M.C. Beaton was the bestselling author of the Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth series and the pen name of Marion Chesney.
Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Chesney’s father was a coal merchant and her mother was a homemaker. Chesney always wanted to be a writer from an early age but she started out as a book buyer for the John Smith & Son bookstore in Glasgow before working as a theatre critic, crime reporter and fashion editor at various publications including the Scottish Daily Express. There she met and married Harry Scott Gibbons, who worked as Middle East Correspondent for the newspaper. She also worked as a chief reporter on Fleet Street before she moved to the United States with her husband where he worked as an editor of the Oyster Bay Guardian. They moved to Virginia and she worked as a waitress in a greasy spoon while Harry washed the dishes. Both then got jobs at Rupert Murdoch’s new tabloid, The Star, and they moved to New York. It was while working in New York that Chesney considered writing fiction as a way to spend more time with their young son, Charles.
Beaton/Chesney found success writing historical romance novels and had written close to 100 books when she decided to switch to writing mystery novels. She wrote the Edwardian Mysteries series but ended it to fully commit to writing Agatha Raisin and Hamish Mcbeth. Her first Hamish Macebeth novel, Death of a Gossip, was published in 1985. A BBC television series based on the books, starring Robert Carlyle as the constable, ran in the UK from 1995 to 1997.
On a trip from the United States to Sutherland, Scotland, Chesney and her husband attended a course at a fishing school that inspired the first Hamish Macbeth story. The couple returned to Britain and bought a croft house in Sutherland. They later moved to the Cotswolds (the setting of her Agatha Raisin books) after their son left home to attend university. Beaton credits her son for the idea for Agatha Raisin. She was asked by his school teacher for some baked goods for a fundraiser. “He asked me for ‘some of my splendid home baking.’ I didn’t want to let my son down by saying I couldn’t bake, so I bought a couple of quiche and put my own wrappings on them. That was the background to the plot of The Quiche of Death.” Agatha Raisin has recently been adapted into a television series for Acorn TV.
Of her prolific output, Beaton told the magazine Shots, “As an ex-reporter I write very quickly and there are always ideas all about, like what people say, stories in the newspapers, or, in the case of Agatha, an ongoing irritation with political correctness.”
In later life, she divided her time between the Cotswolds and Paris. She passed away in 2019. Her Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth series are continuing on, being written by her good friend and author R.W. Green.
