photo credit Barney Allen / Writer Pictures
Marion Chesney Gibbons, who died in December, was better known as crime writer MC Beaton, creator of Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth. Immensely popular in the US, she was regularly named as the most frequently borrowed author from UK libraries. She wrote under a number of pseudonyms and was extraordinarily prolific, publishing more than 160 novels and attributing her immense output to a Scottish work ethic. Described by her publisher as ‘the queen of the village mystery’, her books have been translated into 17 languages and have sold more than 21 million copies.
How she began