LAST YEAR, WHEN I recommended Alexander McCall Smith’s stories of the Botswanan female investigator Mma Precious Ramotswe (the latest of which, In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, is published by Polygon this month) as holiday reading, his name was not yet widely known. He was the Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh, Vice Chairman of the Human Genetics Commission, and a member of numerous national and international committees on Bioethics – a distinguished academic who had set up Botswana’s first Law school and turned out gentle, whimsical stories in his spare time. His life has turned upside down since then. Word-of-mouth recommendations transformed his books into huge bestsellers in thirty languages and suddenly he found himself an international celebrity. Now he has resigned from most of his committee posts and taken three0 years’ leave of absence from his university.

Alexander McCall Smith was born in 1948 in Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). After a happy childhood there, at eighteen he came to university in Edinburgh, where he, his GP wife and two daughters now live in a substantial suburban house comfortably crammed with books, twentieth-century Scottish paintings and precarious piles of paper that cover every flat surface in his office. He is disarmingly hospitable to visiting interviewers, apparently unhurried despite large workloads and pressing deadlines, and politely apologetic that crime fiction (which I write) does not interest him. Mma Ramotswe insists that her Ladies’ Detective Agency is ‘not here to solve crimes, we help people with the problems in their lives’ – which range from missing ostriches to man- eating crocodiles. The heroine of The Sunday Philosophy Club (to be published by Little, Brown in September), Isabel Dalhousie, is an Edinburgh worthy who happens to identify a murderer, but her vocation is philosophy.

Professor McCall Smith’s academic specialties – the legal and philosophical aspects of responsibility, the ethics of genetics – are profoundly serious, but he has a long list of interests, hobbies and enthusiasm, including playing the bassoon in The Really Terrible Orchestra (so bad that it is funny), reading (favourite poet: W H Auden), inserting friends’ names into his books, and listening to Mozart or African chants with equal delight. He seems as sunny as his stories, a contented sage whose concern with moral and personal dilemmas is the basis of both his professions.

I’m writing for the same reason that anybody writes, to share my interest in the world, and to portray it. But writers give themselves away every third sentence and I’ve given myself away. A lot of people write because they have a sense of loss and separa- tion, as anybody does who had an upbringing in a time and place that has gone. Whatever the flaws of that time and place were – I grew up in an unjust society – at the same time, you feel that sense of loss. When you’re dstanced from the landscapes of childhood, you’re going to look back with a certain nostalgia and interest.

So you wrote books for children.

I wrote thirty children’s books, quite a lot of essays and short stories, some for the BBC. I’d done a collection of Afiican stories called Children of Wm. And then I started to write these novels in the mid 1990s, nine years ago. I think it was a natural progression. I’d written a couple of novels before that which I’d never had published.

Hidden in a bottom drawer?

Well. there are a couple in the bottom drawer. And you’re ilso a publisher. A friend and I have a little imprint called McLean Dubois; we bring out hnny little things just for the sheer pleasure of it, it’s tremendous hn.

All that plus committees and teaching and long academic books and articles. How do you do it?

Judng things. I find I just have different parts of my life. But I’ve run out of time over the last couple of years and now I am completely devoid of time.

Do you write and that’s it, or do you polish many times?

I can just sit down and it comes out, and I’ll do a thousand words an hour, and three or four hours is three or four thousand words, and it’s in exact form, so not much editing apart from a little bit of tinkering. I find myself physically pretty shattered after that. It’s almost as if I’m in a trance. I don’t really talk or speculate about it a great deal, but obviously it’s a process of communicating with the subconscious mind.

Do you dream?

Yes, and I have marvellous dreams. I have once or twice recorded dreams which have been an inspiration. I do have dreams which I am aware of as a narrative, and it’s curious because I’m aware that the dream’s a story.

But not the story you actually write.

No. I think that the mind receives the stimuli, so what one reads and sees and hears is lodged away permanently or impermanently, depending. And then I think the mind itself, unknown to you, is reordering these and examining these possibilities, so using a mechanistic analogy, it’s performing a lot of operations. Writers may have particularly developed hnctions, which are doing this in a creative way, putting it into narrative sequences. It’s also clear that linguistic, grammatical functions are operating, and that goes back to what one has learned or read or committed to memory in the past. I have a sense of rhythm in prose, and I think that must go back to early exposure to Biblical prose and learning screeds of poetry at school.

You often use the vocabulary of religion, the language of belief

In the Botswanan books, I’m writing about people who actually would have religious beliefs. In real life Mma Rarnotswe would be a churchgoer.

