Agatha Raisin and the Deadly Dance An Agatha Raisin Mystery

ONE The thing that finally nudged Agatha Raisin into opening her own detective agency was what she always thought of as the Paris Incident. Made restless by the summer torpor blanketing the village of Carsely in the Cotswolds, Agatha decided to take a week's holiday in Paris. She was a rich woman, but like all rich people was occasionally struck by periods of thrift, and so she had booked into a small hotel off Saint-Germain Des Pres in the Latin Quarter. She had visited Paris before and seen all the sights; this time wanted only to sit in cafes and watch the people go by or take long walks by the Seine. But Paris, after the first two days, became even hotter than Carsely and her hotel room did not have any air-conditioning. As the heat mounted to 105 degrees Fahrenheit and she tossed and turned on her damp sheets, she discovered that Paris never sleeps. There were two restaurants across the road with outside tables, and, up until one in the morning, the accordion players came around to get money from the diners. Agatha, as she listened to another rendering of ''La Vie en Rose," fantasised about lobbing a hand grenade through the window. Then there were the roar of the traffic and the yells of the tourists who had drunk not too wisely. Later on, as they felt not too well, she could hear moans and retching. Nonetheless, she decided to see as much of Paris as possible. The Metro was cheap and went all over the place. On the fourth day of her visit, she went down into the Metro at Maubert-Mutualite. She sat down on a hard plastic seat on the platform and pulled out her subway map. She planned to go to W. H. Smith on the Rue de Rivoli and buy some English books. As she heard the train approaching, she stuffed the map back in her handbag, flipped open the doors of the carriage with that silver handle which had so bemused her when she had first tried to board, and went inside, aware that someone was crowding behind her, and at the same time feeling a sort of tremor reverberating from her handbag up through the shoulder strap. She glanced down and saw that her handbag was open again and that her wallet was missing. Agatha stared wrathfully at the man who had crowded behind her. He was of medium height, white, with black hair, wearing a blue shirt and blue jeans. "Here, you!" Agatha advanced on him. He nipped out of the carriage and into the next one, with Agatha in pursuit. Just as she was leaning forward to grab him and the train was moving out, he wrenched open the doors of the carriage and escaped onto the platform, leaving Agatha, who did not have the strength to do the same thing, being carried furiously away to the next station.... **** ....It took much more money to set up a detective agency than Agatha ever dreamt it would. Brought up on Raymond Chandler--type movies, she had assumed that one sat in an office and waited for the beautiful dame with the shoulder pads to come swaying in---or something like that. She quickly found out by surfing the net that detective agencies were supposed to offer a wide range of services, including all sorts of modern technology such as bugging and de-bugging, photographic or video evidence and covert and electronic surveillance. Then someone would be needed to man the phones while she was out of the office. Agatha was shrewd enough to know now that one-woman operations were for novels. She would need to invest heavily in employing experts if she expected to get any return. Once she had found an office in the centre of Mircester, she put advertisements in the local newspapers. For the photographic and video evidence, she hired a retired provincial newspaper photographer, Sammy Allen, arranging to pay him on a free-lance basis; and she secured the services of a retired police technician, Douglas Ballantine, under the same terms to cope with the electronic stuff. But for aBeaton, M. C. is the author of 'Agatha Raisin and the Deadly Dance An Agatha Raisin Mystery', published 2004 under ISBN 9780312304362 and ISBN 0312304366.