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Alexander McCall Smith: ‘We’re becoming more retributive as a society – look at social media’

Alexander McCall Smith - Chris Watt
Alexander McCall Smith - Chris Watt

The novels of Alexander McCall Smith aren’t yet prescribed on the NHS, but it might not be a bad idea. “Quite a few psychiatrists say that they recommend them to patients who are low,” says the creator of the compassionate sleuth Mma Precious Ramotswe, speaking over tea at his Edinburgh home. “I know, from the very moving letters I receive, that Mma Ramotswe speaks to people in a way that helps them to deal with the normal sadnesses of life."

I myself have found, over the years, that the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, McCall Smith’s gently wise and witty novels, make for an ideal pick-me-up after – or, on bad days, instead of – watching the nightly news. And I’m far from alone: his books have now sold more than 27 million copies. McCall Smith, 74, is now celebrating 25 years of the Botswana-set series, although, as he recalls, the first book of the 23 (to date) received little attention back in 1998, when fellow Scottish crime writers such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid were making their names with a welter of gore.

“I suppose I was not necessarily the sort of writer that people wanted to project as a Scottish writer. There was no confrontation, no grit, not too much misery.” It was in America that the series eventually began to sell well initially, three or four books in. “I think they were traumatised by 9/11, and they responded to something that was positive, hopeful, concerned with kindness and forgiveness.”

Whenever Mma Ramotswe solves one of the minor crimes that occur in the books (murder rarely intrudes), she is less interested in punishing the wrongdoer than encouraging the victim to forgive the perpetrator. “You can find the roots of that in African customary law. Traditional African jurisprudence was very much concerned with reconciliation, whereas in our [British] system, somebody is right and somebody is wrong.

“And I think our society is becoming more retributive. You see it in the typical social-media campaign against somebody. There’s a harshness and a lack of mercy and understanding, a need to blame people and hold them to account. It’s mob justice. There’s a chapter heading in one of the Mma Ramotswe books: ‘You don’t change people by shouting at them’. Which is absolutely true.”

Alexander McCall Smith - Chris Watt
Alexander McCall Smith - Chris Watt

McCall Smith politely declines to comment on specific cases when I ask him if he has in mind the treatment of JK Rowling, who used to live a couple of houses away. So did Ian Rankin, with the result that wags named this area the “writers’ block”. McCall Smith’s Victorian house, once a home for unmarried mothers, is large but snug-seeming. He plans to stay put: “Somebody remarked to a typically dour Edinburgh lawyer how nice the houses are. He replied: ‘But awfu’ difficult to get a coffin out of.’ I intend to put it to the test.”

Tall, twinkling and wearing a striped blazer so bright it could be seen in Dundee, McCall Smith is as much of a tonic as his books, endlessly jolly and much given to giggles. I am not surprised that the plentiful paintings on his study walls are largely traditional figurative works: in another of his book series, the 44 Scotland Street novels, there is a dog called Cyril whose owner has trained him to cock his leg whenever the words “Turner Prize” are uttered. “It’s a very weak joke but I love bringing it up. You can irritate the Turner Prize terribly easily, they’re very sensitive.”

McCall Smith is far from a philistine: his hero is W H Auden, who he’s written a book on. “Years ago, I received a wonderful letter out of the blue from Edward Mendelson, who’s Auden’s executor. He said: ‘I’d like you to know that the late W H Auden and Mma Ramotswe would have agreed on 100 per cent of points.’”

I suspect that McCall Smith agrees with his protagonists on most points too. His latest novel, The Discreet Charm of the Big Bad Wolf, is another entry in his series about the mild-mannered Swedish detective Ulf Varg (he debuted in 2019’s The Department of Sensitive Crimes), who often seems to speak with his creator’s voice, despairing of discourtesy and political extremism.

One also senses that McCall Smith agrees with Ulf’s response to directives from the police HR department about the need to be careful with language: “I would hope we can talk to one another freely – without worrying about getting pronouns correct.”

“I do think the cement that holds a society together – it’s best that it should be a personal cement of courtesy and consideration,” McCall Smith says. “You can’t force people to be good, and if you go too far in any agenda of forcing change, people may resent it and it may be counterproductive. I think the inculcation of people from a young age with moral imagination and moral understanding of others may be a better way to effect change than legislation.”

Jill Scott and Colin Salmon in the BBC adaptation of the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Mirage/BBC
Jill Scott and Colin Salmon in the BBC adaptation of the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Mirage/BBC

McCall Smith grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where his Scottish father worked as a public prosecutor. He followed his father into the profession, eventually becoming professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh, and wrote children’s books prolifically in his spare time for many years, before his work helping to set up a law school in Botswana inspired The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

The novelist Lionel Shriver claimed in 2020 that a senior publisher told her the books would not be published if McCall Smith were starting out now, as it would be regarded as cultural appropriation. He prefers not to speak about the issue: “All I’d say is I’m writing about Botswana in a very positive way, I’m not criticising anybody there. Many people there have been pleased by the positive portrayal of the country. There are so many books about the trials and difficulties of Africa, not so many that celebrate the very positive qualities which you’ll see in these societies. So I’m redressing a balance.”

Even a gentle writer like McCall Smith can make enemies. When one of his characters spoke slightingly of the Perthshire town of Crieff, “they were really cross, and the local MSP said I should go to Crieff and apologise. Those were the character’s views, not mine, but – I had to go up there for a funeral, and the citizens of Crieff were sort of…” He re-enacts some minatory muttering.

These days, it takes as long to read the “by the same author” page in one of McCall Smith’s books as it does the actual text. He writes five or six books a year in his various series, in addition to numerous other projects: for instance, the libretto for an opera based on Aiding and Abetting, Muriel Spark’s 2000 novel about Lord Lucan, or a film script based on the activities of the Really Terrible Orchestra, a bizarrely popular outfit he cofounded in 1995, in which he delights audiences by playing the bassoon badly. “The script is about the value of doing things you aren’t very good at.”

When he’s writing, he says, he goes into “what the psychiatrists call a dissociative state” and the words flow easily. No thoughts of retirement, then? “No. Mma Ramotswe will only end when I end.”


‘The Discreet Charm of the Big Bad Wolf’ will be published by Abacus on June 8