Red Bush Tea with Alexander McCall Smith
Dave Weich, Powells.com
In 1998, Alexander McCall Smith introduced the UK to Precious Ramotswe, founder of the first ladies' detective agency in Botswana. Smith couldn't have imagined how his warmhearted protagonist would change his life. Having published more than forty books previously, he was by all accounts a successful author, and a distinguished professor of medical law besides, but when Mma Ramotswe, "a good detective, and a good woman," hung her shingle, she quite simply changed his life.
 The series' debut, The
No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency—it started as a mere short story,
which grew into a set of stories, then a novel, and now Smith has agreed to
write at least eight volumes—earned two Booker Judges' Special Recommendations and was voted one of the International Books of the Year and the Millennium by the Times Literary Supplement. Now, five installments along, with the success of The Full Cupboard of Life the series boasts more than four million copies in print—in English alone. Mma Ramotswe's folksy investigations have been translated, or will soon be, into twenty-nine additional languages.
Born in what is now Zimbabwe, educated in Scotland, Smith (he goes by "Sandy") published his first book, a children's novel, at twenty-eight, but it was as a professor that he eventually returned to Africa, helping to establish a law school at the University of Botswana. There he happened to see a woman cheerfully chasing a chicken around a well-kept yard. Fifteen years later, the memory resurfaced, and Mma Ramotswe was born.
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The fifth installment in the bestselling No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series picks up with Mma Precious Ramotswe still engaged to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. She'd like to set a wedding date, but realizes that her fiancé has other things on his mind ? most notably a frightening request from the assertive matron of the Orphan Farm.
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"A 'cozy' set in Africa. This is the first in a wonderful new mystery series set in Botswana. Using deceptively simple language that nonetheless sings with the rhythms of Africa, the author introduces us to the indomitable lady detective, Precious Ramotswe. You will come to love her and the land she lives in." Kathi, Powells.com
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The second installment of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency finds our wily heroine searching for a young man who disappeared into the African plains many years ago.
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Morality for Beautiful Girls finds Mma Ramotswe expanding her business to take in the world of car repair and a beauty pageant.
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Now that the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is established, its founder, Precious Ramotswe, can look upon her life with pride. But life is never without its problems, as she discovers in this fourth book in a series the L.A. Times calls "thoroughly engaging and entertaining."
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?[The] sixth entry in McCall Smith?s consistently delightful series. . . Amid the hilarious scenarios and quiet revelations are luminous descriptions of Botswana, land of wide-open spaces and endless blue skies." Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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"Scotsman McCall Smith renders brisk, seamless tales that are both wry and profound." Allison Block, Booklist (starred review)
Dave: You've amassed quite a catalog over the years, publishing more than
fifty books. How long have you been a storyteller?
Alexander McCall Smith: I sent off my first manuscript to a publisher
at the age of eight. I even got a letter back, which was very kind of them.
So I had some sort of sense that I wanted to write, but I really started somewhere
in my twenties when I began to write short stories. That's when it really
got going.
My first book was published when I was twenty-eight. It was a children's book,
actually, my first children's novel, a bit of an accident, really. The publishers
in Scotland had set up a literary competition. I entered two manuscripts. One
was an ordinary novel. The other was in the children's category. I was hoping
to win the former, but I was fortunate enough to win the latter.
I ended up spending quite some time writing children's books. I wrote thirty
or something like that, some of which are still in print, or coming back into
print now. Some were in print in translation in various parts of the world.
So I was moderately successful as a children's book writer. Then I spent more
time writing short stories. I did stories for broadcast for the BBC, I
wrote a radio play, that sort of thing. I started to write collections of short
stories, including a collection of African stories, which is also going to be
reissued. Then I started to write these Botswana novels.
This was all happening
while I had another career, as most writers do. Dave: Will you continue to teach?
Smith: Now that the books have taken
off so dramatically, I've really had to choose. I haven't resigned from my university
chair—I'm still a professor of medical law at Edinburgh—but I've
taken a three-year, unpaid leave, which may prove to be longer. I don't know.
Dave: You once saw a woman chasing a chicken around
her yard in Botswana. She was the inspiration for The
No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Fifteen years after witnessing that scene,
you decided to write about her.
