In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, Blue Shoes and Happiness, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, Alexander McCall Smith

Susana Van Bezooijen, African Woman

(April 10, April 12, April 21) These are the sixth, seventh and eighth in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. I read the first five all in a row a few years ago, and really liked them. Liked them so much I bought the books, and tried to get other people to read them.

So this is coming back to an old favourite after a long hiatus. Of course it's going to be different. There is so much activity in the newer ones, sigh. One of the charms of the early ones was that very little happened -- the small cast sat around and thought a lot -- and yet profound answers to minor mysteries would suddenly erupt and you would be charmed and surprised by the solutions.

Now there are a lot of characters to keep track of, and they are often getting into quite dramatic scrapes that leave less time for sitting and thinking.

I'm also now seeing them through the lens of the Isabel Dalhousie series, and realizing that the two series are not opposite ends of a spectrum like I first thought. There are a lot of ethical issues in Precious Ramotswe's life -- she’s just not as Zen about them as Isabel. Both series have lots of domestic detail, lots of eating and drinking and looking at countryside. Same big issues and same small scales, just different countries.

I was kind of stunned recently by someone's off-hand remark to the effect that "McCall Smith's Botswana books are patronizing." This never occurred to me when I read the first five, but -- duh -- I can see now that even just the fact of a white Brit writing light-heartedly about black people in a former colony would arouse the suspicions of the politically sensitive. And then the language is very plain and simple, and the people address each other as Mr. So-and-So and Mma Such-and-Such in a kind of Dr. Seuss-y way -- it would be very easy on a superficial level to assume the Batswana are being infantilized.

But I read the books in the usual way (lol) and never saw any demeaning or belittling going on -- the books are warm and fuzzy, and even cute, sometimes, but they also have the thrill of the exotic and the wisdom of ancient fables. The humour is never at the expense of the main characters or their values. And I never took the style as a sign of a superior attitude. It reminded me from the beginning of reading the English version of a García Márquez novel... like McCall Smith was trying to create a "translated voice," which I find interesting.

To me, it was always simply that McCall Smith had created a new style of detective novel ...and a weird and wonderful one, too.