Fleet Street star made crime pay
THE celebrated crime writer MC Beaton used her experiences as chief woman reporter for the Daily Express to bring realism to her characters Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin. Sharply witty but warm and wise, the Glaswegian produced 200 books, selling 21 million worldwide. Libraries saw her as a godsend – she was the most borrowed UK author of books for adults for eight years in a row.
Inevitably, her charming and slow-paced detective stories, often laced with dark humour, were made into TV series, although she could be critical of the results.
She stopped watching the BBC’s 1990s series Hamish Macbeth, starring Robert Carlyle, because she did not like the way the police constable working in the fictitious Scottish town of Lochdubh was portrayed as a shady pot smoker.
Beaton was more taken with Ashley Jensen’s portrayal of her amateur detective, Agatha Raisin, in Sky’s drama comedy.
The daughter of a coal merchant, Marion grew up in a Glasgow council house and discovered her love of literature while working for bookseller John Smith and Son. Vivacious and chatty, she enjoyed the company of journalists and talked herself into getting a job as a theatre reviewer before turning her skills to reporting crime for the Scottish Daily Express.
Her vivid accounts of razor gangs and killers brought her to the attention of editors in London, who brought her to the capital and nurtured her talents.
“It was hard work but when I walked down Fleet Street and heard the printing presses start up and saw the dome of St Paul’s reflected in the Thames I thought I had arrived,” she reflected.
Soon the scoops started rolling in, interviews with an up-and -coming band called The Beatles and then becoming immersed in the John Profumo sex and spies scandal of 1963.
In 1969, she married Harry Scott Gibbons, the Daily Express Middle
East correspondent, a fellow Scot. They later moved to Brooklyn, New York, landing jobs at the Star magazine, while rubbing shoulders with the local Mafiosa. In the Big Apple she turned her hand to crime writing.
She originally wrote under her
maiden name, Marion McChesney and chose the name Beaton for her crime books after one of Mary Queen of Scots’ maids. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2001, she wrote at her flat in Paris and country home in the Cotswolds.
She leaves a son, Charles, 48.