Alexander McCall Smith: Author, Musician, Lawyer, Innovator

I am always impressed by those adventuresome souls who are able to kick over their traces and start a new path in life. Famous among these is Grandma Moses, who took to painting in her seventies when she wanted to make something for her postman’s Christmas gift, and Colonel Harland Sanders, who began the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise after a new expressway bypassed his restaurant and put him out of business when he was in his sixties. Both of these were individualists whose "get up and go" hadn't got up and went when they were ready for Social Security. And, even more important, they were people with a vision.

Another of these trailblazers is Alexander McCall Smith. Smith was born and grew up in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), then went off to Scotland to study law. At close to 50 years of age, he was teaching in Belfast, Ireland where he entered a literary competition and won in the children’s category. He returned to Southern Africa in 1981 to help co-found and teach law at the University of Botswana.

"Write what you know" (Mark Twain)

The rest is history, since McCall Smith  came out with his book The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. It was in an airport bookstore that I picked up this first mystery and I was instantly charmed. Mma Precious Ramotswe has had some reversals in her life, with the death of her father and the breakdown of a marriage that brought her more sorrow than joy. She has become a follower of the teachings of Clovis Anderson, author of a text on the principles of detection. She set up as a private detective on a main street in Gaborone, Botswana. Her main strengths are intelligence, courage and a basic understanding of human nature. Somewhat of a Miss Marple, except that this is a career for her. The first thing she does is hire a secretary, Grace Makutsi, who is intensely proud of her graduation at the head of her class at the local secretarial college with an astounding grade of 97%.

All of the characters are beautifully drawn, and the reader begins to appreciate the life and culture of Botswana even to the point of ordering Mma Ramotswe's favorite tipple, bush tea, from online sources. It can even be found in local grocery stores these days. The stories are usually simple, but it would be a mistake to consider the characters simple-minded. In The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, several of Mma Ramotswe's friends seem to be walking unwarily into different traps that had me calling out to them to watch their steps, but I underestimated their insight.

Bush Tea

One of the milestones of McCall Smith's life was when he became a respected expert in medical law and bioethics. He used this background as a pathway into his next series, featuring Isabel Dalhousie, who is a moral philosopher by training and inclination. She is the editor of a periodical titled the Review of Applied Ethics. Isabel is a woman of independent means, with a fulltime housekeeper, but she keeps quite busy. People are always coming to Isabel, asking her to solve their problems, and she has become an occasional detective. Her friends and family frequently admonish her about getting involved in problems that are, quite frankly, none of her business.

Actually, what she does best is to personalize the Socratic idea that an unexamined life is not worth living. There are handfuls of mysteries in Isobel's daily life as she ponders the ethics of everyday situations. In The Sunday Philosophy Club, Isabel unfortunately witnesses a man's fall from a balcony in a concert hall. She believes she has a moral obligation to find out what she can about the man, because she thought she exchanged glances with him as he fell. "That was part of the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do."

The location of the stories is in Edinburgh, an eminently respectable town where the citizens believe there couldn't be any murderers here. But Isabel knows that Edinburgh is a place like anywhere else, and has the same range of people as any place else did: the good, the bad and the morally indifferent. But they had their quirks of course, but even their quirks were charming––as we find in The Charming Quirks of Others.

McCall Smith is also the former chairman of the British Medical Journal ethics committee and was a member of many other boards and commissions, all of which he gave up when he achieved success as a writer.

Still with some time on his hands, McCall Smith decided on a new venture, taking a leaf out of the pages of Dickens and the San Francisco novelist Armistead Maupin, both of whom wrote serialized novels. Thus 44 Scotland Street was released in installments every weekday in The Scotsman newspaper and was also later delivered on the BBC radio as 15-minute dramas. The stories surround the characters living in a particular Edinburgh apartment building.

Right away, the reader is caught up in the lives of Pat MacGregor, a 20-something who is on her second gap year, since the first didn’t work out; Bruce Anderson, her narcissistic flatmate; Matthew Duncan, the owner of an art gallery; Angus Lordie and his dog Cyril; and my personal favorite, little Bertie Pollock. Bertie is somewhat of a genius, but his life is constantly made miserable by his overbearing mother, who insists he play the saxophone, speak Italian and visit a psychiatrist regularly. I get every book right off the presses so I can see how Bertie is faring, as he tries to live a normal life and hold his head up in all the difficult and humorous situations he finds himself. These stories have grown into eight volumes so far; the most recent, Sunshine on Scotland Street, is very hard to get hold of.

“To boldly go where no man has gone before” (or to boldly go where no man has swept the floor) (Star Trek and others)

Much to the dismay of his publishers, McCall Smith's next literary experiment was an on-line novel. This was a serialized story published on the Internet exclusive to Telegraph.co.uk. and available to the readers at no cost.

These stories tell the stories of the inhabitants of a large housing unit named Corduroy Mansions, in London, England. Here, also, there is a large cast of characters, one of the most interesting of whom is a dog, Freddie de la Hay.

As Corduroy Mansions was released online, readers could interact via online discussion boards with each other and the author himself. The Daily Telegraph staff edited this. The author wrote a chapter a day, starting on 15 Sep 2008. The first series ran for 20 weeks. These daily chapters were also available as an audio download. Fortunately, there are hard copies for all those who prefer reading a book.

Sandwiched into these series are wonderful children's stories; several nonfiction books, such as The Forensic Aspects of Sleep; and a fifth series, about a Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, who finds himself in one humiliating situation after another.

