Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith: The Jurist Who Invented Mma Ramotswe

Before he sold forty million novels, he helped write the criminal law of a country. Before that he chaired ethics committees deciding what medicine was allowed to do. Then, in 1998, a woman named Precious Ramotswe set up a detective agency in Gaborone, and the professor of medical law became one of the most widely read novelists alive. At seventy-seven he was still filing a newspaper serial whose chapters go to the printer before he has written the ones that follow — composing a novel forward, in public, without knowing how it ends.

Bulawayo

Rodney Alexander Alasdair McCall Smith — Sandy, to almost everyone — was born on 24 August 1948 in Bulawayo, in what was then Southern Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. He was the only son, with three elder sisters, of a father who worked as a public prosecutor in the city. He was educated at Christian Brothers College in Bulawayo before leaving for Scotland.

Edinburgh and the Law

At the University of Edinburgh he took an LLB and then a PhD in law, and went on to teach at Queen's University Belfast. It was in Belfast, almost incidentally, that he won a children's book competition — the first sign that the academic lawyer had another career waiting.

Botswana

In 1981 he went to southern Africa to help co-found the law school at the University of Botswana. The commitment was not ceremonial: he co-wrote *The Criminal Law of Botswana*, published in 1992. A generation before Precious Ramotswe made the country famous to millions of readers, McCall Smith had spent years working on the machinery of its justice system, which is why the fiction's affection for Botswana reads as knowledge rather than tourism.

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The Bioethicist

Back in Scotland he became Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh, where he is now emeritus. The public appointments piled up: chairman of the *British Medical Journal*'s ethics committee until 2002, vice-chairman of the United Kingdom's Human Genetics Commission, and a member of UNESCO's International Bioethics Committee. He was, in other words, one of the people the British state consulted about cloning, genetic testing and the limits of medical research. He left his academic post in 2005 to write full-time.

Precious

He had already published around thirty books when *The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency* appeared in 1998. Set in Gaborone, it introduced Mma Precious Ramotswe, the first female private detective in Botswana. By 2009 the series had sold more than twenty million copies in English; by 2010 his fiction overall had passed forty million and been translated into forty-six languages. The twenty-sixth Ramotswe novel and a companion volume, *The Wit and Wisdom of Precious Ramotswe*, were both in progress in his seventy-eighth year.

The Serial

His most peculiar achievement runs in *The Scotsman*. The 44 Scotland Street books are written as a daily newspaper serial and have now reached a nineteenth volume, *The Prime of Bertie Pollock*. Chapters go to print before their successors exist. "The delightful thing about Scotland Street is that anything can happen," he says. "We can write about anything." Its most beloved character, the gifted seven-year-old Bertie — fluent in Italian, a saxophonist, alarmingly well read — is never permitted to age. "All the usual characters' lives are progressing apart from Bertie," McCall Smith explains, "but Bertie's prime is still seven. Why would you want him to grow older?"

Everything else runs in parallel: the Isabel Dalhousie novels, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs comedies, the Detective Varg books, *Corduroy Mansions* (2008), which he serialised online, a volume of poems, *In a Time of Distance* (2020), a contribution to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project in 2009, and the libretto for *Okavango Macbeth*, a Macbeth performed with baboons, staged at the No. 1 Ladies' Opera House in Botswana. When last interviewed he was simultaneously eighteen chapters into the new serial, converting a Radio 4 story into a novel, launching a podcast, and writing a play with the South African director Nicholas Ellenbogen.

The Really Terrible Orchestra

He co-founded The Really Terrible Orchestra, an amateur ensemble whose name is also its manifesto, and plays the bassoon in it. At seventy-seven he took up the saxophone: "I love learning new things." He lives in a Victorian house in Edinburgh's Merchiston with his wife Elizabeth, a doctor; they have two daughters. In 2014 he bought the Cairns of Coll, uninhabited islets in the Hebrides, in order to keep them as a wildlife sanctuary, and the same year visited Rawene in New Zealand, where his grandfather George Marshall McCall Smith had established the regional health services.

Why Alexander Is Called a Genius

The claim is not about prose. It is about cognitive stamina and range, and the evidence is unusually literal. He writes between 2,000 and 3,000 words a day, up to 5,000 when at home, and does it while holding five or six separate fictional worlds in active memory — Gaborone, Scotland Street, the Isabel Dalhousie books, the Detective Varg books, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs comedies — and switching between them without the voices bleeding. The 44 Scotland Street serial is the hardest proof: nineteen novels composed forward against a newspaper deadline, each chapter irrevocable once printed, with no ending known in advance. Almost no novelist attempts that once, let alone as a permanent working method. Set that beside a first career in which he co-founded a national law school, co-authored a country's criminal law textbook, and sat on UNESCO's bioethics committee, and the description that fits is polymath rather than stylist.

The counter-case has to be granted fully. Nobody argues these novels are formally ambitious or linguistically difficult; their governing virtue is deliberate gentleness, and the plainness of the prose is the point rather than an accident. Literary prizes have conspicuously not followed the sales. The honours he has received are for service — a CBE in the 2007 New Year Honours, a knighthood in 2024 for services to literature, academia and charity, honorary doctorates from Edinburgh in 2007 and St Andrews in 2015, and the American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award in 2009, presented by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Critics who dislike him find the books complacent, and it is fair to say that a fiction organised around human decency forgoes most of the tools other novelists use. If the word genius belongs here, it attaches to the jurist and the extraordinary productive machine, not to a claim that these are great sentences.

Legacy

The unusual thing about McCall Smith's fame is how much of it rests on generosity of attention. He gave a global readership a Botswana written by someone who had helped build its legal institutions and kept going back — to an opera house he helped fill, to an elephant sanctuary, to a river deck in the Okavango where he finished a recent novel. Forty million books in forty-six languages is a commercial fact. The more interesting one is that a professor of medical law, having spent decades on the hardest questions about how people should be treated, spent the rest of his life writing books whose entire subject is the same thing, in a gentler register.