The continuing pleasures of Alexander McCall Smith
Scots author Alexander McCall Smith proved with a single book that a mystery novel about an ordinary, decent person solving crimes and sorting out people’s problems in an unfamiliar country can be a best-seller. Then he did it again and again in an ongoing series. Then he changed characters and locales and has been writing another string of best-sellers.
Smith put Botswana on the map with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. His series featuring Mma Precious Ramotswe, the African country’s amply proportioned only female private detective, has developed a cult following — and a lucrative tourist industry for Botswana.
Another Smith series — how this man can write! — features Isabel Dalhousie, editor and now owner of a journal of philosophy, The Review of Applied Ethics, new mother and lover of a younger man. The latest Isabel Dalhousie mystery is "The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday," just out by Pantheon Books.
Isabel has a reputation for solving puzzles of the human kind, although her loved ones tend to look upon her more as a meddler. When a woman she meets at a dinner party divulges a shameful secret and pleads for her help, Isabel confronts the parameters of guilt. She also comes face to face with her own insecurities. Can she trust Jamie, her beloved? Or will she unwittingly push him away?
Like strains of lovely music softly played, the neighborhoods of Edinburgh, Scotland, form a lyrical background for the Dalhousie books. And readers with a Scottish soul, who retain those ancestral genes that cause their blood to race at the sound of bagpipes or their eyes to tear when certain poems are recited, might feel a surprising homesickness for a place they’ve never been.
But you don’t have to be Scots to enjoy this book. You just have to enjoy a good mystery in the tradition of those classic stories that present elegant, intriguing puzzles and characters you’ll feel you know or would like to.
There are certain writers whose name is sufficient guarantee that a book will be a pleasure to read. Alexander McCall Smith is one. I closed the cover of this book regretfully, sorry to be at its end, wishing for more of the story. How could an author do better?