Are you?

Very occasionally – I’m quite happy to do so, because I think the religious practice is one route to spiritual enhancement and recognition of the spiritual side of our life, which we must all have if we want to have a life of any richness at all.

I get the impression that your writing, which seems so simple and accessible on the surface, is a vehicle for making a moral point.

I’m stating a position on the world. You are potentially involved in a moral conversation with your readers and I happen to be interested in moral philosophy and ethics and so it’s perfectly natural for me to engage in that.

So your books advise, set an example, deliver a message.

I hope that I’m not becoming too didactic, but I think that people are interested and ready for this debate, it’s a debate of some substance when it occurs in fiction, and people actually like it. You’ve got to respect the reader, you don’t sit there and preach to people, otherwise they immediately close the book. At the same time, as a method of engagement with the reader, you can say, here are these ideas or views. They may not hke them, but here they are. I think people feel very strongly about these issues of how we are to treat other people, how we are to lead the good life, because it’s quite ficult to reinvent religious arguments for people who’ve lost it entirely

So you suggest pragmatic reasons for behaving well. For example, Isabel says that manners are the basic building block of civil society, the method of transmitting the message of moral consideration. ‘An entire generation had lost a vital piece of the moral jigsaw, and now we saw the results: a society in which nobody would help, nobody would feel for others; a society in which aggressive language and insensitivity were the norm.’

If you pressed me, I would say we value one another because we understand the value of the individual, the importance and preciousness of human life. If we don’t see that, then on pragmatic grounds, rather than anythlng else, I think we’ve got a Hobbesian danger of nastiness, brutahty and shortness codonting us.

But you remain an optimistic writer. I know you’ve been quite critical of contemporary Scottish literature’s tendency to miserabilism and pessimism.

I don’t like to read too much about the distressing aspects of life. There’s room in literature for the grim and room for social realism, but when you have a very realistic, gratuitously aggressive, negative literature, that unbalances things and it leads to a nihilistic view.

Would you censor it?

No, I’d just say that every writer should be aware of the fact that he or she is contributing to our moral universe and our shared conversation. and somebodv whose contribution consists of nihihstic, debased commentary, an amoral celebration of the amoral, should examine the philosophical and moral implications of that.

One could call your books moral celebrations of the moral.

Generally speaking, I find myself distressed by a world in which people relate to one another in a morally inconsiderate way. I think that it’s really very important that we should reflect on the moral implications of what we do. But not from any preachy position at all. I’m as flawed as anybody else, personally. But I thmk our passage through life does involve us making moral decisions every day; we could, should be cohnted by them. Every time we are caused vain bv the world. we shbuld retlect on how fortunate we &e and what misfortunes some other people may have. I find myself very interested in the ethcs of friendship, and I think for many people fiiendshp, human relationships, emotional relationships, love affairs, etc are a real encounter with moral questions right at the heart of their lives: how you treat your fiiends, how you treat people with whom you have long-term emotional relations, how you discharge your obligations to those who are in some lund of relationship of vulnerability with you.

You recently edited some legal essays about ‘the duty to rescue’, presumably ofthose who are not in any kind ofrelationship with you. Do you conclude that there is a moral even $not a legal duty?

Yes, looking at all the arguments, we do – the easy rescue which you can discharge without great difficulty. If I see someone who’s in dire need and I can very easily help them in a way whlch won’t make my Me practically unliveable. But life is a balance. The self has a legitimate claim.

You’ve moved into a world where strangers will think they have a claim on you.

I know there are people who take a close interest in me and what I do. I sometimes find that a bit disconcerting.

I wonder if that’s why you have Isabel Dalhousie reflect that people are entitled to their secrets. to their sense that at least 11 there was some part of their life which they could regard as ultimately, intimately private; because if they were denied this privacy then the very sey was diminished’. That seems to be what celebrities have to expect.

It is a bit of a surprise when people who turn up at every event know things about you which you didn’t think they would.

(He gets sacks full of fan mail, and shows me one from a woman whose mother was comforted by his books on her deathbed. He is obviously moved by it, and still a little surprised.) Do you think you’ll really ever return to academe? Or are you enjoying all this too much?

I’ll see what happens. I’m rather embarrassed to analyse what has happened to my books in the United States – there’s a very substantial element of luck. Just now, I’m delighted, it’s wonderful. There’s not a day goes past that I don’t think so. And I’m telling a story – which is what I really want to do.