DEFENDING COMFORT IS NOT A LACK OF AMBITION:

Beaton, a pseudonym for Marion Chesney Gibbons, was widely known as the queen of cosy crime, selling more than 21m copies of her books around the world and regularly being named the most borrowed adult author from UK libraries. But the novelist, who was born in Glasgow, was not a fan of the "cosy" moniker.

"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. "To keep writing in clear well-balanced sentences takes a lot of hard work and if anyone doesn't want a Glasgow kiss, swallow that opinion and put it where the sun don't shine."

Beaton started out in bookselling, moving into journalism as the theatre critic for the Scottish Daily Mail before becoming a reporter for the Daily Express. She and her husband, Harry Scott Gibbons, moved to the US after the birth of their son. Marion turned to writing Regency romances in order to spend more time with her young son, and had written almost 100 before she began to write detective stories under the MC Beaton pseudonym.

Her Hamish Macbeth stories, about a quick-witted but unambitious Highland village policeman, were inspired by a fishing holiday in Scotland, with the first published in 1985 and later televised with great success.

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