His primary career, put on hold three years ago, was as professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh. For one thing, he's only recently started doing it full time. There's more than a bit of novelty in McCall Smith's writing career. Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are. The books are "portrayals of people in whom generosity of spirit is very strong," he says. But McCall Smith, once his laughter subsides, quickly tosses out a central one. In the conversation that follows, a variety of possible reasons for the success of "The No. Not the normal ingredients to send books flying off airport racks.
(Quick: find it on the map.) Their heroine, Precious Ramotswe, is a woman of "traditional build" (she's fat) who shuns violence, lacks interest in sex and appears to spend as much time sipping bush tea as she does solving clients' problems. How is it that these quirky, slow-paced, mild-mannered entertainments - which are not really detective stories, despite the series title - have acquired millions of readers around the world? Indeed, the question that prompted the psychiatrist story is one that seems almost rude to ask: The rest of the formula is something of a mystery, though. It's not the greatest joke you've ever heard, perhaps, but McCall Smith's good humor is irresistible - and surely a factor in his books' success.
His whole body shakes, rumpling his coat and skewing his tie. The laugh that follows sends his voice up nearly an octave. One group would get the book and the other one would get blank pages. Then: "You can imagine the control group. "I don't know whether they got that plus Prozac," McCall Smith says, starting to grin. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series - and of much, much more, but we'll get to that - is expanding on a story about a psychiatrist who said he'd been prescribing the books to depressed patients, with good results. Slumped diagonally across a stiff hotel armchair, the Scottish author of the six wildly successful novels in the "No. Alexander McCall Smith has a laugh that could charm a hissing cobra, and he's about to let loose with one now.
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