Crime writer who gave us Hamish Macbeth dies at 83
Fans mourn ‘MC Beaton’
THE prolific author who created the much-loved Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin has died at the age of 83.
Marion Chesney was the most borrowed British author for adults in UK libraries under her pseudonym MC Beaton.
The witty Glaswegian crime writer made it her mission to ‘bump off people you want bumped off’ and preferred to call herself an entertainer rather than an author.
With a disdain for political correctness, she ensured her fiction was laden with gory murders, nymphomaniacs and frisky older gentlemen.
Her Beaton titles have sold 21million copies worldwide and her detective creations made successful moves to television – although she never forgave the BBC for its shady portrayal of her beloved Hamish in the successful 1990s series starring Robert Carlyle.
‘I could bitch for Britain about it,’ she once said of the show, claiming the BBC ‘despised’ the writing in her books and in making the programme had committed an act of ‘infanticide’.
When they tried to bring out Macbeth’s ‘dark side’ – which the writer maintained he did not possess – she gave up watching the show.
The author, who also created romance novels under other pseudonyms, began writing fiction in middle age after a stint on Fleet Street as the senior woman reporter at the Daily Express.
Chesney recalled the time she spent there as savagely competitive, with newspaper reporters often beating police to crime scenes using information that had been obtained from stolen police radios.
She married the Daily Express’s Middle East correspondent Harry Scott Gibbons in 1969. The couple eventually moved to New York with their young son Charles and took reporting roles at the New York Star, where she made friends with local gangsters.
Her debut novel, My Dear Duchess, was published in 1979 under the pseudonym Ann Fairfax and she would go on to write 150 historical romances under a raft of pen names. Chesney’s first detective story earned her £3,000 and for much of her writing career she was careful to keep producing stories – sometimes at the rate of six novels a year – to help keep her ‘head above water’.
Born in 1936, she was raised in a council house in Glasgow’s Balornock and her childhood was soundtracked by the wail of air raid sirens.
Her parents were happy for their daughter to stay at home to keep them company, but her response was to think ‘to hell with them’. It was an English teacher who secured her job at Glasgow bookseller John Smith & Son, where she devoured the works of the authors she loved.
In the 1950s, after meeting the Scottish Daily Mail’s features editor in a Glasgow tearoom, Chesney persuaded her of her previous newspaper experience (which she did not have) and talked her way into a job.
The budding author began with acerbic theatre reviews before switching to crime reporting. The brutal fatalities she came across in Glasgow’s tenements put her off producing grittier crime fiction for life.
She routinely produced two books a year – one Hamish and one Agatha – until her husband was taken into a nursing home.
To pay for the care bills, Chesney wrote feverishly and came up with six books in 12 months. Her husband died in 2016 after a long illness.
The author spent many of her later years dividing her time between a Paris apartment and the Cotswolds – the setting for her Agatha Raisin novels.
In 2001 she was treated for cancer and had a mastectomy.
Chesney is survived by her son, Charles, 48.
‘Writing to keep head above water’