I am a big fan of Alexander McCall Smith's series, soon to be 10 volumes, usually referred to as the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. Lynn and I have listened to all 9 volumes on audio CD and have become big fans of the narrator, Lisette Lecat. The series has become an HBO program. The pilot was broadcast last Sunday and today at 7 central time, the first post-pilot episode will be broadcast.
One summer as we were about to go on a vacation to Door County, the peninsula that divides Green Bay from Lake Michigan, I bought The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency audio book. The idea of starting a detective agency on the edge of the Kalahari desert in Botswana seemed novel and possibly interesting. The illustration made me wonder what sort of detective cases would be available to Mma Ramotswe.
The language turned out to be excellent. The plotting a modern rarity, gentle but still spirited, with no gunfire, explosions, or sweaty bed scenes. Good gunfire and that has its place, I think, but who wants a steady diet of that sort of thing?
After quite a bit of this series, I read three volumes of McCall Smith's Prof. Von Ingelfeld series, which are funny and quite unusual. McCall Smith is, or was, a professor of medical ethics at Edinburgh University. He seems to like to pick on German academics but in my experience, there is plenty to pick on with academics everywhere.
I have listened to a couple of the Isabelle Dalhousie series. Being set in Scotland, they are not narrated by the wonderful South African Lisette Lecat. Of what I have read, they are the least appealing of any of his fiction.
We have listened to all four volumes of the 44 Scotland Street series. At one point, McCall Smith was having lunch with an editor of The Scotsman and made a remark that novels are not serialized in newspapers anymore, as they were in Dickens' time. The editor immediately offered to publish a novel in daily bits if Smith would write it. He undertook the task and found the daily deadline and the lack of possibility of revising what was already published more difficult than he had imagined. I think that in the best parts of the 44 Scotland Street series, his writing achieves its highest level.
Last week on Sunday, HBO broadcast the pilot for the movie series of the No. Ladies Detective Agency. The pilot ran for about 1.75 hours. Tonight, the first episode airs at 7 PM central time.
Bill