Smith: That particular vision, that experience, made me think it would
be good to write about a woman like her. I wondered what her story was, this
woman, and I reflected upon how she probably had a very interesting past. She
had probably brought up a number of children with very little money. Her yard
was nicely swept—it was a respectable house in which she was living. She was
probably, with very little in a material sense, making a good life for herself.
I thought it would be good to write about such a person, but I didn't form
any particular idea or intention of doing so. The idea must have bubbled away
in the subconscious. Many years later, I sat down to write what I thought was
going to be a short story, and it's actually turned into six novels so far—
I've written a sixth—and is going to be eight. It was initially a very
short short story. I wrote more stories about her, and gradually those developed
into a novel.
That decision, to sit down and write the short story, and to make it about
a woman who uses the cattle she inherits from her father to start a detective
agency, is in my case one of those curious moments when a decision changes one's
entire life. Lots of us can look back and find a conversation, a suggestion
somebody makes, a decision that changes the whole course of one's life. That
was it for me. Had it not been a detective agency that I made her found, I may
not have discovered the possibilities which led to me writing the novel.
Dave: It's a peculiar vocation for a lead character in that these really
aren't traditional mysteries at all. Yet, as you say, for whatever reason, it
worked. Why, do you think? Did Mma Ramotswe somehow open up a different style
of writing for you? Was it Botswana?
Smith: It's a combination of those factors. There is something of Botswana
in the books. The whole ethos, the whole feel of the books, is to do with that
particular country. But that is my writing voice. If you were
to read my other work, you'd probably say, "Yes, this is by the same person.
Maybe a little different, but it's the same voice."
The question you pose makes me think of this: When singers are training, they
talk about the opening up of the voice, which seems to be quite a physical process,
the development of the voice as an instrument. Maybe that's the same for writers.
You find a particular note that enables you to open up your voice. That might
have happened for me here, although I hadn't actually thought of it until you
asked.
Dave: In the last few years you must have encountered a great deal of feedback from
readers, which characters they like, what they do or don't like about the books...
Has that moved the more recent books in any particular direction?
Smith: It has probably confirmed what I thought all along. It has given
me the confidence to use this voice.
I was discouraged in the past in that I didn't meet with a great deal of success.
My children's books were moderately successful as were some of my short stories,
but I really felt frustrated, as many writers do. I'm old fashioned. I may as
well admit it. Certainly my writing didn't fit the received notions of what
Scottish literature in the eighties and nineties was at all. I was regarded
as a bourgeois writer when everybody was being very aggressive, in-your-face.
That was clear to me. I was resigned to that. People had said to me, "Your writing
is probably too gentle, too whimsical, to fit the zeitgeist."
What gave me confidence was this confirmation from readers. People seemed
to want that. We have over four million in print in English now, and just yesterday
we sold Bulgarian rights, which means we're up to twenty-nine foreign languages.
That makes you feel like, Okay, I'll say what I've always wanted to say.
Apparently people want to read it.
It's immensely reassuring for me to now have these publishers all over the
place saying, "Yes, go ahead with it. Write as whimsically as you like. You
can be as out-of-step as you like." That's very nice.
Dave: In The
Full Cupboard of Life, the parachute jump is a rather whimsical twist.
Smith: I like exploring the slightly wry and the slightly
odd. I admire writers such as E.
F. Benson, for example. The parachute jump is just so ridiculous, and such
an awful notion, finding yourself signed up for a parachute jump.
I don't know where the ideas come from. They're products of the subconscious.
I don't actually think very much while I'm writing; I don't regard it as a very
cogitative process. I sit down and it's almost as if I'm in a trance. Out it
comes. It's changed very little, if at all, afterwards. The subconscious is
producing these ideas based on impressions and its own activity.
We're talking about the same regions of the mind that produce dreams. We don't
plan our dreams usually, although there are some that we can in fact direct
a little bit in the semi-waking state. We're obviously the producers of our
dreams, but we're not the directors. I think that's possibly what happens with
writing, although different writers write in different ways. That's the way
I write.
Dave: I don't want to give away what happens in The
Full Cupboard of Life, but one longstanding issue is how long Precious has been
waiting to be married.
Smith: Hasn't she just? Yes.
Dave: And yet, if she were to be married, what would be left for the
next books?
