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good afternoon.i'm ann mossop from the opera house. and it's my pleasureto welcome you and our guest this afternoon,alexander mccall smith, to this talk inour ideas at the house series. so it's a great pleasureto welcome him to the stage
breathe hot yoga west seattle, in a year where he's publishedeight new books to come and talk to usabout as many of them as we can fit in this afternoon. alexander mccall smith.
(applause) -thank you, ann.-thank you. we're talking this afternoon... alexander is going to give usall the news from everywhere, which i think meansthat we're going to try and go from regensburg to botswanato london to scotland. but before we do that, i don't know. i have wanted to ask about somethingthat is completely off the topic because i came acrosssome of your twitter...
..your tweets earlier in the day, and i just wanted to say howbeautiful and poetic they were. those of you who haven't read them, tell us about why you have becomea twitter person. i was told to. (laughs) my publishers in new york saideverybody has to tweet these days and if you don't,you're regarded as tremendouslyold-fashioned and not in touchwith the social media.
so i said ok, and so i signed up for twitterand i quite enjoy it. i don't say very much. well,you can't say very much on twitter. you can just give very laconicmessages in telegraphese, and so i do that. then i found that i quite enjoyedreading other people's tweets because as you knowyou can reciprocate signing and you get some very peculiar thingssaid on twitter. -do you twitter yourself, do you?-no, i don't.
-oh, right.-i mean, i do... i signed up but have failedto do anything about it. well, there are...you're one of these people... you look at their statisticsand it says 'followers - nought'. -(laughs)-exactly. -'tweets - nought'.-nought, exactly. so i'm obviously very old-fashioned. what if somebody cameand followed you? if you've found somebody that...
well, they have, and i've given themnothing to follow. -nothing to follow? (laughs)-no, i'm very behind the times. we had stephen fry visit us last year and that was when i first understoodthe pleasures of twitter because he is an incessant tweeter,and to see him having popped up, "this is the view out ofmy dressing room at the opera house," and all the newsof what he was doing, so when he wasn't here, you could track perfectly wellwhat he was doing,
not to mention what his alter ego,mrs stephen fry, was up to. so then i understood it, but ireally do have to galvanise myself, so i will be inspiredby your very poetic example. -well, thank you.-(chuckles) many of us really came to... for many of us, it feels likeyou came into being fully formed in 1999 or 1998 when we first read the first book of 'the no.1 ladies'detective agency' series,
but you've really been a writerfor many, many years before that and writing not just legal booksbut writing many things. yes, i did, i wrote quite a lot before i wrote 'the no.1ladies' detective agency'. the 'no.1 ladies' detective agency' was the first bookwhich had any real impact, but prior to that i'd writtenquite a lot of short stories, quite a number of short stories. i'd written a collectionof short stories,
i'd written a collection ofafrican traditional tales, and i'd writtenover 30 children's books. and then things changed and i started writing novels. i was at the time that i wrote'the no.1 ladies' detective agency', i was fairly reconciled to havinga relatively small readership. i had a readershipbut it was relatively small. so i hadn't anticipatedthat things would change when i wrote 'the no.1ladies' detective agency'.
when you look ata list of your books, it's a very interesting thing to dobecause they are innumerable... and when i said i hadn't readeverything that sandy had written, that did also include not having read 'pike fishing in ireland:the social context' or 'the criminal law of botswana'. oh, you've missed yourselfon that, ann. (laughs) nobody reads that anymore. but looking at the listof publications,
there's a periodaround just up from 1998 when the first 'no.1 ladies'detective agency' was published, which is very interesting to look at, because we go from'the forensic aspects of sleep' to 'the no. 1 ladies' detectiveagency' the following year, 'the popcorn pirates','in the protectorate', 'justice and the prosecutionof old crimes', 'monkey boy', 'tears of the giraffe', and then the fiction outputaccelerates enormously
and we see less of'the forensic aspects of sleep'. but i wanted to ask youabout that transition from being an academic and writeron legal matters to becoming a fiction writer,which, if we're looking at this list, we can see that occurringover a period of time, and to tell us what that was like and how much of thatwas you consciously deciding that you were really goingto pursue this and how much of itwas things happening.
