Exclusive interview with author M.C. Beaton and a review of her latest murder mystery, the 25th in the Agatha Raisin series
Rating: 3 Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
“I loved pantomimes as a child” says The Blood of an Englishman author M.C. Beaton.
“Particularly as I was a child in World War 2. An outing to a pantomime was to be taken away into a glittering world of unreality.”
Pantomine is a distinctly British form of theatre. Typically performed during the Christmas season, pantomime adds humor to a story loosely based on a familiar fairy tale with the audience singing along at certain parts and shouting out stock phrases and warnings to the performers.
Beaton takes the classic story Babes in the Wood and turns it on its ear. Beaton’s writing style is engaging and the story moves at a good clip. Her story will engage you even if you have never read one of her books. But it’s not for everyone, with the depiction of the murder quite gruesome and our heroine Agatha also smokes.
Agatha Raisin indulges her friend Mrs. Bloxby, the vicar’s wife, and joins her to see some local amateur theater doing a panto version of Babes in the Wood. The baker, a menacing ogre on stage, vanishes in a puff of green smoke….and he doesn’t join the rest of the cast for the curtain call….
On her drive home Agatha sees emergency vehicles rushing toward the theater. She turns her car around and soon discovers the baker has been most foully murdered. Why? Agatha and her team of private detectives are on the case. The more they dig the more dirt they find out about the whole cast….and the more danger they put themselves in.
“Most people talk about (my previous book) The Vicious Vet because they like that scene where Agatha destroys the pub loo in an effort to remove a spot from her face,” says Beaton. She also wrote thirty novels for the Hamish MacBeth series, in addition to four Regency mysteries as Marion Chesney.
“It’s not like the days when I was writing the Regencies and went to the Records Office in London to buy an A to Z of London 1811 to make sure I knew where all the streets were then,” says Beaton. “I didn’t view any documents for this book.” Beaton’s main research was into the construction of the Victorian star trap, that trapdoor on a stage which lets the villain arrive and exit.
Beaton says the most surprising thing that happened while writing this book was that her husband Harry gave her as a birthday present a June trip on the Orient Express to Venice.
Beaton was recently nominated for the Library Dagger Award by the Crime Writers Association. The Blood of an Englishman has not been optioned for film or television.
Beaton was born in Glasgow but now divides her time mainly between homes in the Cotswolds and Paris.
The Blood of an Englishman: An Agatha Raisin Mystery by M.C. Beaton. Series: Agatha Raisin Mysteries (Book 25), Hardcover: 304 pages, Publisher: Minotaur Books (September 16, 2014), Language: English, ISBN: 9780312616267 $24.99.
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