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Thank heaven for small mercies. A few weeks ago, when the opportunity to interview Alexander McCall Smith came in over the transom, someone suggested we hang out in a music shop or maybe the Juilliard School of Music, where McCall Smith might noodle away on a borrowed bassoon.

You see, in addition to being one of the most prolific English-language authors working today, McCall Smith is also the co-founder of the Really Terrible Orchestra, an Edinburgh-based amateur musical outfit that is, by most accounts and its own admission, pretty awful.

But the bassoon plan has failed to come to fruition, which means the only aural assault in the offing will be the usual New York squawking street symphony endured on the way to a Belgian bakery café a stone's throw from Carnegie Hall.

“We are an optimistic orchestra,” McCall Smith says with tongue-in-cheek cheer, as he walks briskly along West 54th Street. “We never get invited anywhere, we invite ourselves. But we get very good houses for an uninvited orchestra.”

They have invited themselves to New York's Town Hall for a gig that will take place, appropriately enough, on April Fool's Day. “Our audiences actually very much enjoy themselves. They love the idea of a group of rank amateurs playing music, and not doing it very well.”

It's not that McCall Smith doesn't believe in excellence, but perhaps there are higher values, like community. Audiences at the RTO concerts participate in a Sound of Music sing-along medley and are given paper bags during the orchestra's rendition of the 1812 Overture to provide comical fortification of the cannons in Tchaikovsky's symphony.

A casual reader of McCall Smith's most popular series of books, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency , would recognize his abiding interest in community. The books, set in the Botswana capital of Gaborone, centre on Precious Ramotswe, a gentle, heavyset gal – she calls herself “traditionally built” – with a kindly husband and a couple of foster children. She spends her days solving low-grade mysteries and passing the time with her diligent but faintly humourless assistant, Mma Makutsi.

The series's 10th volume, Tea Time for the Traditionally Built , which will be published next month, follows Mma Ramotswe as she solves the mystery of a local soccer team that has lost its winning ways, but the book is more interested in Ramotswe's relationship with her ailing white van and her reflections on life in Botswana.

At one point, she evinces pity for the wife of a soccer player who spends most of her days alone: “She knew that it was not always easy for women in such places, where the easy companionship of the village had been replaced by the comparative anonymity of the town. ... We are born to talk to other people, she thought; we are born to be sociable and to sit together with others in the shade of an acacia tree and talk about things that happened the day before.”

“A very powerful theme in fiction is that of loss,” says McCall Smith, 60, now sipping from a large latte in a bowl. “I think that's often a very powerful reason for people writing; a lot of people are trying to heal the separations that they find in their lives – a sense of separateness, sense of loss. Hence, novels about childhood.

“One of the things I think we're all aware of having lost, as our societies get more complex and larger, is the sense of – maybe this sounds tremendously trite, it's not a novel observation in any sense, but nonetheless true – is a sense of community and a sense of belonging to a small group, and sharing things in a certain, smallish group.

“There is this intimacy still in Botswana. It's a country of just under two million people, and there's this sense of connectedness, in that people tend to be related to one another. You have to be very careful about what you say, because you're talking about someone's distant cousin.” In The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books , Botswana is Africa's Mayberry, USA.

McCall Smith himself was born in Zimbabwe and moved to Edinburgh as an adult, but he returned to Africa to teach law at the University of Botswana and goes back to the country once a year in part for himself and in part to feed his books.

This year, he will be there twice, once for his annual visit in June and then again in October, when he will premiere an opera, for which he is writing the libretto, at a small opera space he founded in an old Gaborone garage space now called The No. 1 Ladies' Opera House.

It is part of a small but growing No. 1 Ladies' industry: With perhaps 15 million English-language books sold in the series, readers feel so connected to the area that they seek out its real-world inspiration.

They respond to the books' relaxed atmosphere of comfort and safety, and McCall Smith's depiction of the slow pace of Gaborone life. Often, he says, he receives letters “from people who have suffered.” Cancer patients tell him they read his books during their chemotherapy.

Life may move slowly in McCall Smith's Botswana, but the author himself never seems to take a pause, writing an average of four to five novels a year. (In the past, he would often write his Botswana books while visiting his sisters in Vancouver, where he keeps a boat, but his schedule has kept him away from Canada lately.)

Don't be too impressed, he says. He doesn't spend all his waking hours at the desk. But then, he doesn't need to: He writes about 1,000 words an hour.

“I'm very conscious of my good fortune in this respect,” he says. “I just sit there and I go into a sort of trance, and it comes from the subconscious mind. I don't even have to say to myself, ‘What's going to happen now?' I don't even have to really think in a conscious fashion. It's different from, say, applying one's mind to an issue.”

He's got four running book series to his credit. This morning, he was hammering out some of Volume 6 of TheSunday Philosophy Club series (a.k.a. Isabel Dalhousie Mysteries). He's part way into the new 44 Scotland Street series book, which would also be Vol. 6, as well as Vol. 4 of his Portuguese Irregular Verbs series.

There's also a screenplay adaptation in the works of a novel by his friend, the Zimbabwe-born author Michael Holman.

He is not, however, directly involved in the adaptation of his No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books for a television series, which begins tomorrow night (Sunday, Mar. 29) on HBO Canada. “I would have liked to have been asked,” he says, looking a little piqued.

As for Vol. 11 of the Botswana series, he's already decided on one of the plots. And unlike most authors, who have many reasons for keeping mum about their work (superstition, uncertainty, fear of ideas being stolen, and so on), McCall Smith is only too happy to give away at least one strand of his next story. A voluble sort, it's almost as if he can't help himself; he wants to please, wants to entertain. (You can stop reading here if you don't want to know what happens, but then the pleasure of his Botswana books has rarely been found just in the plots.)

Fans of the series will know that Mma Ramotswe's professional bible is the (fictional) guide book, The Principles of Private Detection , by Clovis Anderson. In the next book, McCall Smith reveals, she will actually meet her hero.

“Clovis Anderson will come to Botswana as a visitor and he will be travelling around Gaborone, and he will pass the sign saying No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, and he will stop just to introduce himself as a professional courtesy, and she will discover that he is a very agreeable man, and when he discovers his book there, he will be so delighted that somebody's reading his book, because he would have been a total failure,” says McCall Smith. “He would never really have had much business, never really have solved any great cases – so he wrote this book, just based on wishful thinking, really.

“Mma Ramotswe will soon sense this, and she will very kindly invite him to participate in one of her investigations, which she will of course solve but she will let him think that he's solved it. He will go away a bigger man, cheered by this meeting with her.”

If McCall Smith keeps to his usual pace, it should be in bookstores soon.