When Alexander McCall Smith flew from Scotland to Manhattan for a meeting with Random House in the late 1990s, he was pretty sure his life wasn’t on the brink of major change. Then 50 years old, Smith had already been writing children’s books for a decade and a half, and he was well into a career teaching medical law at the University of Edinburgh.
But back in the U.K., Smith (“Sandy” to his friends) had just published his first trio of adult novels to minor fanfare. Each were gently comic quasi-mysteries centered on a Botswanan private eye named Precious Ramotswe who investigated her neighbors’ small-scale personal problems—the title of the first book, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, gave the series its name. After reading about the budding franchise in the New York Times, Random House’s Edward Kastenmeier invited Smith to lunch to discuss publishing the books stateside.
“They said to come along at 11 in the morning, and I thought I would be given a cup of coffee and then shown the door at 12,” Smith, now 75, recalls via Zoom from his home on the west coast of Scotland, tidily dressed in a button-down salmon shirt and navy blazer. “But then I found out that they’d taken a whole restaurant, and they had all these publicists and marketing people and whatnot. I got out of the office at about four in the afternoon, and I distinctly remember going out onto Park Avenue and looking up at the canyon of shiny buildings, and thinking, Oh, my life is going to be a bit different.”
And so it has been. More than a quarter century later, Precious Ramotswe’s exploits have sold more than 20 million copies in English and been turned into an HBO series starring Grammy winner Jill Scott and Anika Noni Rose. In October, Pantheon will publish the 25th No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novel—a typically breezy heartwarmer called The Great Hippopotamus Hotel.
In it, Mma Ramotswe (mma being the Setswanan equivalent of miss) digs into the affairs of the titular establishment after its harried manager approaches her at a clothing store. The hotel’s owner has recently ceded control of the business to his niece and nephews, and ever since, the once reputable operation has fallen into disrepair. A bout of food poisoning from the typically reliable kitchen recently swept over a pack of travel agents; an entire day’s laundry went missing from the line; several guests have found scorpions in their beds. “Some of these things may seem like small matters, Mma Ramotswe,” the manager concedes. “But put them together, and they make a pattern.”
While Ramotswe teams up with her high-strung secretary, Grace Makutsi, to determine who might be trying to sabotage the hotel, Ramotswe’s husband, mechanic Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, is asked to procure a South African sports car for a well-connected 60-year-old client—a job he reluctantly accepts despite fearing the man may be using it to facilitate infidelity. “Poor men,” Ramotswe thinks after Matekoni details his dilemma. “How sad it was that something as unimportant as a sports car could turn a man’s head in this way.”
Even die-hard cozy readers may note the relative lack of stakes. There are no bakeshop murders or missing gems in a Mma Ramotswe novel; most often, the heroine resolves her cases by lending the perpetrators a sympathetic ear. By way of explanation, Smith asserts that he’s more interested in philosophy than plot. “I’m interested in the effects of kindness,” he says. (When Smith was shopping around the manuscript for The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, his first publisher urged him to add “more edge.”) “When I see kindness, I’m greatly moved by it, and I think most people are—they yearn for it. We live in a harsh world. People want to see the possibilities and the healing power of love.”
This preoccupation bears out in Smith’s other series (he prefers to write series, he says, for the opportunity to “be in continuing conversation with characters”). His 44 Scotland Street novels focus on the tender connections between a series of tenants who occupy a single multi-unit building in Edinburgh; his Sunday Philosophy Club mysteries follow philosopher-turned-gumshoe Isabel Dalhousie, who solves even smaller cases than Mma Ramotswe. By and large, Smith’s novels aren’t mere conveyor-belt tea-time entertainments—they’re moral arguments for empathy and decorum couched in inquiries about missing cats and marital strife.
Smith was born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1948, the youngest child of a British prosecutor, and spent his early life making up stories. After secondary school, he decamped to Edinburgh to pursue a law degree, and then bounced between Africa and Europe. While teaching in Belfast in the late 1970s, he submitted a children’s manuscript and an adult manuscript to a literary competition. The children’s submission won, launching him on a solid career of children’s writing before he struck gold with Mma Ramotswe.
Now Smith juggles eight series in all, plus occasional standalones, with nary a ghost writer in sight. The author estimates his productivity at about 1,000 words per hour, which winds up amounting to four or five books per year. “I don’t say that in any boastful sense, I’m just describing the process,” Smith says. “I go into what psychiatrists would probably label a minor dissociative state.”
In recognition of that prolificacy, Smith was recently knighted. At the end of 2023, the author received a letter from Downing Street summoning him to Edinburgh’s Holyrood Palace so King Charles could tap him with a “quite heavy” sword. “I’ve been lucky enough in my literary career to win a number of very nice prizes, and you do feel very honored,” Smith says of the knighthood, following up with a quintessentially British disclaimer: “You’ve got to be careful it doesn’t go to your head. But it is nice.”
Readers have commended Smith for accurately capturing the rhythms of life in Botswana, but he’s careful to stop short of claiming true authority. “Writers are always looking at the experiences of others. I do it all the time. You look at other people, and you imagine,” Smith says. “You’ve got to be careful about it, because you don’t want to claim an understanding that you may not have, and I wouldn’t want to do anything critical. But I’m writing in a very positive way about my characters.”
One way to think about it, he says, is that he sets his novels in a universe just left of the real world—one with recognizable conflicts that’s nevertheless a little more sprightly than real life. “You’re not denying that the world is a vale of tears; the world is a vale of tears,” Smith says. “But you’re concentrating on little human interactions that actually transcend that.”
With more than 100 novels to his name, and at least three more on the way in the next year, this much seems clear: that fateful Manhattan meeting with Random House produced a delightfully winning formula.