Finally, McCall Smith has a few nonseries books of fiction. La's Orchestra Saves the World is set in England at the beginning of World War II. Lavender––La for short––goes to live in a country cottage. Music is her refuge, and she helps bring together all the local musicians who played music, and it was an antidote to the horrors of war. In this venture, Smith calls on his own musical background. Aside from his other talents, Smith is also a bassoonist and he co-founded a group, The Really Terrible Orchestra, whose mission it is "to encourage those who have been prevented from playing music, either through lack of talent or some other factor, to play music in the company of similarly afflicted players." Critics of their performances seem to agree that lousy is the best they can ever be.

Well, you can’t be good at everything.

Whatever plans Alexander McCall Smith has for his next venture, either book or series, I look forward to it. I would love to know how he manages his time.

Another Botswana: A Review of Michael Stanley's Death of the Mantis

Death of the Mantis: A Detective Kubu Mystery by Michael Stanley

Most of the Republic of Botswana, a flat landlocked country of 2 million people about the size of Texas, lies in the immense Kalahari Desert. One of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, it has transformed itself from dire poverty to a vibrant, fast-growing economy since gaining its independence from Britain in 1966.

An area as large as Massachusetts is occupied by the Botswanan section of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, which it shares with South Africa. In this book, it is managed by Director Vusi with a scant handful of staff. This morning Monzo, who compiles the wildlife statistics, has missed yet another staff meeting and is not answering his radio. He had told Ndoli that he was going out to check that a group of Bushmen he had spotted recently weren't poaching in the park.

Ndoli goes in search of him and finds his jeep abandoned and Monzo, fatally injured, lying at the bottom of a ravine. Three Bushmen surround him, trying to revive the dying man with water. When Monzo dies of his injuries and a bloody rock is found nearby, Inspector Lerako immediately arrests the three Bushmen for his murder. Khumanego, a Bushman living in the modern world, calls his friend and onetime classmate Assistant Superintendent David Bengu of the Botswana CID for help. The Bushmen are rarely violent, and Khumanego believes the men are being railroaded by a bigoted policeman. The evidence is very thin––merely the absence of other footprints in the rocky area and Mongo's statement that he was going out to find them.

Bengu, whose nickname is Kubu because of his size––"kubu" being the Setswana word for hippopotamus––presents the case to Superintendent Mabuku, and asks permission to work it. Mabuku at first flatly refuses, but when Cindy Robinson, an American reporter interested in the Bushmen, files a story on the case Mabuku grudgingly agrees that Kubu can "assist" Lerako in the investigation. Kubu, normally an even-tempered home loving man, feels almost a guilty relief to be away from his wife Joy and new daughter Tumi for a few days. At two months, Tumi is still waking several times every night; and to Joy's increasing exasperation, Kubu never hears her.

The Bushmen, or San, think of themselves as "The First People." Recent genotyping research seems to support this claim, tracing their unique divergence back over 100,000 years. They have an unusual golden-brown undertone to their skins and are shorter than most races, with adult men rarely reaching five feet in height. Many are still hunter-gatherers, roaming the deserts and veldts in small family groups. They have no concept of private property, which often brings them into conflict with their neighbors in the world of today. They are an ancient people on the edge of extinction or assimilation.

While they live lightly on the land and have left no vast ruins or monuments, the San have left their mark in many hundreds of caves in the Kalahari. Both religious and aesthetic, this stunning record of their lives can be tracked over thousands of years. In fact, this book opens with the journey of a Bushman and his adolescent son to the most sacred and secret of these places.

To Kubu's surprise, his friend Khumanego offers to go with him and act as his translator to the Bushmen. Khumanego is passionately convinced of the innocence of the Bushmen, but his pleas to release them have fallen on deaf ears; Lerako remains stubbornly convinced of their guilt despite being unable to find credible evidence.

"When a kudu dies after we have hunted it, we feel its pain, and at the same time it knows it is providing for us. We have a shared purpose. We never hunt for more than we can eat, because if we did, it would be robbing the animal we had killed. Stealing its destiny. The world would get out of balance. Bad things would happen."

"When we stop in the desert, we never eat all the food that is available. Or drink all the water. We always leave some for those who come after. We would rather take hunger and thirst with us than leave it behind."

"We are all part of the same world. All connected. That is why the men you have arrested did not kill the man who died. Bushmen don't kill other men. If they did, they would be killing themselves."

Not until several other violent crimes have been committed, all apparently linked to the same area of low hills, is Lerako persuaded to release the three Bushmen in his custody.

While the story here is convoluted, the careful reader can solve the mystery ahead of the police. The characters are well developed, especially Kubu and his family, who I would enjoy meeting again. The desert setting is stunning and harsh, a far cry from the gentle Botswana of Alexander McCall Smith's Precious Ramotswe. But what I will remember longest from this book are the plight and lives of the Bushmen; their gentleness on the earth and their remarkable art. A people who would "take their hunger and thirst with them rather than leave it behind for another" could teach us a lot about how to live together.

Michael Stanley is the pen name of the team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip. Sears lives in Botswana, and Trollip in Minnesota and Botswana. Both are regular contributors to the award-winning Murder is Everywhere blog. Death of the Mantis is the third in their Inspector Kubu series, and the first that I have read. Their fourth, Deadly Harvest, will be released by Harper Paperbacks on April 30th.