On Alternate Trajectories 🔄

An ode to my favorite fictional character, Agatha Raisin

artwork by Caroline Corrigan

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There is an extraordinary fullness to my life right now. Joy and grief are tangled up together, vying for space inside me, threatening to burst out. Weighing me down with an odd mixture of exhaustion and… peace? It is unclear how all this is possible at once, but here I am, trying to be alert to everything, awake to my life as it currently is. “Trying” is the key word—it is, of course, not always possible. There must be streaks of absence, somewhere else to go when the tangle twists and burns. Lately, I’ve been leaving my life again and again to visit the village of Carsley, where a one Agatha Raisin lives.

Reading has always been one of my favorite escapes, and with the advent of audiobooks and wireless headphones… oof, yes. Take a favorite activity and mainline it into an avoidance technique that can be literally piped in, flooding my corporeal form with external narrative, buoying my body up and out of its physical surroundings? Yes! A form of entertainment that I can use as a drug to stimulate chore-doing, floating through my house as though a ghost-butler is the one in charge of cleaning? As though I am not the one crawling around on their hands and knees, picking up all the individual clumps of plastic batting off the rug, reaching under the couch to find the dog’s disemboweled broccoli squeak toy? No—I am not that woman. OK, I am a little bit that woman, but I am also a wealthy middle aged woman in a thatched cottage, holding a cigarette in one hand and a gin & tonic in the other, who has or is about to solve a mystery. Yes. Yes please.

I know at least two Mom Blog readers are already with me here (hi especially to Sarah), but for the rest of you uninitiated: the Agatha Raisin mysteries are a thirty book series, available at any public library in both regular and large print. You’d recognize them as the book you ignore, because it has an illustrated picture of a cake on it. “Who reads those?” you might wonder to yourself, imagining a gray-haired woman laden with various recycled plastic shopping bags. ME, I tell you, ME. I read them.

Would you be brave enough to check a book with this cover out??

“Who writes them?” you might also ask, now that we’re talking about it. The books are published under the pen name M.C. Beaton, which is one of six different pen names the author Marion Chesney used in her absolutely bat-shit bonkers triumphant writing career—counting rapidly on Wikipedia, she has published over 148 books. Is that too many books? No! It’s not. She wrote that many because she had fucking FUN writing all of them. FUN, I tell you.

Speaking of telling you things, I am a little humiliated to tell you—should I?—oh well, here we go: I have read all 30 Agatha Raisin books at least twice, though probably three times if I am really being honest. I’ve read all of the Hamish Macbeth books (34) at least once. And I’ve read two of her regency romance novels. I plan to read more, but it’s hard, because I just want to go back to Agatha Raisin.

The first book in the series, which I can’t recommend enough, if you like having fun and enjoying life and also levitating out of your own skull with British delight, is called, perfectly: Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death. Quickly, with only a few spoilers: a gruff and lonely but powerful and glamorous PR executive, Agatha Raisin, takes early retirement and leaves bustling London for the Cotswolds, a sleepy and romantic cluster of small towns she’d always dreamed of living in since she was a small child on vacation with her cruel, alcoholic parents. Finally she’s made it—but she doesn’t fit in. Seeing a sign for a quiche baking competition at the village store, Agatha, who can barely use a microwave, heads back to London to buy a quiche from her favorite bakery and submit it as her own. The judge eats her quiche and drops dead! Now Agatha is accused of murder AND has to admit to her new neighbors that she is a cheat!! Are you with me??!

Can I also tell you that Agatha is rude, in a funny and empowering way? She often tells people to “bugger off” or yells her signature curse, “snakes and bastards!” She smokes cigs and drinks brandy when she’s had a shock. She worries too much about her “waistline” (lots of classic 90’s diet culture toxicity at play, but it works for her character) and she is always opening her “capacious handbag” to extract her checkbook. It’s not that she never worries about money, but you know she doesn’t have to. She can buy a new greenhouse for her backyard if she wants to, thank you very much. She’ll do it even though she never learns how to garden. It’s ok! She blunders her way around the village, demanding answers, until she solves the mystery, making some new friends along the way. I LOVE IT SO MUCH. Can you tell?

This is the kind of thing I love to tell Jimmy about, one headphone out, one headphone in, instead of talking about any of the other things we might be talking about, those tangled things we’d rather avoid right now. One of the best things about my personal husband is that he actually enjoys hearing me regale him with summary of the books I am reading, even if they are books about Agatha Raisin. Believe me when I tell you I wrote a whole other paragraph describing Book #2 (Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet), but I also love you, dear reader, and so I deleted it.

Being a good listener and a beauty queen

When I was a kid, my own mother was never without a paperback novel. We now might recognize this behavior, perhaps, for what it was—a kind of pathological avoidance mechanism ubiquitous today in the form of PHONES. In the 90’s, however, my mother’s book behavior was widely accepted as intellectual, even if the books were often cosy mystery or period romance. I remember her waiting outside of the DEB for me to try on a pleather tube top, reading her book; waiting outside of my violin lessons, reading her book; waiting at the bottom of one of the many roller coasters at The Great Escape, sun hat on, reading her book. 

