Snubbed by critics, adored by readers, MC Beaton was a worthy successor to Agatha Christie

Snubbed by critics, adored by readers, MC Beaton was a worthy successor to Agatha Christie - Telegraph.co.uk

Posted: 02 Jan 2020 12:00 AM PST

MC Beaton, who died this week, never referred to herself as a novelist: that was too pretentious a term for somebody who wrote light-hearted murder mysteries. The creator of Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin preferred to call herself an entertainer.

Beaton once appeared on a panel I chaired at a literary festival, with a gaggle of her fellow crime writers. I asked solemn questions about whether crime fiction glamourised violence, and the authors solemnly replied that it was their duty to show that violence exists in the world and not to sanitise it.

Apart from MC Beaton, who used the question as an excuse to launch into some very funny stories about some of the horrible things she saw as a reporter in the 1950s, when her beat was the Glasgow slums, or the nefarious activities of the local Mafia hoods she befriended when she lived in Brooklyn. Naturally, it was MC who had the biggest queue at the book signing afterwards.

The funny thing about MC Beaton is that I very rarely meet anybody who has heard of her, and yet her books have sold 21 million copies around the world (and those are only the sales of the books written under the Beaton pen name; she also published some 150 historical novels under her real name, Marion Chesney, and other pseudonyms). Whereas the great Val McDermid, famous for her grisly murders, is behind on the sales front – 16 million copies sold according to her website – and yet is a household name.

This is probably because Beaton wrote "cosy crime" (although it was a term she disliked) and was therefore ignored by the critics, passed over by prize juries (she never received the Crime Writers' Association's Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement, an injustice too late now to rectify) and never profiled much in the media.

'There is a huge appetite for the less bloodthirsty brand of crime novel'

Yet despite this readers who prefer crime fiction in its less gory incarnations found their way to M C Beaton. As the ever-booming popularity of Agatha Christie proves, there is a huge appetite for the less bloodthirsty brand of crime novel.

For the millions of readers who happen to be down in the dumps or who want a bedtime book that won't induce nightmares, a "cosy" is going to be a better option than the gruesome serial killer yarn or the prize-winning crime novel offering a searing indictment of such modern evils as human trafficking or coercive control. The critic Nancy Banks-Smith once observed that Agatha Christie has probably given more pleasure in bed than any other woman, although M C Beaton must now be giving her a run for her money.

In the early days of British crime fiction – the so-called "Golden Age" between the two world wars - it was taken for granted that a crime novel would be "cosy". In the 1940s JB Priestley wrote an essay, "Reading Detective Stories in Bed", in which he observed that crime novels had the ideal ability "to make the mind as cosy as the body" just before lights out.

Agatha Christie and the other pioneers of the detective story made sharp observations on middle-class mores but they were not writing realistic fiction: Miss Marple, the elderly spinster who is a brilliant detective because of the knowledge of human nature she has gleaned from her years of observing life in a small village, is more a brilliantly ingenious concept than a convincing character.

Perhaps the detective story would not have flourished as it did if it did not offer a war-weary readership a world in which events proceeded logically and evildoers were always satisfyingly punished; in Priestley's words, the detective story "opposes to the vast mournful muddle of the real world its own tidy problem and neat solution."

MC Beaton in 2010 Credit: REX

In his essay "The Simple Art of Murder" Raymond Chandler grumbled about English crime writers and the people who read them: "flustered old ladies, of both sexes (or no sex) and almost all ages, who like their murders scented with magnolia blossoms and do not care to be reminded that murder is an act of infinite cruelty". In the 1960s British writers such as P D James and Ruth Rendell took Chandler's words to heart and tried to bring more depth to the genre and show the bloody, messy reality of death and grief.

By the 1980s British crime fiction had become socially engaged and unflinching in its depiction of violence; you rarely met a crime writer with a good word for Agatha Christie, although the reading public lapped up her books as eagerly as ever.

But those new writers who attempted crime fiction in the gentler Christie mode made hardly any impact. On television in the 1990s, Midsomer Murders and Hamish Macbeth became hugely successful, but Caroline Graham and MC Beaton, the writers on whose books those series were based, did not top the bestseller lists.

M C Beaton herself was in her seventies when her books really started to take off. She credited Alexander McCall Smith with kickstarting the 21st Century vogue for cosy crime – his placid No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels were a huge hit in the early 2000s. One wonders if perhaps, after the 9/11 attacks and the End of History having failed to materialise, today's readers are once again looking to mystery fiction for the same certainties and distractions that soothed the troubled readers of the 1920s and 1930s.

One should stress, though, that although MC Beaton set her middle-class murders against picturesque backdrops and offered neat solutions, there was nothing insipid about her books; they were full of the politically incorrect wit and cheerful prejudice that characterised her conversation in real life (she loathed beards, for example, and when I grew one she tweeted that I had committed an act of "self-harm"). Even if not everybody realised it, it is time to acknowledge that she was a worthy successor to Agatha Christie as one of Britain's Queens of Crime.