I just love to bump people off. And I’ve never forgiven the BBC for what they did to Hamish...
Scotland’s best-loved (and VERY waspish) crime writer offers some clues to her long-lasting career success
WHEN she turned 80 years old, MC Beaton’s publishers threw her a birthday party. The Hamish Macbeth author wasn’t at all pleased.
‘I hate being 80,’ she says. ‘At the party I said “I don’t really like this” and my husband said “Well what about me? I don’t like everyone knowing I’m sleeping with an 80-year-old woman”.’
She emits a filthy, smoker’s laugh. Beaton gave up cigarettes only a year ago and misses them desperately, particularly when she’s writing.
‘I had chronic pulmonary disease and I thought if you gave up smoking it went away,’ she explains. ‘Turns out it doesn’t.’ Another rasp of laughter.
MC Beaton – real name Marion Chesney – is marvellous company. Gossipy, mischievous, her sing-song Scottish accent smattered with impressively salty language, she runs through the list of those who have ticked her off over a lengthy literary career.
There’s the BBC, which she has never forgiven for its louche portrayal of her beloved Hamish, the French, for being snotty about her writing abilities, even her Glaswegian parents come in for a tongue-lashing for designating her ‘the moron of the family’.
‘The great thing about writing detective stories is you get to bump people off,’ she says cheerily. ‘I like to bump off people you want bumped off. It’s very cathartic. I love it.
‘That’s why crime writers are all so terribly nice to each other. We’ve got all our spite out in our detective stories.’
And certainly she is nice, although you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her pen, given how prolific she is. She has written a mighty 32 Hamish Macbeth books, the latest of which is out this month, and 26 Agatha Raisins, a series featuring a ditsy Cotswold-based private detective which has recently been televised on Sky starring Ashley Jensen. She’s also written more than 100 Regency romances under a raft of pen names.
Forget Catherine Cookson or Barbara Taylor Bradford, it is Beaton who is the most borrowed adult author in British libraries today, and a regular on the New York Times bestseller list. Her books have sold 15million worldwide.
‘People ask, why did you write so many books?’ she says. ‘Because I have to earn a living. I’m not JK Rowling. I got very, very little at first. The first detective story I wrote I got £3,000 for. So you have to write an awful lot to keep your head above water. I’m all right now though, thanks.’
She certainly is. She has legions of devoted fans who await each new Hamish and Agatha release as if it were the latest Beyoncé album, and is always touched to discover her readers are as emotionally caught up in her stories as she is. Beaton’s continued popularity, she believes, is partly down to her disdain for political correctness, which she describes as ‘a disaster’.
‘I’m not talking about going round calling people fat or being rude, I’m talking about crushing freedom of speech. It is very, very dangerous. It can have a very unpleasant backlash.’
Thus her books are full of nymphomaniacs, randy older gentlemen and women who’d get a man if only they’d lose weight and pop a bit of makeup on, as well as plenty of gory murders.
In the latest novel, one victim plunges to his death from a police helicopter, while a thug is apprehended in a violent scene that leads Hamish to hope they’re not dead simply because ‘I couldnae stand the paperwork’.
She is critical of Police Scotland and, in her latest Hamish Macbeth, describes the combined police force as ‘a state within a state with enough form-filling, paperwork and bureaucracy to make a French bureaucrat weep with envy’.
‘They tried it in Sweden and it was a disaster,’ she says. ‘It’s rather like breaking up the Scottish Army regiments. Everyone had their own family within the force and it just becomes swamped by bureaucracy.’
She is protective of Hamish and still seething about his treatment on the successful BBC series starring Robert Carlyle, which ran in the mid-1990s.
‘I could bitch for Britain about it,’ she says with a sigh. ‘Bobby Carlyle was a very good actor but he wants to play tough men. But they also despised the writing in the books.
‘I remember at one press conference they congratulated everyone with the making of the character of Hamish except me. No writer likes to be humiliated like that. They wanted to bring out his dark side, and I told them he doesn’t have a dark side. They didn’t know whether to make it Whisky Galore! or a detective story. I gave up watching it.’
She claims she also lost out financially.
‘I got cheated on rotten. I got nothing for repeats. Someone told me the production company that made it went bankrupt two years ago and I thought, “Oh, there is a God”.’
Being treated fairly is important to Beaton, perhaps because of her own difficult background. Indeed, her own life story reads like a novel, albeit one grittier than her detective novels.
She grew up in a council house in Glasgow’s Balornock and her first memories are of putting on her Mickey Mouse gas mask and being rushed down to the Anderson shelter at the end of the street as the air raid sirens blared. Her father was a coal merchant and both parents viewed their outspoken daughter as the black sheep of the family.
‘My mother said to me that she and my father had decided I wasn’t going to come to anything so I could stay at home and be a companion to them,’ she says with a scoff. ‘I thought, to hell with them.’
