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Transcript

Welcome to Mystery Books podcast, a podcast covering mysteries and all of their forms from classic golden age novels to contemporary cozies. I’m mystery author Sara Rosett. And this is season one, episode two. And it’s all about Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death by M.C. Beaton. All right. This book was published in 1992, and I will read the blurb first. So you have a general idea of what the book is about.

Book Blurb

Putting all her eggs in one basket, Agatha Raisin gives up her successful PR firm, sells her London flat, and samples a taste of early retirement in the quiet village of Carsely. Bored, lonely and used to getting her way, she enters a local baking contest: Surely a blue ribbon for the best quiche will make her the toast of the town. But her recipe for social advancement sours when the judge not only snubs her entry—but falls over dead! She must reveal the unsavory truth…she has never baked a thing in her life! In fact, she bought her ready-made quiche from an upper crust London shop.

So this is a really funny setup for a mystery. It’s got the culinary elements that cozy readers love and it’s just got a fun tone to it. And I think the blurb captures that very well.

Story Behind the Story

All right. So a little section, the story behind the story. The idea for the book came to M.C. Beaten while she was living in London. In The Agatha Raisin Companion, she recalls, “My son’s house master asked me if I could produce some of my excellent home baking for a charity sale. I did not want to let my son down by telling him I couldn’t bake. So I went to Waitrose and bought two quiches, carefully removed the shop wrappings, put my own wrappings on them with a homemade label, and delivered them. They were a great success.” At this point in her career, M.C. Beaton had written romances and a series of detective novels set in Scotland, the Hamish Macbeth series. Then her editor asked her to write a detective story set in the Cotswolds. Beaton remembered the “cheating quiche”, as she called it, and used that as her What If jumping off point for the story. She says, also in The Agatha Raisin Companion, that she enjoyed reading E.F. Benson’s Miss Mapp books and she, “Thought it might be interesting to create a detective that the reader might not like, but nonetheless would want to win in the end.”

Agatha is an interesting character. She’s not your typical cozy mystery protagonist. She’s a little… she’s actually very abrasive. I was going to say she’s a little abrasive, but she’s very abrasive. Normally a cozy mystery has a protagonist that we’re very sympathetic to and we can identify with. And I believe that readers do sympathize with Agatha even if we don’t identify with her. And I think that’s part of the secret to why these books are so popular. So on Agatha’s personality–this is from chapter one–it says, “Agatha was aged fifty-three, with plain brown hair, and a plain square face, and a stocky figure. It helps in public relations to have a certain amount of charm. And Agatha had none. She got results by being sort of a one-woman, soft-cop/hard-cop combination, alternately bullying and wheedling on behalf of her clients.” So that is a good summary of her. She’s sort of tough and she’s going to get what she wants.

The foil or the mirror for her in this book is Mrs Blocksby the vicar’s wife. The book describes her like this: it says, “Mrs Blocksby’s goodness was a bright, shining weapon against the dark things of the night.” So I love that description of her. And it really shows how Mrs Blocksby is sort of a refuge for Agatha. Agatha’s trying very hard. She doesn’t really know how to fit in into the village, and Mrs Blocksby, she sees the goodness in her when other people don’t.

Themes and Tropes

All right. So the tropes in this one, such good tropes here that I really enjoyed. First we have Fish Out of Water. Which Agatha doesn’t know how to get along in this slow paced, non-competitive world of the English village, and that’s where we get a lot of the humor. And she is determined to win. I’m not sure she understands what she’s trying to win. She’s trying to win the villagers over. She doesn’t understand how to go about it at all. So it really contrasts the slow-paced world, the insular aspect of that, where everyone has known each other for a long time with the outsider. And Agatha tries all these different things. And that’s how she gets into trouble is by baking, well supposedly baking, this quiche. And that’s in an effort to fit in into the village.

All right. Another trope is the Lady Boss. Even though Agatha is retired, she’s still living the life of the lady boss. She’s still determined to do well and to win. She’s super competitive and she’s going to win at this village life thing. She doesn’t really know how to live that out in the village. There’s some of the funniest scenes related to her competitiveness. One of them is when she goes to ask her neighbor if the woman can recommend a house cleaner. And the woman says, “Oh, no, you’ll never get anyone.” And Agatha was like, “Well, of course I will!” And so Agatha finds out who this woman is using to clean her house and goes out and steals the woman away from her. The house cleaner becomes a secondary character and a good friend of Agatha. And so it is just funny how Agatha approaches it and she feels as if she’s won. She’s done a good job. She’s got what she needed and she came out on top. But she doesn’t realize that that is just going to make her even more disliked in the village. It’s just an example of how she’s trying so hard to fit in and just going about it all the wrong way.

