Agatha Raisin 31 - Hot to Trot

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  For M. C. Beaton, with love—her warmth,

  intelligence and sense of humour will be

  missed by her readers, but even more so by

  her friends and family. The world will be a

  less interesting place without her.

  Foreword by R. W. Green

  He simply had to be up to something—or she was. It was all a bit fishy, or so Agatha Raisin would have thought. A married man calling on a woman of advancing years and spending hours having cosy little private chats? Agatha would have thought there was definitely something going on … and there was. M. C. Beaton—Marion—was working out what agonies and triumphs would next befall Agatha Raisin, and her male visitor—me—had the immense thrill and huge privilege of helping her do it.

  I first met Marion many years ago. My wife, Krystyna, was Marion’s publisher in London for more than twenty years, so Marion and I met many times at publishing functions. We enjoyed chatting, both being Scots, both having been journalists, and both being writers. Marion, it has to be said, was a far more successful journalist and writer than me, but she was always as keen to find out what I was up to as I was to hear stories about her adventures in Scotland, the United States, France or the Mediterranean. She had led a fascinating life.

  At publishing events, Marion was inevitably whisked away to meet and greet, but when Krystyna and I visited her in the Cotswolds on occasion, we were able to talk more freely, sometimes about books, more often not. I came to regard Marion as a friend and always looked forward to seeing her. Last year, when she was not in good health and finding it difficult to get her ideas down on paper, I was glad to be able to help.

  Marion was an avid news watcher, following world events on TV, and they were a bountiful source of inspiration for her. Current affairs stories regularly reminded her of events from her own past, which she would sometimes mould into scenes involving Agatha, James, Charles or the village of Carsely. Those scenes might suggest plots, or a way to develop a storyline. The scenes she planned stayed in her head until they were committed to paper as part of a plot device or something to add to the life story of one of her large cast of regular characters. She knew everything about her characters. She knew where they lived, how they talked, how they dressed, how they moved and what they thought. She didn’t regard them as friends—they were her inventions, not her closest chums—but she knew them all intimately nonetheless. And she kept all of their character traits and quirky foibles in her head. She had no need of any kind of character bible or written notes.

  Sir Charles Fraith, for example, was described to me by Marion as “a predator when it comes to women.” She was quick to point out that she didn’t mean he is dangerous or violent towards women, simply that he always has one eye on his next conquest. He is well-bred, well-educated and intelligent but, despite his grand house and vast estate, he is, as she put it, “impecunious.” That, she swiftly explained, was not the sort of word she liked to use very often in her books. Marion liked to keep her stories moving along briskly, having fun, travelling light, unencumbered by excessively ornate prose.

  When I visited Marion to start working with her, I expected that she might want me to take dictation on the new book and possibly chip in a few ideas as we went along. No. She was smarter than that. She wanted to talk about storylines, incidents, murders and what cards the characters would be dealt. Marion did not, for example, want Sir Charles Fraith to remain penniless forever. She thought it would be good for him to have lots of money for a change. How long she would allow him to keep it was another matter.

  I made lots of notes, all the while expecting a dictation session to begin. That wasn’t Marion’s idea at all. She wanted to make sure that I understood Agatha’s world, so she sent me away with my notes to write a sample chapter the way she would do it, staying true to the characters and the way that life, death and murder played out in Carsely. If what I came up with was the way she would weave an Agatha Raisin murder investigation, then we might be able to work together. If it wasn’t as she wanted, well, we would still be friends.

  It’s easy to forget how horribly nervous you used to feel as a child in the classroom, handing a homework essay to the teacher. It all came flooding back when I gave Marion the print-out of what I had written. I wasn’t exactly hopping from one foot to the other as Marion read through it—I sat down to avoid that—but the silence was excruciating. Suddenly, without looking up, she said, “No, I wouldn’t use that phrase,” and crossed out a line with her pen. A moment later, “Not ‘smirk.’ Agatha doesn’t ‘smirk.’” Then she looked up and smiled. “Apart from that, this is just how I’d have done it.”

  Agatha would not only have been deeply suspicious of our clandestine meetings, but also absolutely furious about the laughs we had at her expense. A phrase involving snakes springs to mind. Marion and I were of one mind in having fun with the writing—otherwise, how could it ever be fun to read? I thoroughly enjoyed working with Marion and I am honoured that she trusted me to meddle with her characters. I will miss her more than I can say.

  An Introduction from M. C. Beaton on the Agatha Raisin Series

  The writing road leading to Agatha Raisin is a long one.

  When I left school, I became a fiction buyer for John Smith & Son Ltd. on St. Vincent Street, Glasgow, the oldest bookshop in Britain—alas, now closed. Those were the days when bookselling was a profession and one had to know something about every book in the shop.

  I developed an eye for what sort of book a customer might want, and could, for example, spot an arriving request for a leather-bound pocket-sized edition of Omar Khayyam at a hundred paces.