After school, a kindly English teacher found her a job at John Smith & Son, the Glasgow bookseller, and she spent her days reading the authors she adored.
‘The writing was always there,’ she says. ‘I always wanted to write.’
Her big break came on this very newspaper, where she wrote theatre reviews for the Scottish Daily Mail after persuading the features editor, whom she’d met in a Glasgow tearoom, that she had written for newspapers in the past (she hadn’t).
Her reviews were witty and acerbic and in the late 1950s she graduated to crime reporter, a tough job for a young woman at the time.
‘I remember walking along past the Barrowlands one night saying “please God send me a taxi, I’ll even give up smoking”. It was scary with the razor gangs. Glasgow had the worst slums in Western Europe and it was the days of the press wars – reporters driving each other off the road and hiding Crown witnesses from the police. I still remember the smell of the tenements, the leaking stair lavatories and the gas lights.’
Despite the grim memories, she retains a misty-eyed pride for her home city.
‘I am completely Glaswegian,’ she says. ‘I’m not one of these people who say they come from a little Highland village called Uddingston or Partick. I’ve always thought of myself as Glaswegian first, then Scottish and then British.’
A stint on Fleet Street followed, where she met and swiftly married Harry Scott Gibbons, the Daily Express’s Middle East correspondent. The pair ‘bummed around the Middle East’ for a while and finally relocated to New York where, with their young son Charles in tow, the couple got reporting jobs on the New York Star.
‘The thing is, if you’ve got a child, half your mind is back home,’ she says. ‘So I was reading these Regency romance novels by Georgette Heyer for escape, and then I’d read her imitators and they were rubbish. They got it all wrong. So my husband said “Well, why don’t you write one?” So I did.’
HAMISH came to her during a holiday back home in Scotland when she and a group of friends found themselves stranded in a remote corner of Sutherland after a bad storm.
‘There were 11 of us trapped in this Highland wilderness, and I suddenly thought what a wonderful setting for a detective story. I hadn’t really thought it through, though. I went back to New York and said to my editor I’ve got this marvellous idea for a setting and she said who’s your detective and I blurted out “the village bobby”. She said “What’s his name?” and Hamish Macbeth just came to me. So although the idea first dawned on me in Scotland, Hamish was born on Fifth Avenue.’
Ever since, Hamish has been a constant in her life. She writes two books a year – one Hamish and one Agatha – but when her husband went into a nursing home three years ago, she worked feverishly and produced six books in 12 months in order to pay his care home bills. Harry died last November after a long illness.
‘Fortunately, it was painless. Friends
got him into a nursing home and he was very happy there. They spoilt him rotten. But one day I phoned him up and he said “I’m just about to have a shower” and I told him I’d be down afterwards. And then the nursing home called and they were crying over the phone. I couldn’t believe it. Except I could, really.’
Now, after more than half a century of marriage, she is adjusting to life on her own.
‘Harry travelled an awful lot and in the end I didn’t so much. And I enjoy being on my own. I’m very lucky that way. No, I’m fine. I’m OK.’ She sounds as though she is trying to reassure herself as much as anyone else.
Beaton now spends a lot of time in Paris, where she has an apartment in the Latin Quarter off the Boulevard St Germain. She loves the city and the people, even though some of her French friends find her writing a little, shall we say, declassé.
‘Then I pointed out that not only am I on the French bestseller list, I’m speaking at the Quais du Polar this year, the most prestigious literary festival in France. Their jaws absolutely dropped.’
‘Ha!’ she says gleefully. ‘Schadenfreude. One up for me.’ The rest of her time is spent in the Cotswolds, where she has a cottage in a chocolate box village and heaps of friends, some of whom help provide inspiration for her Agatha Raisin novels.
‘They’re an interesting bunch and there are loads of stories round here,’ she says. ‘We’ve got Margaret, who was the former ambassador to Nicaragua during the Noriega crisis, and then there’s my next door neighbour who’s a tennis coach and also makes her own beer. So we’re a real mixture of people.’
Unlike the BBC’s Hamish Macbeth, she loves the TV version of Agatha Raisin. ‘I adore Ashley Jensen,’ she says. ‘She is very warmhearted and although she doesn’t look like Agatha in the books, she’s got the character. She’s wonderful.’
With more than 160 books to her name, Beaton still gets herself into a fankle over meeting deadlines.
‘I always think I will never ever get into this bloody mess again and then it’s always dash and blast, because I have.
‘It’s fatal to think about what you’re going to write. There’s always something – the streets, the smells, something evocative. I try to do 1,000 words a day.’
She can’t imagine a time when she won’t write books. ‘Writing gives a pattern to the day,’ she says. ‘And it’s nice not to have to retire.’
And why should she? She’s only 80, after all.
Death of a Ghost, A Hamish Macbeth murder mystery by MC Beaton, is published by Constable on February 21, £16.99.
MC Beaton will be appearing at Glasgow’s Aye Write! Book Festival on March 12.