Scottish writer Alexander McCall Smith was 8 years old when he sent his first manuscript to a publisher. “You can imagine how awful it was,” he said.The story was rejected, but from all appearances McCall Smith has recovered. Now 59, he's become a literary whirlwind, regularly churning out new installments in four different series, including the international best-selling “No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.”
“I very much enjoy writing, and I'm very lucky in that I find I can write quite quickly,” McCall Smith said in a phone interview from Boston, an early stop on a tour that brings him to Carlsbad Thursday night.
“I don't have to sit and cogitate. It all seems to come to me, almost like I'm in a trance, and off I go. I know there are writers who agonize over every word, but I'm not one of them.”
His newest book, “The Miracle at Speedy Motors,” is the ninth in the “Ladies' Detective Agency” series. It again features Precious Ramotswe, “Botswana's foremost solver of problems,” a good-hearted woman of considerable size and intuition.
These aren't hard-boiled thrillers in the Chandler or Hammett tradition. “I don't consider them mysteries at all,” McCall Smith said. “They're really books about somebody who happens to be a detective.” Critics often use the word “sweet” to describe his work. Nobody ever called Sam Spade sweet.
In the new book, the closest he comes to the kind of action normally associated with detective fiction is a car chase – well, a cart chase. As in shopping carts, careening (sort of) through the aisles of a supermarket.
McCall Smith said he had no plans to do a series when the first one came out in 1999. At the time, he was a professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh (he's since retired), and although he'd written children's books and legal tomes, expectations were modest. The publisher's first print run was just 1,500 copies.
But critics and readers responded well, and McCall Smith wrote a sequel, and then another. The series has been translated into more than 40 languages and has sold more than 7 million copies in the United States alone.
His contract calls for him to do at least two more, but he said he doesn't expect to stop there. “My long literary conversation with those characters continues,” he said. “Every year, when I sit down to write, I can't wait to hear from them, to catch up on their lives. It doesn't feel right to stop yet.”
If anything figures to get in the way, it might be his schedule. The writing pace alone is dizzying, about four books a year to keep the different series going. “I break all the rules doing that many,” he joked. “It's probably illegal.”
Smith said what gives him his energy is “sheer interest in the different worlds” he's created: the domestic doings of Precious in Botswana, the philosophical musings of Isabel Dalhousie in Edinburgh, the pretentious bumblings of Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld in Germany.
He admitted that “every so often I discover one character will want to wander into another story,” but generally he doesn't have trouble keeping them apart.
There are overlaps in tone in the stories, especially the dry humor, the warmth and an underlying belief in the fundamental goodness of human beings. All intentional, McCall Smith said.
“That's just the way I look at the world. There's no reason being nihilistic. We have to do our best in this life, and do our best to enjoy it. There's a lot to be positive about.”
When he's not writing at home in Edinburgh, he's often touring. His current one is the second of three this year to America, and he'll also tour Europe, South Africa and Scandinavia. At many of his appearances, he dons a kilt. “I get complaints when I don't,” he said.
In June, he's scheduled to make his annual trek to Botswana, a country he's come to love through writing about it and through working there (he helped establish a law school at the University of Botswana). This time, he'll be on hand to open The Ladies No. 1 Opera House, a new 60-seat venue in a converted garage.
And if all the writing and touring weren't enough to keep him busy, he also has the Really Terrible Orchestra, which he founded with his wife, Elizabeth, a doctor. He plays the bassoon, “a lovely instrument, although not when played by me.” He bought his at a garage sale in Vancouver.
“We have terrific fun, but we make the most dreadful noise,” he said. “We try, we really do, but we can't play.”
That doesn't stop people from coming to hear them, though. Their concerts frequently sell out. “Classical music can be such a formal affair, and I think some people love the idea that there's an orchestra that will get it all wrong,” he said.
In a sign of just how well things are going now for the prolific McCall Smith, an agent in New York has been in contact about a stateside tour for the orchestra, really terrible or not.