  As staff were allowed to borrow books, I was able to feed my addiction for detective and spy stories. As a child, my first love had been Richard Hannay in John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps. Then, on my eleventh birthday, I was given a copy of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Views the Body and read everything by that author I could get. After that came, courtesy of the bookshop, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Gladys Mitchell, Eric Ambler, Agatha Christie and very many more.

  Bookselling was a very genteel job. We were not allowed to call each other by our first names. I was given half an hour in the morning to go out for coffee, an hour and a half for lunch, and half an hour in the afternoon for tea.

  I was having coffee one morning when I was joined by a customer, Mary Kavanagh, who recognised me. She said she was features editor of the Glasgow edition of the Daily Mail and wanted a reporter to cover a production of Cinderella at the Rutherglen Rep that evening, because the editor’s nephew was acting as one of the Ugly Sisters, but all the reporters refused to go.

  “I’ll go,” I said eagerly.

  She looked at me doubtfully. “Have you had anything published?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, lying through my teeth. “Punch, The Listener, things like that.”

>   “Well, it’s only fifty words,” she said. “All right.”

  And that was the start. I rose up through vaudeville and then became lead theatre critic at the age of nineteen.

  After that, I became fashion editor of Scottish Field magazine and then moved to the Scottish Daily Express as Scotland’s new emergent writer and proceeded to submerge. The news editor gave me a tryout to save me from being sacked, and I became a crime reporter.

  People often ask if this experience was to help me in the future with writing detective stories. Yes, but not in the way they think. The crime in Glasgow was awful: razor gangs, axmen, reporting stories in filthy gaslit tenements where the stair lavatory had broken, and so, as an escape, I kept making up stories in my head that had nothing to do with reality. Finally, it all became too much for me and I got a transfer to the Daily Express on Fleet Street, London.

  I enjoyed being a Fleet Street reporter. I would walk down Fleet Street in the evening if I was on the late shift and feel the thud of the printing presses and smell the aroma of hot paper and see St. Paul’s, floodlit, floating above Ludgate Hill, and felt I had truly arrived.

  I became chief woman reporter just as boredom and reality were setting in. That was when I met my husband, Harry Scott Gibbons, former Middle East correspondent for the paper who had just resigned to write a book, The Conspirators, about the British withdrawal from Aden.

  I resigned as well and we went on our travels, through Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. Harry was now engaged in writing a book about the Cyprus troubles. We arrived back in London, broke, and I had a baby, Charles. We moved to America when Harry found work as an editor at the Oyster Bay Guardian, a Long Island newspaper. That was not a very pleasant experience.

  But I longed to write fiction. I had read all of Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances and thought I would try some of the new ones that were coming out. I complained to my husband, “They’re awful. The history’s wrong, the speech is wrong, and the dress is wrong.”

  “Well, write one,” he urged.

  My mother had been a great fan of the Regency period and I had been brought up on Jane Austen and various history books. She even found out-of-print books from the period, such as Maria Edgeworth’s Moral Tales. I remember with affection a villain called Lord Raspberry. So I cranked up the film in my head and began to write what was there. The first book was called Regency Gold. I had only done about twenty pages, blocked by the thought that surely I couldn’t really write a whole book, when my husband took them from me and showed them to a writer friend who recommended an agent. So I went on and wrote the first fifty pages and plot and sent it all to the agent Barbara Lowenstein. She suggested some changes, and after making them I took the lot back to her.

  The book sold in three days flat. Then, before it was even finished, I got an offer from another publisher to write Edwardian romances, which I did under the name of Jennie Tremaine because my maiden name, Marion Chesney, was contracted to the first publisher. Other publishers followed, other names: Ann Fairfax, Helen Crampton and Charlotte Ward.

  I was finally contracted by St. Martin’s Press to write six hardback Regency series at a time. But I wanted to write mysteries, and discussed my ambition to do so with my editor at St. Martin’s Press, Hope Dellon. “Okay,” she said. “Who’s your detective?”

  I had only got as far as the rough idea and hadn’t thought of one. “The village bobby,” I said hurriedly.

  “What’s his name?”

  I quickly racked my brains. “Hamish Macbeth.”

  I had to find not only a name for my detective but a new name for myself. “Give me a name that isn’t Mac something,” suggested Hope. She said that M. C. Beaton would be a good name, keeping the M. C. for Marion Chesney.

  So I began to write detective stories. We moved back to London to further our son’s education and it was there that the idea for the first Agatha Raisin was germinated, though I did not know it at the time.

  My son’s housemaster asked me if I could do some home baking for a charity sale. I did not want to let my son down by telling him I couldn’t bake. So I went to Waitrose and bought two quiches, carefully removed the shop wrappings, put my own wrappings on with a homemade label, and delivered them. They were a great success.

  Shortly afterwards, Hope, who is very fond of the Cotswolds, asked me if I would consider writing a detective story set in that scenic area. I wanted the detective to be a woman. I had enjoyed E. F. Benson’s Miss Mapp books and thought it might be interesting to create a detective that the reader might not like but nonetheless would want to win in the end. I was also inspired by the amusing detective stories of Colin Watson in his Flaxborough novels and Simon Brett’s detective, Charles Paris.

