hotel where the party stay.