Agatha Raisin Companion (2 page)

A lot of my reporting on this story consisted of doorstepping Stephen Ward, the man who was accused of pimping the two girls.

Then one day, I was sent to interview Sir Oswald Mosley at his headquarters in Victoria and then follow him on his march down the Strand. I was a child of the Second World War and was appalled
at the brown shirts and Nazi armbands worn by his
supporters. Still, a job was a job and I walked with him down the Strand. To my horror, footage of the march appeared on
BBC news that evening, the presenter saying, ‘Oswald Mosley and some of his faithful followers,’ and there I was, right at the front. I couldn’t help wondering what former
schoolteachers and friends would think when they saw me.

For a while, as I was six characters in search of an author, I enjoyed being a Fleet Street reporter. I would walk down Fleet Street in the evening if I was on the late shift and feel the thud
of the printing presses and smell the aroma of hot paper and see St Paul’s, floodlit, floating above Ludgate Hill, and felt I had truly arrived.

I became chief woman reporter just as boredom and reality were setting in. That was when I met my husband, Harry Scott Gibbons, former Middle East correspondent for the paper who had just
resigned to write a book,
The Conspirators,
about the British withdrawal from Aden.

I resigned as well and we went on our travels, through Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. Harry was now engaged on writing a book about the Cyprus troubles. We arrived back in London, broke, and I had a
baby, Charles. We moved to America when Harry found work as an editor on the
Oyster Bay Guardian,
a Long Island newspaper. That was not a very pleasant experience.

After various adventures, down and out in Virginia, we got jobs on Rupert Murdoch’s new tabloid, the
National Star,
now
The Star,
Harry as deputy
news editor and me on the picture desk. Harry then got a job on another tabloid in Greenwich, Connecticut, which meant I could stay at home and look after Charles, who was now attending a school
for gifted children in Brooklyn Heights. We were living in a Mafia-controlled area, the Gallo boys reigned supreme, and my son was driven to school by Nicky the Kid.

But I longed to write. I had read all Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances and thought I would try some of the new ones that were coming out. I complained to my husband, ‘They’re
awful. The history’s wrong, the speech is wrong and the dress is wrong.’

‘Well, write one,’ he urged.

My mother had been a great fan of the Regency period and I had been brought up on Jane Austen and various history books. She even found out-of-print books of the period such as Maria
Edgeworth’s
Moral Tales.
I remember with affection a villain called Lord Raspberry. So I cranked up the film in my head and began to write what was there. The first book was called
Regency Gold.
I had only done about twenty pages, blocked by the thought that surely I couldn’t really write a whole book, when my husband took them from me and showed them to a writer
friend who recommended an agent. So I
went on and wrote the first fifty pages and plot and sent it all to the agent, Barbara Lowenstein. She suggested some changes, and
after making them I took the lot back to her.

The book sold in three days flat. Then, before it was even finished, I got an offer from another publisher to write Edwardian romances, which I did under the name of Jennie Tremaine because my
maiden name, Marion Chesney, was contracted to the first publisher. Other publishers followed, other names: Ann Fairfax, Helen Crampton and Charlotte Ward.

I was finally contracted by St Martin’s Press to write six hardback Regency series at a time.

I had written over a hundred historical novels when we visited Sutherland in the north of Scotland for a holiday. We joined a fishing school in Lochinver to learn to fly cast for salmon. But
while the others were trying to catch something – anything – I dreamt of writing a detective story. The setting was marvellous: eleven people out in the magnificent wilds of Sutherland.
I swear I could practically see a dead body rolling down the salmon pools.

When I got back to New York, I discussed my ambition with my editor at St Martin’s Press, Hope Dellon. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘Who’s your detective?’ I had only
got as far as the rough idea and hadn’t thought of one. ‘The village bobby,’ I said hurriedly. ‘What’s his name?’ I quickly racked my brains. ‘Hamish
Macbeth.’

I had to find not only a name for my detective but a new name
for myself. ‘Give me a name that isn’t Mac something,’ suggested Hope.

So I quoted from the Border Ballads: ‘Yestreen the Queen had four Maries/The night she’ll hae but three/There was Marie Seaton and Marie Beaton/And Marie Carmichael and
me.’

Hope said that M.C. Beaton would be a good name, keeping the M.C. for Marion Chesney.

So I began to write detective stories. We moved back to London to further our son’s education and it was there that the idea for the first Agatha Raisin was germinated, but I did not know
it at the time.

