Another Agatha

When most of us hear “Agatha” in conjunction with mysteries, we think “Christie”, which is why many more recent writers harken back to that name in their own mystery works.

Once again, I started a series of M.C. Beaton stories, this one featuring an Agatha.

When we first meet Agatha Raisin, it is at a goodbye party in her office in London. She’d built up a very successful promotional agency, and had sold it to take an early retirement.

She was a relentless promoter, shrewd at sizing people up and knowing how to get to them. She was a tough, but fair, boss. He employees enjoyed working for her and were sorry to see her leave, but they expected to go on with their lives, since outside of directly working with her,  they had no relationships with her, and Agatha had a promise from the new owner that all would stay the same in the company. (He lied.)

Agatha had decided to move to the (from what I have heard) beautiful region of England called The Cotswolds. It’s old, picturesque and fill with what seems to be charming villages.

Charming villages. That is one thing that I believes brings me back to M.C. Beaton’s Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin  mysteries is the charming villages, and the reality that outsiders are never totally trusted, and in some of the villages people are downright hostile to everyone, even each other.

 Agatha realizes that she has no friends, not really, not in London, and certainly not in The Cotswolds. The only ones who really make an effort with her are others who understand what being an outsider means: the vicar’s wife, who had previously moved around quite a bit, and a regional policeman whose mother is Chinese.

Agatha is torn. She yearns for the peace of a nice village and her cottage, but misses being busy in London. When in The Cotswolds, she considers going back to London; when in London, she can’t wait to get back to The Cotswolds.

Others come into the village and leave when they find out what village life is really like, but Agatha stays.

Beneath that tough cookie exterior lies the heart of a romantic. All that keeps her in her cottage is the peace she seeks for herself, the intellectual stimulation of helping to solve murders that crop up,

 and her next-door neighbor.

The next-door neighbor is an attractive, retired Army colonel who has moved to what he thought would be a life of solitude to write about famous battles.

Agatha is in her early 50s, but attractive and fit, and she has her eye on neighbor James Lacey, even though, for some time, she has no idea if her husband is alive or dead. She lets everyone assume that she is divorced and that she had at least a middle-class upbringing, neither of which is true.  She was raised in a slum and she married young. Jimmy Raisin was an abusive drunk, and she walked out only months after their marriage. She assumes that he could not possibly still be walking around. 

A curiosity for me is that so far, no one has made one joke about her last name.
(With what I go through with my first name and married name, that must be Heaven on Earth!)

As with her “Poor Relations” and “Hamish Macbeth” series, Beaton’s stories are well-written, and compelling and the characters are well-defined. There is continuity throughout. The first  series I mentioned is the ‘cleanest cut’, Hamish is a bit more ‘adult’, though most people would laugh to hear me say so because they are tame, and Agatha’s stories are possibly the tamest of all, with all of them mentioning ‘relations’ and relationships, but at what would now probably only get a “PG” rating, although this girl would say “PG-13”, (or is it 14 now? This series seems to have M.C. Beaton’s one prejudice against we who are not amply endowed “Upstairs”, as my mother would say. Perhaps I am extra sensitive to it, however.)

All in all, I am enjoying her works and have been switching back and forth between Agatha and Hamish, with a few other writers’ works read or heard in between. With family and the nearly 3-yr old here, I’m barely going to get to read this.

I recommend this writer’s stories highly and if I get to the end of these, I will be looking for more of M.C. Beaton’s works.

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