From Africa back to Scotland

The publishing world is full of romantic stories, not every one with a happy ending. (I was brought up on the tale, possibly apocryphal, that Evelyn Waugh’s brother-in-law, Edward Grant, kept a framed copy of his letter turning down Gone with the Wind in his office.) One truly happy story, however, so far without an end, is that of Alexander McCall Smith. With a day job as Professor of Medical Law at Edinburgh University, he is the author of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, creator of the immortal Mma Precious Ramotswe, she of the ‘traditional’ Botswana build. Published originally in hardback by the small Edinburgh firm of Polygon, the series has now sold millions worldwide, its fame spread by that surest of all methods, delighted-reader recommendation. The sixth, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, published last month, topped the fiction hardback bestseller list, making Polygon the smallest publisher ever to do so.

Alexander McCall Smith has now given us a new detective, Isabel Dalhousie, with a new series, no longer set in Botswana but in Edinburgh: ‘genteel home to ladies who lunch’ according to the blurb of his new publisher, Little, Brown. Both Precious Ramotswe and Isabel Dalhousie are shortly to be immortalised on television, but the two ladies have more in common than that. Both have received substantial independent incomes from their fathers, even if that of Precious was in cattle (used to buy her detective agency) whereas Isabel has pictures by Samuel Peploe on the walls of her elegant Georgian house. Both have, at the start, rotten personal lives, one having been betrayed by Note, a womaniser who deserted Precious when pregnant (the baby died) and the other by a literary Irish cad who took poor Isabel on a trip to his home in Ireland, only to have his mother hissing ‘slut’ at her (surely a most inaccurate description).