marion chesney agatha raisin and the quiche of death

It was there that she pursued her love of crime fiction.įrustrated by bookselling and harbouring ambitions to be a writer, she talked herself into a job as a theatre critic on the Scottish Daily Express, graduating to a reporter covering fashion and then crime, and moving to the head office of the Express in London in the “glory days” of Fleet Street. On leaving school she went to work as a fiction buyer for John Smith & Son in St Vincent Street, the oldest bookshop in Glasgow. Marion Chesney was born in Balornock, a district of Glasgow.

Following a successful pilot episode in 2014, Sky commissioned three TV series starring Ashley Jensen as Agatha, while Radio 4’s adaptations featuring Penelope Keith, who also reads the audiobook versions, increased her fan base. Thirty Agatha books followed, as did television and radio adaptations. As she said in 2017: “I wanted someone you didn’t like but you might want to win out in the end.” Agatha, intolerant, gin-swilling and gloriously non-PC, is a former public relations executive turned amateur detective, solving crimes in a picturesque Cotswold village, and makes her debut in the wonderfully titled Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death. She saw her 1992 creation Agatha Raisin as an antihero in the Becky Sharp mould. Her attitude to the television series was ambivalent, and at a crime-writing festival in Reading in 2010 Chesney Gibbons told a shocked but amused audience in no uncertain terms that Carlyle had been miscast – as he was a Lowland Scot whereas Macbeth was a Highlander.

Marion chesney agatha raisin and the quiche of death