Smith: There's quite a lot. We've got other characters that need to
be developed and explored.
Mma Makutsi, her assistant, is a very important character, and she enjoys
a lot of the limelight in Volume Six, which is called In the Company of Cheerful
Ladies. I also introduce a new character in that book, and he hadn't been
planned at all. It was while I was writing it that he literally came into my
vision on his bicycle and was knocked over by Mma Ramotswe—and knocked
into the book. There he is. And he's given a job. The editors are very pleased
that we've got him because they like him as a character.
So there's that to explore. And there are the adopted children. And of course
there are all the usual issues, the usual business of these people. There's
the tea issue, which we get quite a lot of in Volume Six, quite a lot of tea
scenes. We'll have much more to say about tea. And of course there's day-to-day
life in Botswana.
I've agreed to write eight. I have a general idea of some of the issues I'll
bring up in Volume Seven. I don't know what I'll do in Volume Eight. Then I'll
address the matter of whether we end it at that stage. One has to know when
to stop. That is principally an aesthetic decision, but obviously it's a commercial
one as well. I'll sit down with my publishers and say, "Should we give it a
rest?"
At the same time, I've started my new Scottish series, which is called The
Sunday Philosopher's Club. I've written the first one. That's being brought
out in September. The BBC bought it, too, to make it into a television series.
The Scottish series will run in parallel to the Botswana books.
Dave: The new series is set in Edinburgh, right?
Smith: It is indeed, yes.
Dave: What's it like to be writing two series simultaneously?
Smith: I'm enjoying it immensely, writing about a different milieu.
The central character, Isabel Dalhousie, is a moral philosopher whose mother
is American, but she's been brought up in Scotland. She gets involved in people's
affairs and problems, and she has a niece called Kat who constantly has the
wrong sort of boyfriends, so we get a bit of fun out of that.
A lot of it is concerned with her, as a moral philosopher, looking at the
implications of what she's doing in all these things she gets involved in. Possibly
it's a little bit more tilted in the mystery direction. Isabel gets drawn in.
And she has a sharp sense of humor, this woman, so I'm having great fun with
that. I've written the first one and I've said I'll finish the next one by the
end of February.
I'm doing a serial novel, as well, which is being published in the Scotsman
every day. That started in January and finishes in June.
Dave: What is it called?
Smith: 44 Scotland Street. The series arose from a conversation
I had in San Francisco last July. Amy
Tan had a party for me—it was very nice, very generous of her—
and I bumped into Armistead
Maupin there and talked to him about his Tales
of the City, which I thought was a very entertaining book.
When I got back to Scotland, one of the papers asked me to write about this
trip to San Francisco and Los Angeles, and I mentioned the conversation. I said,
"What a pity that newspapers are no longer doing serial novels." This was a
19th century thing with Dickens,
and indeed Flaubert
did Madame
Bovary in a similar fashion. The editor of the Scotsman read this
and asked me to lunch. He said, "You're on." It had been a very generous lunch,
so I said yes.
That's what I've been doing. We're probably at episode eighty-something; it
goes up to a hundred and twenty. One thousand words a day.
Dave: So you're writing it more or less as it's being published?
Smith: I'm about eight days ahead. I'll have to do some this weekend.
I'm doing it while I'm traveling, writing it on this trip.
Dave: Do you find yourself regretting plot or character developments
in earlier chapters? I wish I hadn't said that in episode forty-two.
Smith: Yes, it's rather difficult to change it in the way that one
would change a novel. I hadn't really thought of that. There's a lot that I'm
not thinking about because you just have to do it. You can't stop. You can't
be too self critical or self-analytical. You just have to do it. But I'm enjoying
it so much. It's the lives of a group of people living in a Georgian block in the Georgian
part of Edinburgh, with one protagonist, a twenty-year-old girl. It's great
fun. The newspaper readers are invited to send in ideas and suggestions. We
get those constantly. It's quite interactive. People have actually asked to
be put in, so I'm now writing some people in. That will finish in June, as I
said. They want me to do another series, which I might.
Dave: Do you have time to read in the midst of all this writing?
Smith: I do, yes. I do read. As I suppose most people would say, I'd
like to have more time to do that.
