The Woman Who Brought Murder to the Highlands
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
IF anything, M.C. Beaton should frighten people away from the Highlands.
As the creator of Highland village policeman and reluctant sleuth Hamish Macbeth, she has populated the north with bodies on a scale unseen in real life this side of the Battle of Culloden.
Murders aside, however, thousands of readers across the globe have bought into Beaton’s vision of the Highlands, based on her years living in Sutherland, and return to her novels again and again.
However, the origins of Hamish Macbeth date back long before Beaton moved to the Highlands herself with her husband Harry Scott Gibbons and son Charles.
It was while she was working in John Smith’s Bookshop in Glasgow that she met Donald MacKenzie, the young Highland divinity student who would be the model for her policeman hero.
"He was tall and gangly in his threadbare clothes and we were all very snobby as only the inadequate can be," she said.
"He had no side to him, and a lovely gentle voice.
"I discovered there were two sides to the Highlanders. You get the gentlemen, and you get the cowboys. They’re the ones who can’t bear to see anyone getting on — people have a trout farm and they’re doing very well, so they poison the water."
He might have some archetypal Highland traits, but it turns out that Hamish’s birthplace is not Sutherland after all, but 5th Avenue in New York where the family were living at the time.
When her American publisher told Beaton sales of the Regency romances she had been writing previously — publishing over 100 of them under various pseudonyms — were disappointing and asked if she was working on something else, Beaton immediately responded that she was writing a murder mystery, taking her inspiration from a recent visit to a fishing school in Sutherland. The isolated group of strangers had struck her as an ideal setting for a murder mystery,
When asked who her detective was, she answered with the first thing that came to mind: the village policeman.
Now, after some 30 books in the series, giving the Highlands a murder rate to rival inner city USA or Midsummer, Beaton says she can look back on her time in Sutherland, where she moved soon after beginning the series, with affection for the scenery and "certain people".
"Odd things happen up there, as if the ground had recorded tragedy," she added.
"You can go up some glens and feel this wave of misery — it’s almost like being haunted. I don’t think there’s anything supernatural about it. I just think that certain types of stone record things."
Beaton’s own experience of real life crime in its most serious form came much further south, however, as a tabloid reporter in Glasgow.
Her duties included minding a witness in a murder case in an exclusive hotel in the Trossachs.
"After we stayed there, the manager complained that the bed was full of lice," she laughed.
"When we took her to court, the photographer from this Glasgow tabloid was so furious that my paper had got the witness tied up that he punched me. Then my driver took his bonnet off and gave him a Glasgow kiss!"
For those unfamiliar with Beaton’s original novels, the name of Hamish Macbeth is more likely to conjure up the image of Robert Carlyle who played the character — or at least a character with the same name — in the BBC television series, but for Beaton the television series was a "disaster" far removed from the character of her books.
"When they told me that Zenith Television, who made Hamish Macbeth, had gone bankrupt, I said: ‘There is a God!’" she chuckled.
She had better hopes for Sky television’s adaptation of her acid tongued PR agent Agatha Raisin, screened by the channel on Box Day — even if her middle-aged and middle-class Cotswolds resident sleuth is now played by Dumfries-shire actress Ashley Jensen.
"She sounds more Scottish than me — Agatha’s supposed to have a posh accent," Beaton laughed.
"But it’s fun entertainment and it’s done by Mammoth Screen who do Lewis and Endeavour. They are really so nice to me compared to the other lot! They say: ‘Marion, if there’s anything in the script you don’t like, you tell us.’ So I tell them, and nothing happens, but they are so nice about it!"
There is also the possibility of a Hamish Macbeth revival, which Beaton is pressing the production company, Acorn TV, to film in Sutherland as opposed to the Plockton setting of the BBC version.
"It has to be Sutherland for that wind," she said.
"The wind’s so mad up there, you open the back door and catch a passing sheep!"
Still writing two books a year – she had planned to cut down to one but buying a new house bit into her savings – Beaton has built up a dedicated following on both sides of the Atlantic.
"I was very lucky to start small," she said.
"If you build up, you will continue. Just as long as you never cost your publisher money."
• M.C. Beaton’s latest novel is Agatha Raisin and The Blood of An Englishman. Her latest Hamish Macbeth mystery, Death of a Policeman, will be reissued in paperback in February 2015. M.C. Beaton is published by Constable & Robinson.
