The style & technique of MC BEATON

Marion Chesney Gibbons, who died in December, was better known as crime writer MC Beaton, creator of Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth. Immensely popular in the US, she was regularly named as the most frequently borrowed author from UK libraries. She wrote under a number of pseudonyms and was extraordinarily prolific, publishing more than 160 novels and attributing her immense output to a Scottish work ethic. Described by her publisher as ‘the queen of the village mystery’, her books have been translated into 17 languages and have sold more than 21 million copies.

How she began

On leaving school Marion Chesney, born in Glasgow, began work as a fiction buyer for John Smith & Son, the city’s oldest bookshop. She enjoyed reading the crime novels of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. While still working for Smith, she started reviewing variety shows for the and quickly rose magazine, where she became fashion editor. She then moved to the , reporting mainly on crime, and that was followed by a move to the ’s head office in London. There, she reported on the Profumo/Christine Keeler affair; and in 1969 she married fellow journalist Harry Scott Gibbons. They left Fleet Street and moved to the United States, where Harry worked as a newspaper editor in Virginia and Connecticut. Then both she and her husband obtained jobs on Rupert Murdoch’s new tabloid, , and moved to New York. It was there that Chesney read some imitators of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances, and said to her husband: ‘I could do better’.