![]() In recent interviews she acknowledged that she had lost count of how many books she had written, though she estimated that it was at least 160. She wrote more than 100 romances under that name, her own and other pseudonyms, including Ann Fairfax, Helen Crampton and Charlotte Ward. The first, “Regency Gold,” was published under the pen name Jennie Tremaine. She was a fan of Georgette Heyer’s romances set in the Regency period of British history, and when she complained to her husband that Heyer’s many imitators often bungled the historical facts and generally wrote poorly, he challenged her to write a novel herself. Chesney married Harry Scott Gibbons, a journalist whose work led the couple to move to the United States. ![]() She later worked as a fashion editor and as a crime reporter on Fleet Street. “But the next week, an office boy gave me two critics’ tickets for the Glasgow Empire,” a major theater. “I wrote the 50 words and thought my brief moment of glory was over,” she told Booklist. Chesney if she would want to write a 50-word notice on a production of “Cinderella” that included another editor’s nephew in the cast - the understanding being that she had to mention the nephew. And it gave her an accidental entree into journalism.Ī woman she had helped find a cookbook turned out to be an editor for the Glasgow edition of The Daily Mail and asked Ms. “I would haunt libraries, dreaming that perhaps one day …”įirst, though, came a job as a buyer for a Glasgow bookstore, which exposed her to a lot of literature. “I always wanted to be a writer,” she told Booklist. ![]() Her father, David, was a coal merchant, and her mother, Agnes, was a homemaker. Marion Chesney was born on June 10, 1936, in Glasgow. In that book, the first in the Agatha Raisin series, Agatha tries to pass a quiche off as her own homemade entry in a quiche-baking contest, and the judge ends up poisoned. That was the background to the plot of ‘The Quiche of Death.’” “He asked me for ‘some of my splendid home baking.’ I didn’t want to let my son down by saying I couldn’t bake, so I bought a couple of quiche and put my own wrappings on them. “My son’s housemaster was holding a sale for the Vietnamese boat people,” she said. Chesney explained that her editor had suggested she try a mystery set in the Cotswolds, and her son inadvertently gave her the hook. Agatha isn’t a detective, but, like Jessica Fletcher of “Murder, She Wrote,” she is better at deducing whodunit than the paid professionals are. Chesney herself had recently moved after living in the Scottish Highlands since the mid-1980s. Chesney introduced a very different sort of crime solver: Agatha Raisin, a London publicist who retires to Carsely, a fictional village in the Cotswold region of England, where Ms. A BBC television series based on the books, with Robert Carlyle as the constable, ran in Britain from 1995 to 1997. ![]() She wrote romances before turning to mysteries in 1985 with “Death of a Gossip,” the first of more than 30 Hamish Macbeth stories.Ī later novel described Hamish, the constable in the fictional village of Lochdubh in the Scottish Highlands, as “tall and gangly and lanky and unambitious,” yet he had a shrewdness that, book after book, enabled him to crack cases. Chesney held an assortment of jobs, including several in journalism, before publishing her first novel in 1978. Martin’s Publishing Group, whose Minotaur Books published her Agatha Raisin series, announced the death. 31 at a hospital in Gloucester, in western England. Beaton that featured the endearing crime solvers Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth, died on Dec. Marion Chesney, who in midlife began writing novels and produced more than 150, including mystery series written under the pseudonym M.C.
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