The 35th in Agatha Raisin series came out yesterday in the UK – and the first nine are in Kindle Unlimited at the moment, so it seemed like a good time to write about M C Beaton’s Cotswold-based mystery series.
Agatha is a middle-aged public relations agent, who at the start of the series sells her Mayfair firm so she can retire early and move to the Cotswolds. She soon finds herself caught up in a murder investigation – after she tries to ensure that she’ll win a baking competition by buying in her entry only for one of the judges to drop dead after eating it and she has to clear her name. Soon she’s stumbling over murders where ever she goes and gaining a reputation for her detective work, until in the fifteenth book she sets up her own private investigations agency.
Agatha is originally from Birmingham where her parents lived in a tower block in a slum and she has dragged herself up through her own efforts. She’s prickly, she doesn’t really understand the countryside and she hides her vulnerability under a hard shell that very few people actually see through. There is a regular cast of characters alongside her who help to smooth her path – and smooth off her edges. From the local police force there is Bill Wong, who is the first friend that she makes after moving, then there is Mrs Bloxby the vicar’s wife who helps her navigate the village, Roy Silver who used to work with Agatha in London and who pops up from time to time and then James Lacey, Agatha’s handsome next door neighbour and Sir Charles Fraith a rich but stingy friend – both of whom are love interests of sorts at various points.
Agatha is 53 in the first book in the series and has remained “in her early 50s” throughout the whole series – they’re another series that I would describe as existing in the floating “now”* where time has moved on but the characters have remained the same age. Aside from the detective agency development, Agatha’s life remains fairly similar through the series – even if some times you think things are changing!
I originally read the first dozen or so back in the early 2000s, and then after reading too many of them in a row started to get a bit fed up with the formula (see above!) – which I’ve found is very much a thing with M C Beaton books as I have the same issue with Hamish Macbeth but also her historical romances. But as long as you read them well spaced out there’re a lot of fun – as are the radio versions with Penelope Keith. The TV series – which has Ashley Jensen as Agatha – is quite a different beast to the books and I suggest if you do do both then you may be need to separate them off from each other in your head, much the way I did with the Phryne Fisher books vs the TV series.
M C Beaton – aka Marion Chesney – died in 2019, but the series has continued – with book 31 onward being credited as “with R W Green”. I need to read some of the latest ones to see if/how the series has changed at all – the most recent one I’ve read is book 28 (and I’ve read all bar about two of the series up to that point) which probably takes you up until the point where the libraries closed for Covid, because that’s how I used to read them. I would go and borrow some more – but we all know how big The Pile is at the moment. But if you haven’t read any of them, do try the early bit of the series out via Kindle Unlimited.
Happy Reading!
*See also Elizabeth Peters’s Vicky Bliss series in a way, where the first book was written in the 1970s and the last book in the mid 2008s, where the settings remain fairly close to the time that they are written in, but Vicky remains about the same age.
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