Marion Chesney Gibbons: Bestselling crime novelist who created Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin
“One day a baking competition, another a murder,” wrote Marion Chesney Gibbons in Death of a Celebrity, one of the Hamish Macbeth novels she published under the pseudonym MC Beaton. The quote perhaps sums up the appeal of the crime novels that consistently made Chesney Gibbons, who has died aged 83, one of the most frequently borrowed authors from UK libraries.
Her books, which were as intricately plotted and bloody as Agatha Christie’s, were usually set in a picturesque and comforting milieu, though she rejected the “cosy crime” label that was sometimes applied to her work.
She was born Marion Chesney in Glasgow. A keen reader from an early age, her first job was in a bookshop, managing the fiction department at John Smith and Sons Ltd. In her spare time, she wrote theatre reviews for the Scottish Daily Mail, becoming the paper’s theatre critic. She also worked as a secretary at Scottish Field magazine, where she soon rose to the position of fashion editor. Later she joined the Scottish Daily Express as a crime reporter.
Next Chesney Gibbons made the move to London to be a reporter on the Daily Express. Shortly afterwards, she married Harry Scott Gibbons, a Middle East correspondent. They decided to try their luck in the US, where they took jobs at a restaurant in Alexandria – Chesney Gibbons as a waiter and her husband washing dishes in the kitchen – until they were able to get work on the Star, Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid.
It was while working for Murdoch in New York that Chesney Gibbons took up writing fiction in the hope of developing a career that would allow her to spend more time with her son Charles. She began writing under her maiden name, Marion Chesney, and soon found success with a series of historical romances. Throughout her career, she wrote romances under many pseudonyms, including Sarah Chester, Helen Crampton, Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine and Charlotte Ward.
However, Chesney Gibbons is best known as MC Beaton, author of the popular “cosy crime” novels. In this guise she created two of literature’s most beloved detectives, Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth. Raisin is a former London advertising guru who retires to a Cotswold village seething with crime and murder (“What sinks of iniquity these little villages can be,” as Chesney Gibbons wrote in Agatha Raisin and the Busy Body) while Macbeth is a village policeman in the Highlands. The Raisin and Macbeth books sold more than 21 million copies worldwide and both series were adapted for television, with Robert Carlyle playing Macbeth and Ashley Jensen playing Raisin.
However, Chesney Gibbons disdained the “cosy crime” label. In an interview with Crime Hub in 2019, she complained: “It is patronising and implies that my books, which are easy to read, must be easy to write ... 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.”
In 1994 Chesney Gibbons moved to the Cotswolds, dividing her time between there and Paris. Fifteen years later, she told Cotswold Life: “I have seen life from every angle. When I was reporting in Glasgow, it was a high crime area – still gaslight, razor gangs, and the worst slums in western Europe. When I came down to the Cotswolds, I remember being in Evesham and seeing the brass band down by the Abbey Gardens: men with knotted handkerchiefs; little children playing on the boats. I felt they didn’t know how lucky they were ... In the Cotswolds, some of the old values still exist: kindness, honestly, gallantry and decency.”
Over the course of her career, Chesney Gibbons published more than 160 novels, which were translated into 17 languages. She was working on new Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth novels at the time of her death. She is survived by her son.
Marion Chesney Gibbons, writer, born 10 June 1936, died 30 December 2019
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