The Agatha Raisin series
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE QUICHE OF DEATH
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE VICIOUS VET
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE POTTED GARDENER
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE WALKERS OF DEMBLEY
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE MURDEROUS MARRIAGE
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE TERRIBLE TOURIST
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE WELLSPRING OF DEATH
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE WIZARD OF EVESHAM
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE WITCH OF WYCKHADDEN
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE FAIRIES OF FRYFAM
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE LOVE FROM HELL
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE DAY THE FLOODS CAME
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE CURIOUS CURATE
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE HAUNTED HOUSE
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE DEADLY DANCE
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE PERFECT PARAGON
AGATHA RAISIN AND LOVE, LIES AND LIQUOR
AGATHA RAISIN AND KISSING CHRISTMAS GOODBYE
AGATHA RAISIN AND A SPOONFUL OF POISON
AGATHA RAISIN: THERE GOES THE BRIDE
AGATHA RAISIN AND THE BUSY BODY
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2010
Copyright © Alison Maloney
and Introduction © M.C. Beaton, 2010
Illustrations by Alice Tate
The right of Alison Maloney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
UK ISBN: 978-1-84901-319-2
Printed and bound in the EU
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
Introduction
1 Introducing Agatha
2 Agatha’s Past
3 Agatha’s Cotswolds 31
4 Carsely
5 A Pastime in Fighting Crime
6 Close Shaves
7 A Cast of Carsely Characters
8 Mrs Bloxby’s Words of Wisdom
9 Agatha’s Men
10 The Raisin Detective Agency
11 Agatha’s Cats
12 Itchy Feet
13 Mrs Raisin’s Reason
14 Raisin’s Questions 128
15 Raisin’s Recipes
Index
The writing road leading to Agatha Raisin is a long one.
When I left school, I became a fiction buyer for John Smith & Son Ltd in St Vincent Street, Glasgow, the oldest bookshop in Britain – alas, now closed. Those were the days when bookselling was a profession and one had to know something about every book in the shop.
I developed an eye for what sort of book a customer might want and could, for example, spot an arriving request for a leather-bound pocket-sized edition of Omar Khayyám at a hundred paces.
Mills &Boon romances were rather frowned on and were kept at the back of the fiction stand to be ready for ladies who asked me for ‘a book with nothing, you know, nasty in it’.
As staff were allowed to borrow books, I was able to feed my addiction for detective and spy stories. As a child, my first love had been Richard Hannay in John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. Then, on my eleventh birthday, I was given a copy of Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Views the Body and read everything by that author I could get. After that came, courtesy of the bookshop, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey Gladys Mitchell, Eric Ambler, Agatha Christie and very many more.
But I was desperate to write. I even offered my services free in Renfrew to a local paper, sure they would want me, as they appeared to have not very high standards, along with some terrible typos. I remember seeing, ‘The Provost and his wife entered the gaily decorated hell.’ I was particularly fond of the description of a wedding: ‘The marriage of Miss Blank and Mr Bloggs was consummated at the altar to the sound of the organ.’
Having read Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, I then decided to become a copywriter and sent my résumé to all the advertising agencies in Glasgow. I only got one interview, with the boss of some agency whose name I forget. He looked me over from my Harris tweed coat to my high heels and said, ‘I was curious to see you and to give you a bit of advice. Never, my dear, say you edited the school magazine. Never say you’ve had nothing published. Lie. Say you’ve been published in Punch, the Spectator or anything you can think of. Come back in a couple of years and I’ll think about it.’
A pretty young actress, Jill Lubbock, who was ‘resting’, came to work in the bookshop and often took me over to the Citizens Theatre where I met the actors. I was stage-struck. The actress moved on. A bookseller, who started work in the second-hand department, seemed to me rather grand and I was anxious to impress her. I told her I often went backstage at the Citizens Theatre and went for coffee with the actors, and I offered to take her. I took her to a performance of Henry IV Part Two. We went backstage and met Fulton Mackay and John Grieve. ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘union meeting tonight. We’re not going for coffee.’
I was disappointed but I said to my new friend that we would go to the café next door anyway. We had only been there a few minutes when all the actors walked in, carefully avoiding looking at me. The hard fact was that, without my pretty actress friend, I was nobody. I writhed with humiliation as only a teenager can.
Bookselling was a very genteel job. We were not allowed to call each other by our first names. I was given half an hour in the morning to go out for coffee, an hour and a half for lunch, and half an hour in the afternoon for tea.
I was having coffee one morning, when I was joined by a customer, Mary Kavanagh, who recognized me. She said she was features editor of the Glasgow edition of the Daily Mail and wanted a reporter to cover a production of Cinderella at the Rutherglen Rep that evening, because the editor’s nephew was acting as one of the Ugly Sisters, but all the reporters refused to go.
‘I’ll go,’ I said eagerly.
She looked at me doubtfully. ‘Have you had anything published?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, lying in my teeth. ‘Punch, The Listener, things like that.’