yes, well, i suppose i must,deep down inside, have wanted to write fiction. i think that was probably somethingwhich was very deep and very permanent in that i remember writing...as a boy i used to write. i sent off my first manuscriptwhen i was eight. it must just have been a few lines. i had a letter backfrom the publisher, which was very kind of him.
so i think i always knewthat i wanted to write, but, of course, writershave to earn a living. ann: mmm, of course. it's not possible to say, "i'm going to be a writer and that'swhere i'm going to earn my living." now, some people do thatand they get away with it. there are some people who aresuccessful with their first book. they write their first book whenthey're 21 and it's a great success. ann: jonathan safran foer,who was here the other night.
did he do that?well, there you are. -willie dalrymple was another case.-very young. willie wrote that book i thinkwhen he was still an undergraduate, his first book, or pretty closeto still being an undergraduate. and that's admirableif one can do that, but for most of us actuallyyou have to wait. you have to wait a while, because i think its exceptionalhaving anything to say when you're... -when you're 19.-when you're 19.
now, i remember when i was 19... i don't know how you feltwhen you were 19, but when i was 19, i thoughti had an awful lot to say. oh, an awful lot. i thought i knew an awful lotand in fact i didn't, although actually there aremany 19-year-olds who do know a lot. every so often you meet peoplewho are 19 and they know far more than you knowand it's deeply disappointing. (laughter)
well, but i think very often, though, those beautiful books thatpeople write when they're young, sometimes that first bookis not what they know but it's a storythat comes out of who they are and that growing-up experiencethat has that real power. that's right. i mean, a really good example of somebody writing a bookat a very early age and doing a sustained work of fiction
is of course 'the young visiters'by daisy ashford, which is a marvellous book. i'm sure many people will know it. written by...she was nine, though,just over nine, i think, and she wrote this marvellous book'the young visiters', which was over 60 pages. it was a fairly substantialwork of fiction, and of course it's gotthat wonderful opening line, one of my favourite opening linesof all time, when she writes -
bearing in mind it's writtenby a 9.5-year-old-girl - "mr salteenawas an elderly man of 42." and the interesting thingabout that first line is when you mention it to teenagers,they don't see what the joke is. -(laughter)-ann: "yes, so?" you've got to be very careful. you have to knowwhat you're writing about. there are some people who clearly, unfortunately, don'tknow what they're writing about,
but it doesn't deter them. -ann: no.-(laughs) and they write withwonderful solecism. i read about a book which was writtenby a writer from west africa who had clearly notvisited london before but decided that he wouldset his novel in london, and he referred toall the palm trees. as you would, a natural part of life. yes! (laughs)
and, of course, people wrotethose books about the westerns. people were always writing westerns. italian writers - all the spaghettiwesterns were wonderful. and, actually, on the subject, those marvellous inspector ghotebooks by harry keating - he wrote thosebefore he went to india. he'd never been to bombay,as it then was, and he had travel guides to bombay. he sat down with thoseand he wrote these books,
which apparently werereally very accurate because the travel guideshad been accurate. -so he had created his own...-he'd created... ..an entire fictionalised versionof bombay. the bbc took him to bombay - mumbai -and introduced him. they took himon his first visit there and introduced him toa real inspector of the bombay cid, which of course is whatinspector ghote, his hero, had been. and they made a wonderful,charming film
as he went around and he saw scenes that he would have described inhis book before he ever went there. and the real indianpolice inspector said, "you know, you've got it rightin these books, absolutely accurate." and it was all based onsecond-hand knowledge, which...that's a great talent there. ann: it is. i wanted to talk to you a little bitabout detective stories, i guess. our cultures at the moment
are absolutely addicted todetective stories in all media. you know, we startedfrom sherlock holmes, going through kind of the golden ageof 20th-century writers to people in that heritagelike p.d. james and then to this cropof forensic-obsessed... oh, yes. either the police procedural versionor still the lone detective. -autopsy novels.-autopsy novels. (laughs)
and what i'm interestedin talking to you about is the way that precious ramotsweand isabel dalhousie are both detectivesof a very, very different kind, so that in a wayyou have appropriated some of those aspects of a detective, if nothing else by calling... starting off with'the no.1 ladies' detective agency' and making her a detective. but it's a very unusual kind
and neither of those heroinesare, you know, gun-toting, that kind of feminist detectiveof the '80s or '90s tough girls, but they havea tremendous moral authority and they have a mystery to unravelwhich is or isn't a crime. and i just wanted to talk to you about why, where, what do you thinkyou took from it? what kind of new form of mysteryor detection we see in those two series of books? well, i didn't consciously set outto do anything to the genre
because the genre obviouslyis well established and you've got all sortsof subcategories in the genre. i didn't really set outto turn the genre on its head. and i think as far as mma ramotswewas concerned, the idea was just toreally have a setting which enabled her to deal witha whole lot of people, with a whole lot of people towalk in off the street more or less and bring their problemsand their issues and talk about that bit of societythat they come from in botswana.
