‘We Are All Care of Another” is the title of the first chapter of Alexander McCall Smith’s new Mma Ramotswe adventure, The Miracle at Speedy Motors.
Therein lies some of the unique appeal of the proprietor of the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency: care. Not for Mma Ramotswe the casual cruelties of the detective genre. While the hard-boiled among crime fiction aficionados might discount McCall Smith’s ‘traditionally built” sleuth, millions of readers and legions of critics the world over have succumbed to her charm and humanism — and his.
‘I could not have written the Mma Ramotswe books without spending my entire childhood in Zimbabwe,” says McCall Smith. ‘It is the basis of an attachment to this part of the world.”
After those early, formative years, he ‘rather lost touch” but rediscovered Southern Africa during stints in Swaziland and Botswana. He says he ‘hadn’t imagined a prolonged literary conversation with a country — Botswana itself”. The results are nine books in the Mma Ramotswe series, a boon to readers.
Such bounties seem to be typical of Botswana. McCall Smith remarks that the country had the ‘good fortune not to be gobbled up by South Africa”. Had that happened — as it might have done during the frantic post-World War II unbundling of the British Empire — ‘it would have been markedly different”. Instead, it was the beneficiary of ‘a policy of benign neglect; it was administered from Mafikeng, not even afforded the courtesy of being ruled from within”.
Further good fortune was in Seretse Khama’s ‘great leadership”, diamonds and a sound infrastructure. Turning back to Khama, McCall Smith worries that few outside of Africa know much about the man, and he suggests that an opera should be written about Botswana’s first post-independence leader.
Opera has taken up some of his prodigious creativity of late, with both he and fellow Edinburgh writer Ian Rankin having written works. That chimes with McCall Smith setting up, with his wife Elizabeth, The Really Terrible Orchestra, which he is at pains to emphasise really does ‘make a terrible noise”.
Audiences, he says, love going to listen to an orchestra where things go wrong. The orchestra will take a bow in the United States in April next year, with an engagement at the New York town hall.
If the music is therapeutic, writing was that and more before he turned to it full-time in 2005. He says it was ‘a spare-time occupation, not a pastime: I was more driven than that”.
It was when The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency took off internationally that he was able to devote himself fully to writing and he ‘realised that was what I ought to do”. This is all the more remarkable given his successful career in medical law and bioethics. Not many professors at the University of Edinburgh can claim such meteoric second careers.
‘It was very demanding but I embraced the change,” he says. Then follows the proviso: ‘Although when you become a full-time writer you find the one thing you can’t do is write all the time!”
As a writer, McCall Smith is a ‘fairly heavily morning” person. Midday and early afternoon are out, while late afternoon can be good sometimes. Writing four books a year means those mornings are extremely productive. Again, good conditions prevail.
‘I have the good fortune that I hear it coming from the subconscious mind, interrogating the world, asking questions.”
In two to three hours he pens 3 000 to 4 000 words. When he was writing the Scotland Street series, daily serial novels subsequently published in four books, such application was non-negotiable. He is giving that series a break this year, though.
Mma Ramotswe sails on splendidly, The Miracle at Speedy Motors being her ninth outing. Author, protagonist and the series have copped flak for their lack of ‘social realism”. It’s a charge McCall Smith is aware of, but deals with cogently.
‘There is a curious assumption that literature should be about dysfunction and suffering. It’s perfectly proper and reasonable for a writer to write about the positive and the human, and human virtues.”
It goes back, McCall Smith believes, to the cultivation of virtues. And to some large questions, such as ‘What do we expect or hope for with the general liberation of self and the demolition of repressive structures?”
He points to contemporary Britain, showing ‘real signs of social malaise, a significant degree of social collapse.
‘There are certain objective criteria: crime statistics, changes in offending behaviour, childhood drinking. Teachers are reporting primary school children with hangovers from drinking spirits.”
He quotes Cato — ‘Everything is collapsing” — and continues, ‘People have lost a lot of the ordinary courtesies that seem to create a good society; they have withdrawn into armed camps of distrust.”
It is into this world, where ‘everyone is a stranger to the other”, that Mma Ramotswe comes.
‘If I look at the letters and emails about her, there is a longing for a return to a more gentle society. That is not the whole story, but part of the story that one sees in this part of the world: profound decency and time for each other.
‘People yearn for a more innocent, trusting world because they are bruised by ruthless materialism and illiberal capitalism that go against the instincts of many people. People do want community. They are latching on to an idealised, selective picture of a little world that is social.”
On the other hand, there are detractors and disgruntled readers who, he says, ‘have no hesitation in telling you you’re writing the wrong sort of book”.
Others again look for influences, analogues, references: this is, after all, crime fiction as well. GK Chesterton and his Father Brown stories are raised quite a lot, but it’s years since McCall Smith has re-read him. His major literary influences are WH Auden and the great Indian writer RK Narayan.
Among other work he admires is Amistad Maupin’s Tales of the City, his good friend Amy Tan’s novels, early Nadine Gordimer, especially The Conservationist, and Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor (‘in the same league as [JM] Coetzee”).
Talk turns to tropes in his novels, such as tea, cattle, rain and Mma Ramotswe’s tiny white van in the Botswana books and rain in the Scottish works. (One of the Isabel Dalhousie novels is titled The Right Attitude to Rain.)
‘I spend quite a bit of time thinking about how small things impinge, how tiny incidents assume great importance. The van is very important. It represents an attachment to the simple and familiar. It’s not a powerful vehicle but it does its job. It’s very popular with readers. Two Californian women even have a white van with registration plates TWV1.”
And then there is Mma’s rooibos tea. That is set for centre stage in her next outing, titled A Tea Time for the Traditionally Built. Fans will hope that the cuppas and the care continue coming.