There's a Five Books entry that asks: "What books are like The Thursday Murder Club in offering light entertainment and making fun of the murder-mystery genre?" This is the entry where I found Brat Farrar, which I really liked.

It also listed The Quiche of Death by M.C. Beaton (1936-2019), identifying three similarities to Richard Osman's work: There's an older female heroine (in this case 50-something); it's set in the English countryside (here it's the Cotswolds); and it's "a parody of the murder-mystery genre".

This is the first of Beaton's Agatha Raisin series. The indomitable and not particularly likeable Agatha retires from a busy, successful, and lucrative career as manager of her own PR company in London, and moves to a life of leisure in a Cotswold village. What could possibly go wrong...?

The novel was published in 1992, but the setting somehow feels older. (I'm sure British pub menus were a bit more innovative by then...)


We lived near the Cotswolds for a while... Here we are visiting Bibury, three years before Agatha hit the area

Finding it hard to make friends (not surprisingly, as she is an abrasive sort of person), she decides to break into village life by entering the local baking competition. Given that she can't bake for toffee, she enters a quiche procured from the delicatessen she used to frequent in London. (Agatha, be it noted, seems to have a penchant for leaving food in the boot of her car for unconscionable periods, and I wondered if this was going to factor into the plot. But it didn't.) Anyway, she doesn't win (the woman who usually wins wins), and worse, when the judge takes the (now abandoned) quiche home that evening, he ends up dead (poisoned with cowbane).

Exposed as a quiche cheat, and viewed with suspicion (despite her exoneration by the police, who regard the poisoning as an accident), she sets out to redeem herself in the eyes of the village by finding out Who Really Dunnit.



Beaton has a good eye (a field of new corn, for example, is "bright green and shiny, turning in the breeze like the fur of some huge green cat"), and a humorous turn of phrase (when there's a tube strike in London, and she goes to take a river boat instead, she finds "a sort of yuppies' Dunkirk"; she has tea at a hotel that has "a dim ecclesiastical air, as if haunted by the damp souls of dead deans"...).

And Agatha is a potentially interesting lead. Beaton tells us that she "was described as 'a real character', and like all real characters who speak their mind, she did not have any real friends". We're invited to feel a little sympathy for her, alone in her new environment, and doing everything wrong.

But her attitudes, even if you understand them as attitudes that are being sent up, tend to jar just that bit too much. When she's introduced to DC Wong, for example, she thinks of him as "a young tubby oriental who looked like a Buddha". It's not that Agatha's misanthropy is overtly racist (she's pretty horrible to everyone); and she and Wong later become good friends, and he gets all the credit he deserves. But that turn of phrase really made me wince. Then there's the bingo-loving woman who offers Agatha pink gin. She finds herself mentally done over on class grounds: "Surely Bacardi Breezers, lager and lime, rum and Coke would have been more her taste."

Mostly, though, Agatha is portrayed in flat-out farcical situations. And I think that was my main problem with the book: Agatha is just too ridiculous to be enjoyable. It's not so much cosy crime as chuckles crime.

(Beaton, by the way, hated the "cosy" label: "'It is patronising and implies that my books, which are easy to read, must be easy to write. Nobody calls Agatha Christie cosy,' she told the Crime Hub in 2019.")

It's not that crime stories should necessarily take themselves seriously. There's plenty of wry humour in Richard Osman's book, for example. But underpinning it, in that case, is a heart-wrenching riff on aging, which takes the whole thing to a different dimension. That extra lift-off was missing here.



So, all in all, I find myself pretty much in line with this review: "Placidly diverting."

But I fully acknowledge that Kirkus and I are probably in an underwhelmed minority. Beaton went on to write dozens more Agatha Raisin mysteries (not to mention a lengthy series featuring her other sleuth, Hamish Macbeth). She was renowned for "selling more than 21m copies of her books around the world and regularly being named the most borrowed adult author from UK libraries". I guess you can't argue with that...

And, according to Beaton: "If you really want to be a writer, then nothing will stop you. Nothing stopped me."

You can't argue with that either.