Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith (born August 24, 1948, Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe]) British writer, creator of a series of novels about Precious Ramotswe, a fictional character who is Botswana’s only female detective.

McCall Smith was raised in Southern Rhodesia and moved to Scotland at age 18 to study at the University of Edinburgh. He received a law degree in 1971 and then returned to Africa, where he helped to establish the law school at the University of Botswana. Back at the University of Edinburgh, where he eventually became a professor of medical law, he published a range of scholarly works, including, with J. Kenyon Mason, Law and Medical Ethics (1991) and, with Colin Shapiro, Forensic Aspects of Sleep (1997). McCall Smith served as vice-chairman of the British Human Genetics Commission. He retired from teaching in 2005 to focus on writing full-time.

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In 1976 McCall Smith published his first fiction, a children’s novel. He went on to write more children’s books, many of which are set in Africa or derived from African sources. Children of Wax: African Folk Tales (1989), a collection aimed at both children and adults, consists of stories he collected in Zimbabwe.

He also wrote radio plays and short stories, and it was from one of the latter that the novel The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency emerged. First published in Great Britain in 1998, it sold slowly at first, and it did not appear in the United States until 2002, after McCall Smith had already published two more books centred on Mma Ramotswe (Mma being an honorific). It subsequently became an international best seller. By the time the series reached its ninth novel, The Miracle at Speedy Motors (2008), more than 15 million copies of the books had been sold in English alone, and The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency had been adapted as a television series. Throughout the novels, Mma Ramotswe works with Mma Makutsi, who is her faithful assistant, and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni to solve mysteries in which crime consists not of murder but of petty burglary, jealousy, and other puzzles of everyday life in Botswana. Further entries in the series included Tea Time for the Traditionally Built (2009), The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party (2011), The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon (2013), The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café (2014), The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine (2015), The House of Unexpected Sisters (2017), To the Land of Long Lost Friends (2019), and The Joy and Light Bus Company (2021).

In 2003–04 McCall Smith initiated three other series. The Isabel Dalhousie/Sunday Philosophy Club series began with a 2004 novel of the same name and has as its main character a philosopher and amateur detective in Edinburgh. Sequels included The Careful Use of Compliments (2007), The Forgotten Affairs of Youth (2011), The Novel Habits of Happiness (2015), and The Geometry of Holding Hands (2021). The 44 Scotland Street series began as installments published in the newspaper The Scotsman in 2004 and continued with such books as The Importance of Being Seven (2010), Bertie’s Guide to Life and Mothers (2013), The Revolving Door of Life (2015), and Love in the Time of Bertie (2022). The Professor Dr. von Igelfeld/Portuguese Irregular Verbs series of comic novels, which concerns the misadventures of German academic Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, began with Portuguese Irregular Verbs (2003)—a short run of which had been produced in 1997—and progressed with The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs (2003), At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances (2003), Unusual Uses for Olive Oil (2011), and Your Inner Hedgehog (2021).

McCall Smith turned again to serial publication in 2008 with the Corduroy Mansions series, which he released in print and as a weekly podcast via the website of the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph. In 2019 the author debuted the Detective Varg series, which centres on a Swedish detective who specializes in odd cases; books in the series include The Department of Sensitive Crimes (2019), The Talented Dr. Varg (2021), and The Man with the Silver Saab (2021). Trains and Lovers (2012), The Forever Girl (2013), and My Italian Bulldozer (2016) were stand-alone novels concerning the romantic lives of their protagonists. Emma (2014) is a modern take on Jane Austen’s classic novel, while The Pavilion in the Clouds (2022) centres on a father’s alleged affair.

In 2008 he also published the novel La’s Orchestra Saves the World, which centres on a newly divorced young woman who founds an amateur orchestra during World War II. McCall Smith himself had conceived such an ensemble in Edinburgh in 1995; it was known as the Really Terrible Orchestra. McCall Smith also wrote the opera The Okavango Macbeth, a reimagining of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth set in Botswana with baboons as its main characters. It debuted in 2009 at the No. 1 Ladies’ Opera House, a small musical venue that he had opened near Gaborone, Botswana. In 2012 he conceived the idea of a tapestry depicting the history of Scotland; the collaborative project eventually produced more than 150 panels. A Work of Beauty: Alexander McCall Smith’s Edinburgh (2014), a lavishly illustrated history of Scotland’s capital, was written in collaboration with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland.

McCall Smith was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2007.