Marion Chesney

Marion Chesney (1936-2019) was a Scottish novelist who wrote historical romances under her own name and several pseudonyms, and who became best known as M. C. Beaton, creator of the crime series featuring Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin.

She was born in Glasgow on 10 June 1936 and died in Gloucester in December 2019, aged 83. Before writing fiction she was a fiction buyer for the Glasgow bookseller John Smith & Son, then worked at the Scottish Daily Express as a theatre critic, reporter and editor. Her first books appeared in 1979. Under the Marion Chesney name she wrote historical romance series such as the Travelling Matchmaker and the Daughters of Mannerling, and she also published as Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, Helen Crampton, Charlotte Ward and Sarah Chester.

As M. C. Beaton she introduced Hamish Macbeth, a police constable in the fictional Highland village of Lochdubh in Sutherland, in Death of a Gossip (1985). By her death the series ran to 33 novels plus a novella and a short story, and BBC Scotland adapted it for television from 1995 to 1997 with Robert Carlyle in the lead. Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death (1992) launched her second detective, a retired public relations executive living in the Cotswold village of Carsely; Sky 1 televised the stories with Ashley Jensen, following a 2014 pilot with a full series from 2016. Both series have been continued since her death, with R. W. Green taking over Agatha Raisin from Hot to Trot (2020) and completing Hamish Macbeth books she had begun, published from 2022.

For collectors. The opening titles of each series, Death of a Gossip (1985) and Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death (1992), are the natural starting points. Her many earlier historical romances appeared under six different names, so a full collection of her work means searching under each pseudonym as well as under Marion Chesney and M. C. Beaton.