We’d even read at dinner sometimes. Most nights of the week my dad was at work, running the music store he owned. When he was home, he cooked full meals: meats, experimental marinades, seasonal vegetables, variations on a potato. My mother liked to declare that “every woman only has so many meals in her,” a feminist refusal to be domestic that resulted in us eating more or less the same dinners every week. I loved these dinners, and could easily help her prepare them: french toast with whole wheat bread, lots of syrup, and sliced banana; hot dogs and boiled carrots, soft tacos with refried beans, cheese, scallions, and a side of steamed broccoli with soy sauce. Why this combination? I don’t know, but it’s delicious.

Those nights in the kitchen, when it was just the two of us waiting for the broccoli to steam, we’d devised an elaborate game centered around our mutual reading obsession: one would try to catch the other off guard and request a reading night, as though it were a precious treat and not a near-nightly occurrence. It went something like this:

“Mom,” I’d say, deadly serious. “I really need to talk to you about something.” 

“Yes, Olivia?” she’d ask, her eyes widening with concern. 

“Can we read tonight?” …and we’d laugh, and agree that yes, we could read our books at dinner.

Part of me loves that ritual we had. I know I was such a book-freak of a kid that I was dying, dying to read what came next in the Sally Lockhart series—one of Philip Pullman’s lesser known YA offerings about a teenage detective— or one of many spooky ghost-themed books by Betty Ren Wright that scared me so badly I would have constant, intrusive thoughts about my parents dying. Part of me wishes we’d spent a bit more time talking about what we were reading, instead of just doing it—I needed someone to tell me that it was very unlikely that I’d come home to find my parents murdered, which was a plot point in the The Dollhouse Murders :)

One night in middle school, out to dinner (lucky us!) at TGI Friday’s, I saw a classmate of mine walking up to the hostess station with his family. Let’s call this kid Sam—Sam spent every math class I remember reading from one of his thick science fiction novels, paying absolutely no attention to the algebra lesson. Somehow—how do we know these things?—he got an A on every test? Could that be true? That’s my memory anyway. And there he was, with his brother, mother, and father, waiting to be seated, each of them with their own, giant paperback in tow.

“We’re not that bad,” I remember thinking. “We only do it at home.”

One of my mother’s master’s degrees is in library science, and though she never worked as a library-librarian, she had the spirit of a librarian in her belief that the library, any library, was the most important place on earth. I was allowed any book I wanted, murder or not, without question. In the 90s, at our local branch, the YA section of the library was about the size of a compact refrigerator—not even a French door refrigerator—and I had soon read my way through all of R.L. Stine’s disturbing Fear Street series (dead cheerleaders), the rest of the ghost murder nightmare books, a book about a girl who likes a boy but is too fat, but then she loses a bunch of weight from getting the stomach flu, hooray, a book about teenagers whose cruise ship sinks, and they get stranded on a desert island with someone else’s baby (ok looking at the cover image, it’s clearly more than one baby) (why did I love this book so much??), all the Babysitter’s Clubs, all the Nancy Drews. What was next? I went looking for my mother in her favorite section, Mystery, and found my way to Mary Higgins Clark (honestly also kind of too scary) and, eventually, M.C. Beaton.

Reading (or rather, listening) to these books today, I realize they played a big role in imagining how my own life would turn out. Perpetually single until meeting Jimmy, it was easy for me to imagine a life alone, two cats, maybe not a cigarette, but certainly a gin & tonic, whatever that was, cosy under my thatched roof. I never dreamed my life would look so much like my own mother’s—with one daughter, in Albany, NY, a constant stream of fiction in my head.

Today, the fantasy of the quiet cottage feels enormously appealing—nothing in my own disaster of a house is quiet or neat, there is no housecleaner to come tidy up after me, sit down for a cup of tea, and then ask a question that leads me to a clue that makes everything right again, that provides justice, in some small way, to the world. That’s why we read, right? To find the fantasy of solution, not once, not twice, but with the promise of near-eternity—especially when there’s 29 more books in the series.

Other things that mimic eternity: the glorious wait for your sushi boat to arrive

❤️ Like ❤️ this post if you liked it—the little hearts detangle me a bit. Comment if you want: tell me about your least glamorous media consumption, please? I know everyone is currently enjoying fairy smut fantasy novels—is that you? I couldn’t get into it but I’m willing to try again.

For paid subscribers: audio coming shortly. I’m about a week behind on everything this week so I just had to get the essay out… but I have not forgotten all you beautiful beauties. I look forward to talking with (at) you soon. *Paid subscribers get a fun podcast of me reading the essay!*