‘Well, it’s only fifty words,’ she said doubtfully. ‘All right.’ And that was the start. I rose up through vaudeville and then became lead theatre critic at the age of nineteen.
After that, I became fashion editor of Scottish Field magazine and then moved to the Scottish Daily Express as Scotland’s new emergent writer and proceeded to submerge. The news editor gave me a try-out to save me from being sacked and I became a crime reporter.
People often ask if this experience was to help me in the future with writing detective stories. Yes, but not in the way they think. The crime in Glasgow was awful: razor gangs, axe men, reporting stories in filthy gaslit tenements where the stair lavatory had broken, and so, as an escape, I kept making up stories in my head which had nothing to do with reality. It all became too much for me and I got a transfer to the Daily Express in Fleet Street, London, where I found to my dismay that I was back in the fashion department, running around shows in hot salons, pinning up models’ dresses in studios and feeling diminished.
It took me three months to get back to reporting. It was that terrible winter of 1963. I was
living with a friend of my mother’s in the Vale of Health on Hampstead Heath. There were power cuts and gas cuts and then the water pipes in the road burst and I had to trudge up to the standpipe in Hampstead High Street to fetch water.
Women on the newspaper were not allowed to wear boots or trousers, and high heels were a must. Flat heels could get you sent home. I can vividly remember the awful cold of that winter. Come late spring and I was called into the newsroom and told to visit the home of John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, get his wife aside, and ask her what she thought of her husband shacking up with a cabinet whore. I had a sinking feeling I had got the job because I was considered expendable.
When the polite butler told me that they were out visiting the constituency, I could have kissed him, I felt so relieved. I subsequently met Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. Christine Keeler photographed like a dream but was not so attractive in real life whereas Mandy was pretty. If you remember, the scandal was that Christine was also sleeping with the Russian military attaché at the same time as John Profumo.
A lot of my reporting on this story consisted of doorstepping Stephen Ward, the man who was accused of pimping the two girls.
Then one day, I was sent to interview Sir Oswald Mosley at his headquarters in Victoria and then follow him on his march down the Strand. I was a child of the Second World War and was appalled at the brown shirts and Nazi armbands worn by his supporters. Still, a job was a job and I walked with him down the Strand. To my horror, footage of the march appeared on BBC news that evening, the presenter saying, ‘Oswald Mosley and some of his faithful followers,’ and there I was, right at the front. I couldn’t help wondering what former schoolteachers and friends would think when they saw me.
For a while, as I was six characters in search of an author, I enjoyed being a Fleet Street reporter. I would walk down Fleet Street in the evening if I was on the late shift and feel the thud of the printing presses and smell the aroma of hot paper and see St Paul’s, floodlit, floating above Ludgate Hill, and felt I had truly arrived.
I became chief woman reporter just as boredom and reality were setting in. That was when I met my husband, Harry Scott Gibbons, former Middle East correspondent for the paper who had just resigned to write a book, The Conspirators, about the British withdrawal from Aden.
I resigned as well and we went on our travels, through Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. Harry was now engaged on writing a book about the Cyprus troubles. We arrived back in London, broke, and I had a baby, Charles. We moved to America when Harry found work as an editor on the Oyster Bay Guardian, a Long Island newspaper. That was not a very pleasant experience.
After various adventures, down and out in Virginia, we got jobs on Rupert Murdoch’s new tabloid, the National Star, now The Star, Harry as deputy news editor and me on the picture desk. Harry then got a job on another tabloid in Greenwich, Connecticut, which meant I could stay at home and look after Charles, who was now attending a school for gifted children in Brooklyn Heights. We were living in a Mafia-controlled area, the Gallo boys reigned supreme, and my son was driven to school by Nicky the Kid.
But I longed to write. I had read all Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances and thought I would try some of the new ones that were coming out. I complained to my husband, ‘They’re awful. The history’s wrong, the speech is wrong and the dress is wrong.’
‘Well, write one,’ he urged.
My mother had been a great fan of the Regency period and I had been brought up on Jane Austen and various history books. She even found out-of-print books of the period such as Maria Edgeworth’s Moral Tales. I remember with affection a villain called Lord Raspberry. So I cranked up the film in my head and began to write what was there. The first book was called Regency Gold. I had only done about twenty pages, blocked by the thought that surely I couldn’t really write a whole book, when my husband took them from me and showed them to a writer friend who recommended an agent. So I went on and wrote the first fifty pages and plot and sent it all to the agent, Barbara Lowenstein. She suggested some changes, and after making them I took the lot back to her.
The book sold in three days flat. Then, before it was even finished, I got an offer from another publisher to write Edwardian romances, which I did under the name of Jennie Tremaine because my maiden name, Marion Chesney, was contracted to the first publisher. Other publishers followed, other names: Ann Fairfax, Helen Crampton and Charlotte Ward.
I was finally contracted by St Martin’s Press to write six hardback Regency series at a time.