  Agatha Raisin will continue to live in the Cotswolds because the very placid beauty of the place, with its winding lanes and old cottages, serves as a constant to the often abrasive Agatha. I am only sorry that I continue to inflict so much murder and mayhem on this tranquil setting.

  Chapter One

  No one knew. No one who encountered Agatha Raisin striding purposefully along Mircester High Street on this gloriously sunny spring morning, her brown hair sleek and lustrous in its neat bob courtesy of a pre-breakfast appointment with her hairdresser, could possibly have known. No one could even have suspected that the woman in the elegantly cut navy-blue jacket and skirt, carrying a dusky-pink shoulder bag that very nearly matched the colour of her lipstick, who was smiling and nodding pleasantly to passers-by, was hiding a dark torment.

  Only Agatha knew how bitter and betrayed she felt about the way her long-time friend and sometime lover, Sir Charles Fraith, had committed to marrying a woman almost thirty years younger than her. Only Agatha knew, and that, she had decided, was how it was going to stay. I am a successful, independent woman, she told herself. I don’t need to lumber myself with regret over Charles’s mistakes. I need to get on with my own life. Wasn’t it Coco Chanel who said, “A girl should be two things—who and what she wants”? Well, that and the little black dress were two things she definitely got right. I am a private investigator with a thriving business to run and I will live my life the way I choose. Anyone who doesn’t agree with that can go to hell—and that includes Sir Charles Fraith! At that precise moment, Agatha almost believed herself.

  Reaching the corner of an ancient cobbled lane that tumbled away from the high street down a shallow slope, Agatha looked up to the first-floor windows of Raisin Investigations. She could see her staff milling around, preparing themselves for the working day. She tiptoed, as elegantly as she could manage, the three or four steps it took to cross the cobbles, avoiding embedding the high heels of her dark-blue suede shoes in the evil cracks between the stones that she knew were lurking there, booby traps for the unwary. Reaching the sanctuary of the pavement outside the antiques shop above which were her offices, she caught her reflection in the shop window. A little stocky, perhaps, she admitted to herself, but what could you expect after a long, cold winter eating hearty meals? She would easily lose a few pounds now that salad season was approaching. She tugged at the hem of her jacket to straighten an imagined bulge, gave herself a nod of approval and made her way upstairs.

  “Morning, all!” she announced, bustling into the office.

  Everyone looked towards her and responded. Toni Gilmour, Agatha’s Girl Friday, was young, beautiful, blonde and a meticulous detective with a good eye for detail. Agatha had come to rely on her a great deal, although that was something she seldom admitted to anyone, especially Toni. Patrick Mulligan was a tall, cadaverous retired policeman with a wealth of experience as an investigator. He had a serious, almost sombre demeanour and seldom smiled. Simon Black, on the other hand, greeted Agatha with a wide grin that wrinkled his features. He had an odd, pale, angular face that Agatha could never describe as handsome, yet he was a young man who was never short of attractive girls hanging on his arm or warming his bed—or so he claimed. The only girl he ever seemed to care about, howeve
r, was the next one. As an investigator, he had his shortcomings, but his casual charm and dogged determination usually saw him through.

  Mrs. Freedman, Agatha’s secretary, who handled most of the company admin, stepped forward to offer her a blue plastic document wallet. A middle-aged woman with a kindly expression, Helen Freedman was hard-working and efficient, and appeared to know by instinct precisely when Agatha wanted either a cup of coffee in the morning, a cup of tea in the afternoon, or a gin and tonic whenever.

  “Some invoices for you to approve,” she said, “a couple of letters to sign, and can I remind you that you need to submit your expenses?”

  “Thank you, Helen,” said Agatha. “I’ll sort that out later today. All right, everyone! Case conference catch-up in my office in ten minutes.”

  She crossed the open area to her own separate office, pushing open the door. The small room was dominated by a huge wooden desk that had aspirations to being Georgian but, sadly, had been made three hundred years too late. She dropped the blue wallet on the desk beside her large cut-glass ashtray. It had been several months since she had last smoked a cigarette and at one time she had banished all ashtrays to drawers and cupboards, keeping the smoking accoutrements out of sight and out of mind. This one, however, she retained as a kind of trophy, now used only as a paperweight, the glass sparkling clean, a reminder of her triumph over tobacco.

  Settling into her chair, she took a copy of the local newspaper from her bag and unfolded it. “Society Wedding of the Year,” announced the headline. “Sir Charles Fraith to marry in lavish ceremony at Barfield House.” Agatha sighed. So much fuss. Charles’s vile fiancée, Mary Darlinda Brown-Field, was making sure that her wedding was being splashed across the pages of every rag whose editor she could charm, coax, buy or bully. The article was accompanied by a photograph of them together. Charles had a vague, haunted expression, while Mary—well, the giant chin she had inherited from her father and the eyes that were set just a little too far apart meant that she would never win the Mircester Maids beauty contest. Yet the way she was holding on to Charles’s arm demonstrated her determination to make this the biggest wedding ever covered by the Mircester Telegraph.