A third trope is English Village. It’s charming and Old World, but it has sinister undertones. It’s a classic mystery trope. Everything looks beautiful on the surface. But underneath, when you start really looking around, you find out that it is not quite as idyllic as you would think. Now, I love the English village setting trope, so much so that I wrote an English village series. I’ll include a sample from that book at the end of this episode if you’d like to take a listen.

So another trope in this is Mr. Darcy. Yes, Jane Austen is so popular and so well known that one of her characters, I believe, has practically become a trope, the incredibly handsome, seemingly cold guy who underneath it all actually has a heart of gold. So I also played on that in my English Village series, The Murder on Location series, because it just goes so well together. Mr. Darcy and an English village.

Now, a fourth trope in this one is the Baking/Culinary trope, but in this book is sort of turned on its head: she’s not a super chef. A lot of cozy mysteries that feature cooking and baking, the chef is wonderful, wonderful cook. In this one, she’s a terrible cook. She doesn’t know how to cook it all. And part of the funniest descriptions in the book are her trying to make dinner. She just doesn’t know how to cook at all. She’s going to the pub all the time to get her meals. Oh, that also plays into the theme of Trying To Fit In and the competitiveness. So even though she doesn’t know how to cook, she’s going to do her very best to appear as if she knows how to cook. Because, apparently, that’s how you fit in in this village. That’s Agatha’s thought process.

All right. And then we have two tropes that are actually developed more fully over the course of the series than just the first book, because we’re also going to talk about the TV adaptations, the TV show, where these tropes are developed much more quickly than they are in the book. So I’m going to go ahead and mention them here.

So we first have the trope of the Aristocratic Playboy, but M.C. Beaton really has a lot of fun with this one as well, because what she does is: she gives Sir Charles Fraith the poor country home and the title, but he’s a cheapskate. So that’s quite funny. And then we have the Love Triangle. So we’ve got over the course of the series, this develops between Agatha and the Hot Guy Next Door, Mr. James Lacey, and the Aristocratic Playboy, Sir Charles Fraith. I won’t say any more about that, but just know that that’s there. And it’s in the books and the TV show.

TV Adaptation

All right. So let’s move on and talk about the adaptations. In 2014, a TV adaptation was made of this book. It was so successful that they decided to make this into a series. So in 2014, actress Ashley Jensen was cast as Agatha. And a lot of readers had a very hard time with this because she does not look anything at all like the description of Agatha in the books. And I’ll admit, the first time I tried to watch an Agatha TV show, I had a very difficult time. There’s always changes that have to be made when you do an adaptation. So that’s just one of the things that had to be changed in this book to make it appeal to either the television producers or the television audience. Not sure which I’ll leave that one up to you to decide.

So they did keep the main theme of Fish Out Of Water and Agatha’s struggle to fit in with the villagers. And then some of the recurring characters in the books are also recurring characters in the TV show: Mrs. Blocksby, James Lacey, Sir Charles Fraith. Those are all characters in the book, and they’re all characters in the TV show. But of course, as with any adaptation, there’s lots of changes. The cleaner that Agatha fought so hard to get in the first chapters of The Quiche of Death, Doris Simpson, is gone. And she’s replaced by a younger housekeeper who has a crush on the detective, Bill Wong. And Bill Wong is very different too; he’s younger, and he has a bit of a crush on Agatha in the TV show. Lots of crushing going on in the TV show. If you enjoyed the Agatha Raisin books, the tone of them, you will probably enjoy the TV series in it. They do a great job of taking you to an English village. So you get to experience the little cottages, the pubs, the stately homes around the village.

Quotes

Let’s end with some quotes because I love quotes. Agatha was described as “a real character. And like all real characters who speak their mind, she did not have any real friends.” And then Bill Wong says, “You wouldn’t think when you drive through one of these pretty Cotswold villages, how much terror and passion and anger lurk beneath the beams of these old cottages,” which is just perfect for a cozy mystery.

Thanks for listening. I hope this podcast helped you revisit a favorite book or perhaps helps you discover a new author to try. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast, I hope you’ll tell a fellow mystery reader.

Stay tuned for a sample of Death in the English Countryside, my own Fish Out of Water story set in an English village. Location scout Kate works in Hollywood, but when her boss goes missing, she travels to a quaint village in the English countryside where he was last seen. She finds no trace of him and suspects the picturesque village in the beautiful countryside may not be as idyllic as they seem. Here is Death in the English Countryside, narrated by Elizabeth Klett.

Links:

M.C. Beaton website 

Death in the English Countryside by Sara Rosett