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She disapproves of the interfering ways of a rich Indian merchant who hires her to spy on his teenage daughter, and winds up going to the movies with the girl instead of tracking down the boyfriend her father fears will steal her away. In the course of her work, Mma Ramotswe offers ample evidence of her country's complexities and contradictions. Matekoni, an honorable but timid mechanic who spends the first novel courting Mma Ramotswe, the second novel being pressured into adopting two Bushman orphans to provide his fiancée with an instant family, and the third in a (perhaps related) depression. This provides sufficient motivation, over the course of the three novels, for her to rise from secretary to assistant detective, and then to acting manager of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, the garage owned by J. In this, she is assisted by the equally formidable Mma Makutsi, a plain-faced, bespectacled graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College who has discovered, to her chagrin, that the better-paying jobs have all gone to classmates who spent more time at the hairdresser than the library. Not even America.Īs she pursues her investigations in the city of Gaborone and then out across the dusty cattle country where she grew up, not far from the Kalahari Desert, Mma Ramotswe acts as much like Miss Manners as Miss Marple. As, of course, is Mma Ramotswe, who recognizes the difficulties her country faces - poverty, disease and drought, to name just a few - but would never choose to live anywhere else. It's also very much about the variety and resilience of a nation to which Smith (who grew up in what is now Zimbabwe and taught law at the University of Botswana) seems utterly devoted. And by the time you've made your way through the second, ''Tears of the Giraffe,'' and landed in the third, ''Morality for Beautiful Girls,'' you've realized that all this activity is much less about whodunit than why. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency,'' but hardly any suspense. There's a good deal of bustle in the series' first volume, ''The No.
What else would you expect from a lady who can kill a crocodile with one perfectly placed shot in the pitch dark (and then slit its stomach to retrieve a crucial piece of evidence), but goes all wobbly when she hears someone lurking outside her house in the middle of the night? But Mma Ramotswe's methods - and her results - are as unusual as the novels they inhabit.
Of course, problems often lead to crimes.
''We help people with the problems in their lives. ''We are not that sort of detective,'' Mma Ramotswe proclaims indignantly when an important government official asks her to assist in catching a poisoner. And a quick check of his other publications reveals him to be the author of an entire volume on ''The Criminal Law of Botswana.'' But in keeping with his interest in tinkering with stereotypes - about Africa and, it seems, the detective novel - he gives us a heroine who turns out to be interested less in building a conventional case than in following what we would call common sense and she calls old-fashioned Botswana morality. ''Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill.'' Obviously, Smith has read his Dinesen.
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From the opening line in Smith's series of novels about Mma Ramotswe (the polite Setswana form of address by which she is known, even to her most intimate friends), it's clear that he's familiar enough with southern Africa to put a playful spin on most Western readers' assumptions. But it's quickly apparent that these two have more in common than energy and eccentricity.
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His latest literary creation is a short, hefty (or, as she prefers, ''traditionally built'') middle-aged African woman with the deceptively delicate name of Precious Ramotswe, who has traveled a bit in her native Botswana but has never been as far as Johannesburg - and certainly not as far as ''London or wherever detectives went to find out how to be private detectives'' before setting up in business as her country's first and only female sleuth. Alexander McCall Smith is an elderly professor of medical law at Edinburgh University, a prolific author of reference and childrens' books and the founder (and resident bassoonist) of an ensemble called the Really Terrible Orchestra.
Paper, $12.95.ĪT first, they might seem the unlikeliest of couples.
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