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 in 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 at the Oyster Bay Guardian, a Long Island newspaper. That was not a very pleasant experience.
But I longed to write fiction. I had read all of 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 from 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. But I wanted to write mysteries, and discussed my ambition to do so 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. She 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, though I did not know it at the time.
My son’s housemaster asked me if I could do some 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, 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.
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 constant to the often abrasive Agatha. I am only sorry that I continue to inflict so much murder and mayhem on this tranquil setting.
Chapter One
No one knew. No one who encountered Agatha Raisin striding purposefully along Mircester High Street on this gloriously sunny spring morning, her brown hair sleek and lustrous in its neat bob courtesy of a pre-breakfast appointment with her hairdresser, could possibly have known. No one could even have suspected that the woman in the elegantly cut navy-blue jacket and skirt, carrying a dusky-pink shoulder bag that very nearly matched the colour of her lipstick, who was smiling and nodding pleasantly to passers-by, was hiding a dark torment.
Only Agatha knew how bitter and betrayed she felt about the way her long-time friend and sometime lover, Sir Charles Fraith, had committed to marrying a woman almost thirty years younger than her. Only Agatha knew, and that, she had decided, was how it was going to stay. I am a successful, independent woman, she told herself. I don’t need to lumber myself with regret over Charles’s mistakes. I need to get on with my own life. Wasn’t it Coco Chanel who said, “A girl should be two things—who and what she wants”? Well, that and the little black dress were two things she definitely got right. I am a private investigator with a thriving business to run and I will live my life the way I choose. Anyone who doesn’t agree with that can go to hell—and that includes Sir Charles Fraith! At that precise moment, Agatha almost believed herself.
Reaching the corner of an ancient cobbled lane that tumbled away from the high street down a shallow slope, Agatha looked up to the first-floor windows of Raisin Investigations. She could see her staff milling around, preparing themselves for the working day. She tiptoed, as elegantly as she could manage, the three or four steps it took to cross the cobbles, avoiding embedding the high heels of her dark-blue suede shoes in the evil cracks between the stones that she knew were lurking there, booby traps for the unwary. Reaching the sanctuary of the pavement outside the antiques shop above which were her offices, she caught her reflection in the shop window. A little stocky, perhaps, she admitted to herself, but what could you expect after a long, cold winter eating hearty meals? She would easily lose a few pounds now that salad season was approaching. She tugged at the hem of her jacket to straighten an imagined bulge, gave herself a nod of approval and made her way upstairs.
“Morning, all!” she announced, bustling into the office.
Everyone looked towards her and responded. Toni Gilmour, Agatha’s Girl Friday, was young, beautiful, blonde and a meticulous detective with a good eye for detail. Agatha had come to rely on her a great deal, although that was something she seldom admitted to anyone, especially Toni. Patrick Mulligan was a tall, cadaverous retired policeman with a wealth of experience as an investigator. He had a serious, almost sombre demeanour and seldom smiled. Simon Black, on the other hand, greeted Agatha with a wide grin that wrinkled his features. He had an odd, pale, angular face that Agatha could never describe as handsome, yet he was a young man who was never short of attractive girls hanging on his arm or warming his bed—or so he claimed. The only girl he ever seemed to care about, however, was the next one. As an investigator, he had his shortcomings, but his casual charm and dogged determination usually saw him through.