My son’s housemaster asked me if I could produce some of my excellent home baking for a charity sale. I did not want to let my son down by telling him I couldn’t bake. So I went to
Waitrose and bought two quiches, carefully removed the shop wrappings, put my own wrappings on with a homemade label, and delivered them. They were a great success.

Shortly afterwards, Hope Dellon, who is very fond of the Cotswolds, asked me if I would consider writing a detective story set in that scenic area. I wanted the detective to be a woman. I had
enjoyed E.F. Benson’s Miss Mapp books and thought it might be interesting to create a detective that the reader might not like but nonetheless would want to win in the end. I was also
inspired by the amusing detective stories of Colin Watson in his Flaxborough novels and Simon Brett’s detective, Charles Paris.

We had moved to the Cotswolds by that point, and I gave Agatha Raisin my own experiences of being buried alive in winter. Then I remembered cheating with the quiche.
What if Agatha did the same thing for a quiche-baking competition, and the judge dropped dead of poisoning? She would be exposed as a fraud and would need to solve the case to save face. And so the
first book,
The Quiche of Death,
was born.

I had never had any literary ambitions as a writer. I only wanted to produce something that would entertain on, say, a wet day or when someone wanted an escape. When I worked in the book trade,
no one talked about literary writers, but there were magnificent storytellers then: Neville Shute, Rose Macaulay, Agatha Christie, J.R.R. Tolkien, Hammond Innes, Ian Fleming and so many more.

I had noticed in New York that people were reading a lot of old detective stories because there seemed to be nothing to read between the Mills & Boon romances and the Booker Prize novels. I
was lucky to get published at the beginning of the boom, because now there are all sorts of detectives, from cats to rabbis.

I also find that political correctness in this nanny state has gone a bit too far. Although I don’t use real people in my books, I do borrow some real incidents for the rebellious Agatha.
In Sutherland, a printer friend, before the smoking ban, was out in a restaurant for dinner with his wife. Seeing a large glass ashtray on the table, they lit up. A man and woman at the next table
pointedly began coughing and flapping their hands. The printer called over the maître d’ and said, ‘Find these people another table. They’re
annoying us.’

Agatha drinks black coffee, smokes, wears fur coats and can’t cook. Her idea of dinner is to nuke a curry in the microwave.

I wanted a character who is good to be an antidote to my abrasive Agatha and so I invented Mrs Bloxby, the vicar’s wife. It is quite difficult to write about good people: easy to write
about bad ones. But really good people fascinate me, and in these wicked days there are more of them around than you would think.

Agatha is rather emotionally retarded and so is an obsessive romantic where men are concerned. Along comes James Lacey, a retired colonel, and Agatha falls head over heels, simply because
subconsciously she knows he is unobtainable. He maintains a rather cold distance, even after they are briefly married.

Young policeman Bill Wong is Agatha’s first friend, one who sees the soft centre under the truculent exterior.

None of the characters grow any older. If you age your detective, sooner or later you have to pension him or her off. Agatha has a perpetual battle with the ravages of middle age and manages to
maintain a good appearance.

Her rather camp friend, Roy Silver, moves in and out of her life, as does Sir Charles Fraith, a character with whom she has a brief fling although she never really knows what he thinks of
her.

I am often asked if I write with a specific audience in mind and the answer to that is, no. I write as near as I can to the books I enjoy most. Writers who try to copy someone else’s
success always come a cropper. It’s known as ‘bandwagonning’. I was asked recently by a publisher if I would consider a series of detective stories set in Paris. I knew this was
because of the success of
The Da Vinci Code
so I refused, saying I didn’t understand the French.

On one occasion, a woman said to me with a sigh, ‘Well, I might prostitute myself one day and write one of those little Mills & Boon romances.’ Of course, Agatha would have said,
‘Lady, you couldn’t even prostitute yourself,’ but I am much too polite. Successful romance writers are writing as well as they can. It’s no use writing down. I, for
example, lack the necessary skill to write a modern romance.

Agatha Raisin will continue to live in the Cotswolds because the very placid beauty of the place, with its winding lanes and old
cottages, serves as a contrast to the
often abrasive Agatha. I am only sorry that I continue to inflict so much murder and mayhem on this tranquil setting.

Hope Dellon is still my editor for the Agatha Raisin books at St Martin’s Press, Krystyna Green is my editor at Constable & Robinson in London, and the charismatic Barbara Lowenstein
is still my agent.

Will Agatha and James Lacey ever get together again? I don’t know.

But if they do, you’ll be the first to know.

M.C. Beaton