Edit: this portrait of MC Beaton was originally published on June 1, 2019. While the writer died on December 30, we are repeating what was one of these last interviews.
At first, the editor did not believe it. When one of her friends touches her on the word “MC Beaton phenomenon”, she is doubtful. "Why would an ignored author, who has not had success across the Channel for years, suddenly have it?" Anne Michel, director of the foreign literature department at Albin Michel, agrees, out of curiosity, to take a copy of the "Agatha Raisin" series for the weekend. She reads the first volume, "The Fatal Quiche". And there, the seasoned reader is completely enthralled by the incredible adventures of a London fifties who improvises as a detective in a village in the south-west of England. To the point of downloading on its e-reader several other volumes in English.
"I became completely addicted to" Agatha Raisin, "she says. It's very difficult to write comic detective stories. "Agatha" is light and intelligent at the same time. A literary UFO that plunges the reader into a euphoric state. Then begins for Anne Michel what she does not hesitate to describe as "one of the most beautiful editorial adventures" of her career. She bought the rights to the 30 volumes with deliciously kitsch covers and had them translated. In 2016, the "Raisin" sauce takes in France.
Ole olé scenes and hilarious dialogues
Since then, more than a million copies have passed and Albin Michel released in June the 17th volume of the series, "Hide and seek at the hotel". Building on this success, the Parisian editor also published this spring the first two parts of the investigations of Hamish Macbeth, Scottish cop appeared under the pen of MC Beaton in 1985.
A sort of Hercule Poirot in Scottish sauce, this apparently stupid policeman lives alone with his dog in the village of Lochdubh, in the depths of the countryside. He's bored hard, is a bit of a laughing stock. Yet he has intuitions that make him a fine bloodhound. In the second volume, “Who goes hunting”, published on April 24, the return of Priscilla Halburton-Smythe, beauty desired by all the men of the region, to announce her engagement with a London dramatist, disturbs the cop cop in love . Captain Bartlett, invited to this celebration, is found murdered after hunting for grouse, a local gallinaceous man. Hamish enters the dance and immerses himself in the stories of buttocks and hearts of a group of crazy Scottish bourgeois. A lively, delusional and addictive novel.
But who is behind the pseudonym of MC Beaton? An 83 year old Scottish talkative and facetious who, in forty years, has sold more than 20 million pounds! A novelist full of spicy humor, who does not hesitate to spice up her novels with slightly olé olé scenes, dialogues often hilarious, never caricatured, and characters who are aroused in gin or whiskey, hobble like firemen and swear dry!
Glasgow to Brooklyn
His universe with its quaint charm is far from being polished. Everything like its creator. MC Beaton, so it's Marion Chesney Gibbons, old lady so British and so rock and roll at the same time, with the false airs of Agatha Christie, installed in the Costwolds (in the rough south-west of England) , who drinks more coffee than tea, eats asparagus with his fingers while enjoying a lobster salad. And do not miss an opportunity to joke, to punctuate the story of his life with funny digressions.
Thus, she narrates, in a charming disorder, her pre-war childhood in a gray Glasgow infested with rats; the hours she spends, as a teenager, reading at the library (she says that she is more Rebecca Sharp, heroine of William Makepeace Thackeray, than miss Marple, that of Agatha Christie); or her odd jobs, including that of a bookstore salesperson, before landing posts in the press. In particular in the Daily Express, news section, with some forays into the culture pages where she signs interviews with the Beatles.
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She did not dwell on this period, to quickly evoke the love of her life, the journalist Harry Scott Gibbons, with whom she settled in Brooklyn in the 1970s, then under the reign of the New York underworld. "Have you seen the gangster film" Donnie Brasco "? Well here, I raised my son Charles in this not very reassuring context! She laughs. She likes to recount the time when he, still very small, found himself in a photo in the newspaper surrounded by two large egg-laying mafia. "Afterwards, we didn't risk anything, we were under protection, in a way! "
A "graphomaniac" with many pseudonyms
Marion then begins to write. Many. At least two books per year. Under different pseudonyms - seven in all -, this “graphomaniac” is a jumble of historical fictions, detective stories or rosy novels. Back in Great Britain, the Gibbons family bought a house in the fog of Sutherland, in the North of Scotland. Marion says: “It was our farming period. His "Prince Harry" improvised there, a black sheep breeder. Then she moved to the Costwolds, and Agatha Raisin was born with the sole purpose of "entertaining the reader".
Today, the novelist admits to having no “literary claim” and continues to write as she breathes. His only concern? Get hold of a manuscript she just lost in the limbo of her computer. In the meantime, she has already started to rewrite part of it. Nothing stops it.
"Hamish Macbeth - volume 2: Who goes hunting" , by MC Beaton, Albin Michel, 288 p., 14 €.