I find I have much less patience than I used to have with books that I feel
are meretricious or just sloppy. I don't have the inclination to persist with
them, but I manage to find enough new material to interest me. And I like to
go back to tried and trusted authors as well, go back and reread things.
I came across just the other day a wonderful new writer, or new to me, called
John Murray, who did A
Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies. I don't know if you've seen that
book?
Dave: I haven't read it.
Smith: Wonderful. Just a magnificent writer. He's a doctor who has
worked a lot in developing countries. There's quite a lot of science in the
stories, but really beautifully written. There's always that nice sort of discovery
that one makes.
Dave: Is there an author you would particularly recommend? And if so,
what book would you suggest starting with?
Smith: I would be inclined to recommend E.
F. Benson to people who haven't read him. Benson was a remarkably prolific
writer who died in 1940. He wrote a vast number of books. Comparatively few
people read him today, but his Mapp
and Lucia novels are in print in the United States, and they are wonderfully
funny. If people are looking for something that will cheer them up through the
social observation of the small scale, which I think some of my readers enjoy
—they like the small-scale issues—then Benson is a great master.
I also find that Somerset
Maugham should be looked at. I know that he's been out of fashion for some
time, but I think that Maugham was a fine writer.
I really liked Brian
Moore, a Northern Irish writer who moved to Canada then to California but
remained in many respects an Ulster writer. He wrote some wonderful novels,
which were appreciated by various people very greatly. Graham
Greene said that he was his favorite writer, if I remember correctly. His
first one was The
Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, which was made into a movie with Maggie
Smith as a Belfast spinster. He wrote it when he was quite a young man. It was
a remarkable leap of the imagination that a young man could write a book about
a person like that with such acuity of observation.
Those are some of the people for whom I have a lot of time. Oh, and I recently
bought all twelve issues of Proust, A la recherche,
which I must read.
Dave: Take a little time off, maybe.
Smith: Find a year sometime, yes. But I do like dipping into Proust.
Proust is great. And I mentioned Madame
Bovary. I just reread that with great delight. A great, great, wonderful
novel.
William
Dalrymple and his books about India, he's another. From
the Holy Mountain, his trip thorough Orthodox and other Christian communities
in the middle and near east. Then White
Mugles, about the Mugle Empire in India. I'm a great fan of his.
Dave: I must ask: Do you always wear a kilt to your readings?
Smith: Recently I've taken to wearing this kilt at events, yes. In
Scotland I would wear this for a very formal event, a wedding or something like
that. I think actually it's a courtesy for the readers who are coming in. It
indicates that one is treating it as a special occasion. That's why my suitcase
is so heavy. But a kilt is also very comfortable. It's a fairly heavy wool,
a comfortable thing.
Dave: What have I failed to address?
Smith: Not much, it seems. I might mention that I have another series
of books that are going to be published in February, Portuguese Irregular Verbs.
There are three books in the series. They were published in the U.K. in August.
The first book is Portuguese Irregular Verbs, the second The Finer
Points of Sausage Dogs, and the third is At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances.
It's about three German professors, and it's very quirky, but it's taken off
in the U.K. in a very curious way.
Dave: These are books you wrote some time ago, right?
Smith: I wrote the first two some time ago, and I'd privately published
Portuguese Irregular Verbs. It had become a bit of a samizdat, slightly
cultish. People passed it hand to hand. Now it's been published by Polygon in
Edinburgh and Time-Warner is going to do a mass market paperback. That's all
rather fun because it's something I really enjoyed, the adventures of Professor
Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld.
And I should give you one of these CDs. I'll be giving one out tonight to
someone in the audience. I play in an amateur orchestra called The
Really Terrible Orchestra. If you've got earplugs, you're welcome to it.
It really is awful.
Dave: Is the CD available in the U.S.?
Smith: No. It wouldn't get past Homeland Security, I suspect.
Dave: Well, thank you. Do you mind if we put a sound clip on the web
site?
Smith: You're very welcome to do it. Listen to it. We've been played
on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, and we've been played on NPR. We've been
played on a number of radio stations. The one to listen to is our rendition
of King of the Road, which is a very individual rendition.
We are seriously challenged musicians. My wife and I founded this orchestra
when we saw our children playing in school. We thought, What fun! We should
do it, too.
Alexander McCall
Smith visited Powell's City of Books on May 6, 2004.
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