Confessions of a serial novelist

Alexander McCall Smith is writing, even as the Galle Literary Festival swirls around him. This is a man who can’t now stop writing. He calls himself a serial novelist and begins by reciting the stories he is committed to continue.

McCall Smith’s best known series, The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency follows the gentle investigations of Mma Ramotswe and is set in Botswana where the author himself once lived. Set in Edinburgh where the author currently lives, is The Sunday Philosophy Club series, featuring the sleuth Isabel Dalhousie (sometimes jokingly called the No.2 Ladies’ Detective). McCall Smith giggles as he describes another rarefied hero of his serial fiction: Professor Doctor Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, an academic at the Institute of Romance Philology in Regensberg, Germany. As a result of a passing remark Alexander McCall Smith now also writes a daily chapter in The Scotsman newspaper about the fictional residents of 44 Scotland Street, an actual street in Edinburgh. He also writes other occasional novels and children’s books and travels the world to meet his readers.

Add all this together and you can see why he gave up his job as Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. It is difficult to see how this author can even pause for breath but he tells me that writing serials is the most fun because that way he gets to have ‘a longer and more satisfying conversation’ with his readers. He says that his readers keep him on his toes and give him practical advice but that he also enjoys being reminded of how his writing has been received and interpreted (he is particularly delighted that Mma Ramotswe is well received in Botswana). Indeed Alexander McCall Smith strikes me as someone who likes a good conversation. Our interview is scheduled to last half an hour but he brushes away my suggestion that I shouldn’t take up any more of his writing time and keeps us talking for an hour and a half.

He has a question for me: he wants to know if I can tell him whether there is a name for the Sri Lankan gesture of bringing one’s palms together in greeting. He says he is enjoying his time in Sri Lanka, a country with ‘such a romantic reputation’ that he had long wanted to visit. His schedule of interviews and events is keeping him pinned to Galle but he says that he is not one for whistle-stop tours anyway. He says that he prefers to stay in one place and soak up an impression, whilst looking around and admitting that ‘one doesn’t get to see a country properly from a luxury hotel’.

He is interested in Buddhism as it strikes him as a religion with a capacity for acceptance. Something that is troubling him at the moment is what he calls ‘the failure of forgiveness’ throughout the world. He worries that our obsession with accountability drives us into recrimination and leaves out forgiveness, which is crucial to reconciliation. He worries that concerns for public safety have begun to outweigh the importance of the same public’s civil liberties. We talk about the execution of Saddam Hussein and what a hopeless message that sent out about the potential for resolving conflict. We talk about how there is finally peace in Ireland. We don’t talk about Sri Lanka but I think we’re both thinking about it.

I ask Alexander McCall Smith if these concerns go into his novels and he says, yes, inevitably they do. Forgiveness, for example, is something he is exploring in the Isabel Dalhousie novel he is writing while in Galle. Mma Ramotswe is known to let her villains off if they promise not to do wrong again, and calls herself ‘a forgiving lady’. All the same McCall Smith is careful to respect the autonomy of his characters. They are the people to whom he owes his books. He says that in writing he begins with an idea for a character in a particular set of circumstances and thinks about what their life is like. It is out of this particular person’s life that the stories grow.

According to Alexander McCall Smith, when he first thought up Precious Ramotswe he only knew that she ran her own business – he didn’t know it was a detective agency. He then wrote a short story in which this woman Precious Ramotswe tells her revered father on his deathbed that she means to start a detective agency (hearing which ‘he gasps and expires’). McCall Smith jokes about the fact that Precious Ramotswe could just as easily have started a dry cleaning agency and wonders if the series would have taken off that way. He seems genuinely surprised by the success of this story he invented and says that it was initially ‘an unsettling experience’. But he is enjoying his conversation with Precious Ramotswe and Book 9 of the series, The Miracle at Speedy Motors, is due out in March.

The series has been translated into 42 languages and is read all over the world. Even the 44 Scotland Street series is read around the world although its stories are so local to the city in which they’re set. Then again, reflects Alexander McCall Smith, ‘all fiction is local. It has to happen somewhere’.