Glasgow crime author and Hamish Macbeth creator dies after short illness
MC BEATON, the author who created of one of Scotland’s bestloved fictional detectives has died at the age of 83.
Her son Charles Gibbons announced her death and said the “support of her fans and the success she enjoyed in her later years were a source of great pride and satisfaction to her”. She died on Monday following a short illness.
Marion Chesney Gibbons, who wrote under the pseudonym MC Beaton, also created Agatha Raisin crime novels. The Glasgow-born author penned more than 160 novels in a career that spanned 40 years.
Beaton started out in bookselling, moving into journalism as the theatre critic for the Scottish Daily Mail before becoming a reporter for the Daily Express.
As MC Beaton she sold more than 21 million copies of her books around the world and was regularly named as the mostborrowed adult author from UK libraries. Her Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth novels were translated into 17 languages.
It was fishing holidays in Scotland that inspired the Hamish Macbeth stories, about a quick-witted but unambitious Highland village policeman.
They were first published in 1985 and later televised with great success.
The fictional Hamish Macbeth village of Lochdubh was set in the real county of Sutherland.
Although Lochdubh and the neighbouring town of Strathbane wer fictional places, the series referred to real Scottish towns such as Dornoch, Dingwall and Inverness.
In an interview, MC Beaton recalled: “I was at a fishing school in Sutherland in the very north of Scotland, and I thought, what a wonderful setting for a classical detective story, 11 people isolated in this Highland wilderness. So Hamish Macbeth was born.”
Robert Carlyle starred as Macbeth in the BBC series and Ashley Jenson played Raisin in the Sky TV dramas.
She was not a fan of her “queen of cosy crime” moniker. “It is patronising and implies that my books, which are easy to read, must be easy to write. Nobody calls Agatha Christie cosy,” she told the Crime Hub in 2019. “To keep writing in clear well-balanced sentences takes a lot of hard work and if anyone doesn’t want a Glasgow kiss, swallow that opinion and put it where the sun don’t shine.”
Latterly she spent her time between her home in the Cotswolds and Paris.