I had written over a hundred historical novels when we visited Sutherland in the north of Scotland for a holiday. We joined a fishing school in Lochinver to learn to fly cast for salmon. But while the others were trying to catch something – anything – I dreamt of writing a detective story. The setting was marvellous: eleven people out in the magnificent wilds of Sutherland. I swear I could practically see a dead body rolling down the salmon pools.
When I got back to New York, I discussed my ambition with my editor at St Martin’s Press, Hope Dellon. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘Who’s your detective?’ I had only got as far as the rough idea and hadn’t thought of one. ‘The village bobby,’ I said hurriedly. ‘What’s his name?’ I quickly racked my brains. ‘Hamish Macbeth.’
I had to find not only a name for my detective but a new name for myself. ‘Give me a name that isn’t Mac something,’ suggested Hope.
So I quoted from the Border Ballads: ‘Yestreen the Queen had four Maries/The night she’ll hae but three/There was Marie Seaton and Marie Beaton/And Marie Carmichael and me.’
Hope said that M.C. Beaton would be a good name, keeping the M.C. for Marion Chesney.
So I began to write detective stories. We moved back to London to further our son’s education and it was there that the idea for the first Agatha Raisin was germinated, but I did not know it at the time.
My son’s housemaster asked me if I could produce some of my excellent home baking for a charity sale. I did not want to let my son down by telling him I couldn’t bake. So I went to Waitrose and bought two quiches, carefully removed the shop wrappings, put my own wrappings on with a homemade label, and delivered them. They were a great success.
Shortly afterwards, Hope Dellon, who is very fond of the Cotswolds, asked me if I would consider writing a detective story set in that scenic area. I wanted the detective to be a woman. I had enjoyed E.F. Benson’s Miss Mapp books and thought it might be interesting to create a detective that the reader might not like but nonetheless would want to win in the end. I was also inspired by the amusing detective stories of Colin Watson in his Flaxborough novels and Simon Brett’s detective, Charles Paris.
We had moved to the Cotswolds by that point, and I gave Agatha Raisin my own experiences of being buried alive in winter. Then I remembered cheating with the quiche. What if Agatha did the same thing for a quiche-baking competition, and the judge dropped dead of poisoning? She would be exposed as a fraud and would need to solve the case to save face. And so the first book, The Quiche of Death, was born.
I had never had any literary ambitions as a writer. I only wanted to produce something that would entertain on, say, a wet day or when someone wanted an escape. When I worked in the book trade, no one talked about literary writers, but there were magnificent storytellers then: Neville Shute, Rose Macaulay, Agatha Christie, J.R.R. Tolkien, Hammond Innes, Ian Fleming and so many more.
I had noticed in New York that people were reading a lot of old detective stories because there seemed to be nothing to read between the Mills & Boon romances and the Booker Prize novels. I was lucky to get published at the beginning of the boom, because now there are all sorts of detectives, from cats to rabbis.
I also find that political correctness in this nanny state has gone a bit too far. Although I don’t use real people in my books, I do borrow some real incidents for the rebellious Agatha. In Sutherland, a printer friend, before the smoking ban, was out in a restaurant for dinner wi
th his wife. Seeing a large glass ashtray on the table, they lit up. A man and woman at the next table pointedly began coughing and flapping their hands. The printer called over the maître d’ and said, ‘Find these people another table. They’re annoying us.’
Agatha drinks black coffee, smokes, wears fur coats and can’t cook. Her idea of dinner is to nuke a curry in the microwave.
I wanted a character who is good to be an antidote to my abrasive Agatha and so I invented Mrs Bloxby, the vicar’s wife. It is quite difficult to write about good people: easy to write about bad ones. But really good people fascinate me, and in these wicked days there are more of them around than you would think.
Agatha is rather emotionally retarded and so is an obsessive romantic where men are concerned. Along comes James Lacey, a retired colonel, and Agatha falls head over heels, simply because subconsciously she knows he is unobtainable. He maintains a rather cold distance, even after they are briefly married.
Young policeman Bill Wong is Agatha’s first friend, one who sees the soft centre under the truculent exterior.
None of the characters grow any older. If you age your detective, sooner or later you have to pension him or her off. Agatha has a perpetual battle with the ravages of middle age and manages to maintain a good appearance.
Her rather camp friend, Roy Silver, moves in and out of her life, as does Sir Charles Fraith, a character with whom she has a brief fling although she never really knows what he thinks of her.
I am often asked if I write with a specific audience in mind and the answer to that is, no. I write as near as I can to the books I enjoy most. Writers who try to copy someone else’s success always come a cropper. It’s known as ‘bandwagonning’. I was asked recently by a publisher if I would consider a series of detective stories set in Paris. I knew this was because of the success of The Da Vinci Code so I refused, saying I didn’t understand the French.
On one occasion, a woman said to me with a sigh, ‘Well, I might prostitute myself one day and write one of those little Mills & Boon romances.’ Of course, Agatha would have said, ‘Lady, you couldn’t even prostitute yourself,’ but I am much too polite. Successful romance writers are writing as well as they can. It’s no use writing down. I, for example, lack the necessary skill to write a modern romance.
Agatha Raisin Companion Page 1