Death of a Gossip

I recently discovered the Hamish Macbeth series streaming online and when I realized that it was based off of a mystery series (Sorry, mom, for not listening when you told me about it!) I decided to give it a shot. I was a bit wary because of my previous experience with Midsomer Murders (love the show, hated the book) but I'm here to say that the series stand up very well on their own.

This is the first book featuring village constable Hamish Macbeth who does everything in his power to stay below the radar of his superiors in the larger cities of Scotland because he loves Lochdubh so much. In this story, a group of strangers has come together for a weekend of fly fishing lessons. Unfortunately, one of the students is an absolute garbage show more person who keeps needling the other participants (and the instructors) about dark secrets from their pasts (in a subtly sneaky way no less). And then she ends up dead with pretty much everyone as a suspect in her murder. A classic whodunit set in a sleepy Scottish highlands locale with a constable who is reluctantly brilliant at his job. C'est magnifique! show less

Hamish Macbeth is a mild-mannered village constable in the Highlands of Scotland, where the most serious crimes tend to involve poaching - a crime that he does not investigate too thoroughly given that he occasionally poaches himself. A fishing school is based at a hotel in the village; visitors (mostly from England) come for a week to learn how to fly-fish and spend their time hoping to net a trout or salmon. When one particularly loathsome female “student” is murdered, the local CID officers are not keen to have the involvement of Hamish, seeing him as lazy, probably stupid and certainly not detective material. But then, they don’t know Hamish Macbeth…. I have heard of this long-running series for many years, but only now have show more I gotten around to starting it. There’s much to enjoy here, starting with Hamish himself, a man much given to strolling around snagging free coffees and lunches, who nevertheless is very much not stupid or lazy. The setting is lovely of course, and the story, albeit providing perhaps a bit too much detail about fishing, is both funny and satisfying. I was a bit surprised at the amount of sex and bad language, which are not often seen in the cozy genre, but then again it is set in the 1980s! A very quick and enjoyable read, and I look forward to reading the next 33 books in the series. Recommended. show less

I only dimly remember the name Hamish Macbeth from TV listings in the 90s, and I came to this with no preconceptions. I was happy to find myself reading the equivalent of a perfect Sunday night TV murder mystery: cosy, comfortable, traditional, just right!

This is an affectionate, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek homage to Agatha: the closed shop of suspects, all colourful characters, and all with secrets they're desperate to keep secret.

It's the sort of yarn in which, when someone says 'I'll kill her!' it later makes them a suspect. You get the idea.

But Agatha was more sinister, and Ruth Dudley Edwards is funnier. Iain Pears is cleverer.

I probably will read more of Hamish Macbeth, but I'll need to wait until I'm in a very particular sort of show more mood. show less

Lady Jane Winters manages to aggravate the entire fly-fishing class and when her dead body bobs to the lake surface, Lochdubh Constable Hamish Macbeth has to search for a murderer amongst the many suspects. This isn't a great book, for sure, but I am very fond of the TV series and I've heard that future installments are better, so I'll stick it out for a while longer. The audiobook has a narrator who can't do a Scottish dialect to save his life, though, so perhaps stick to the paper version for this installment.

Macbeth and the Gossip Columnist
Review of the Blackstone Audio Inc. audiobook edition (2016) of the St. Martin's Press hardcover original (1985)

After discovering M.C. Beaton's Hamish Macbeth cozy mystery series due to the Estonia cameo in "Death of Yesterday", I started to seek out the earlier books by finding several at Toronto's Sleuth of Baker Street. I enjoyed those and found them to be an especially delightful diversion during this continuing pandemic. My next plan was to go back and read the series in order. I then discovered the rather terrific bonus that most of the books are available free on Audible Plus, a service that I had previously been underwhelmed by (some early attempts with longer books had audio difficulties, with show more book narrations freezing in midstream). Beaton's shorter books (usually 4 to 5 hours on audio) seem to be perfect for this medium.

Death of a Gossip is the first of the series and establishes several of the ongoing cast of characters in the fictional town of Lochdubh (pronounced Lock-Doo) in the Scottish Highlands. Gossip was inspired by author Beaton attending a fishing school similar to the fictional one in the novel. The guests of the expedition find themselves tormented by Lady Jane, a vacationing gossip columnist who savours using her trivia gossip knowledge to annoy others. Predictably, she is murdered in the course of the trip, and local constable Macbeth is called on to solve the crime. show less

Death of a Gossip is a great introduction to a cozy mystery series that I definitely plan to continue reading – or listening to, since I've already got the second audiobook lined up. Narrator Antony Ferguson did an outstanding job of with all the characters and their various accents, especially the obnoxious Lady Jane.

Fantastic! What a story, so intelligently told! The difference between Death Of A Gossip and the first Agatha Raisin book is that the former doesn't concentrate on the main character's details. That only helped to improve on what was a nice murder case. The gathering of suspects in a library was something of a throwback to Christie books. The final showdown with the suspects was very well presented. Hamish is such a decent chap. His traits are realistically displayed, and you believe him, his upbringing, his motives. He is the most alive detective I've come across since Sleeping Murder's Jane Marple. I enjoyed reading about things that moved me. Yet despite the fact that I could have been swept away emotionally, I wasn't. The book gave show more me control of my thoughts. I was aloof and impartial, while still cared very much for Alice, Charlie et al. I was very surprised by the quality of this book. And it seems, and I hope, that I have a lot of good things to discover of the Hamish Macbeth series. show less