 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
By Alexander McCall Smith
Abacus $22.95
 Alexander McCall Smith, a Professor of Medical Law in Edinburgh, seems an unlikely figure to be writing novels about a roly-poly female detective in the peaceable African nation of Botswana, but his endearing creation has turned him into a literary sensation (the TV series will be directed by Anthony The English Patient Minghella).
McCall Smith was hardly craving to get into print: before launching the adventures of Precious Ramotswe he had 50 books to his credit, including Forensic Aspects of Sleep and The Criminal Law of Botswana.
For fun he wrote Portuguese Irregular Verbs, stories about eccentric German professors penned to amuse academic colleagues. It, too, became a popular success, as have The Kalahari Typing School For Men, Morality for Beautiful Girls and the just-released Tears of the Giraffe.
The star of the show is Precious Ramotswe who pits her skills of detection - learned from a cheap manual, 'The Principles of Private Investigation' - against criminals, charlatans and wife-cheaters.
She is the daughter of hard-working Obed Ramotswe, born in 1930 on a plain bordering the Kalahari Desert. At 18 he went off to work in the mines in neighbouring South Africa, an experience he recounts as death nears.
'They put us in cages, beneath great wheels, and these cages shot down as fast as hawks falling on their prey... My job was to load rock after it had been blasted, and I did this for seven hours a day. I grew strong, but all the time there was dust, dust, dust.'
For years, Obed sent his money back home to buy cattle, returning to his beloved Botswana to reunite with his wife and meet the 'Precious' daughter he had never seen.
When her mother died, Precious left the farm to be raised by relatives, excelling in class and then working for a cousin's bus company where she recorded her first investigative success by catching an employee who was tickling the till.
Then she had a brief and violent marriage, to a jazz player named Note Mokoti. No more husbands for her - anyway, they all deceive their wives.
With money from selling her late father's cattle, she starts the No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency, supported by a fast-typing secretary, a tiny white van, and a teapot and three cups. Each chapter is a self-contained mini mystery, full of wry humour and down-home plotting, and of course Precious always gets her man.
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