Alexander McCall Smith is having a good year. His latest book, Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, is an international bestseller; and, in March, HBO launched a well-reviewed mini-series based on the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, of which Tea Time is the 10th instalment.
A writing machine, McCall Smith is also the author of the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, and the 44 Scotland Street series.
And as if being one of the most prolific English-language authors alive wasn't enough, he is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and has served on national and international bodies concerned with bioethics.
McCall Smith was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and taught law at the University of Botswana. He lives in Scotland, but his experiences on the African continent are what inform the No. I Ladies series, which follows the detective work of the heavyset Precious Ramotswe in the Botswana capital of Gaborone.
“A very powerful theme in fiction is that of loss,” McCall Smith, 60, told the Globe and Mail's Simon Houpt in an interview in March. “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.”
McCall Smith will be taking readers' questions until next 5 p.m. Wednesday, June 10. Readers can submit them via e-mail at webbooks@globeandmail.com, or by posting them as comments on this story.
We'll publish his responses in the newspaper and online on Saturday, June 13.