so it was a way of painting a pictureof the country and the lives of the peoplein the country. it was a device, really.so, we don't really have crime. the first novel hasa little bit of crime, though - there is an abduction in it. but i put that abduction in at the suggestion of the publishers,you know. it wasn't there to begin with. and they said, "well, really,we should actually have..."
if you have a detectiveyou have to have a crime. yes! and so i said,"ok, we'll have a kidnapping." and really my heart wasn't in it. but you were very obedientto the publishers nevertheless. you've got to obey your publishers.very, very important. and so since then we've had issues -people have come with issues to her. but she says in one of the books, "my job is to help peoplewith the problems in their lives. so those problems can be anythingfrom a very mild case of curiosity
about what a spouse is getting up to, to perhaps some issue abouta dishonest employee or something of that sort. but the idea really is to talk aboutthe life of these people and their day-to-day existenceand the world that they live in, this country of botswana, whichi find particularly interesting. isabel, of course,is a moral philosopher, so her issue really is to deal withmoral problems that people have. so there's a bit of a mysterybut it's not crime.
and the latest one,which is called... ..the one which has just come out, an australian professor of philosophygoes to edinburgh because she had been adoptedin scotland, then brought out to australia. she wants to findher biological parents, so it's not a crime at all and it's just an investigation ofthe complexities of people's lives. yes, and what is interestingabout it is, i think,
that, for example, if you look attelevision and people's... ..and airport bookshops being stuffed with stories of blood,mayhem, buried corpses, if we think about, for example,michael moore's thesis that the reason why people in americaare so much more likely to go out and shoot people, it's because they're obsessed withthe idea of crime on television, that really it createsa culture of fear and distrust. and if you contrast it witha culture like canada next door...
-yes.-..there's much more trust. and so what interests meabout those books is that it's about very much about solving people's everyday problemsin both cases, although of different kinds, but it's also about peoplewho live in a web of community that is about building and rebuildinginterpersonal trust. yes, yes. so it is about those kind of directpersonal connections between people.
it's about solving people's problemsat first hand and in a way that reinforcestheir trust in their relationships with other peoplein their community. well, thank you very much, ann. could you write the blurbfor the next novel? sorry, is that a polite way of sayingi was being a bit long-winded? no, no, no,it was a polite way of saying that you were very complimentary. but it is actually about...i think it is about community.
the botswana books are aboutquite a tight and intimate community, and, indeed, the edinburgh booksare about that as well in that the edinburgh books dwellon those aspects of edinburgh which are very specificallycommunity-oriented, where people know one anotherand know one another's business. and i think that's somethingthat i'm very interested in. and mma ramotsweoften talks about that when she talks about the old botswanaways and the old botswana morality. and there was one descriptionsomewhere in one of the books
where mma ramotswe is talking abouther father's hat. obed ramotswe, who we don't reallymeet in the books particularly, except in the first book, i suppose -we see a bit of him there - because he's now, as they sayin botswana, he's late. and obed was a very fine manand he had this battered old hat, and she remembers once how he hadleft his hat somewhere or dropped the hat near mochudi,where they lived, and somebody had taken his hatand put it on a wall so that when he next went pasthis hat would be safe for him.
and then she says, "people don't treat the hatsof others with respect anymore," which i thought is, in a sense,a metaphor for the loss of...intimacyin human relations and the sort of relationshipsthat you will find in a small town. we don't live in small towns anymoreand we live in very anonymous cities. and i think we yearn for that. we want to go back to a worldin which we knew the other, to a world in which we feltwe had bonds with the other,
that we knew where the other personcame from, in a sense, which, of course, you get in countryareas - they'll say, "so and so..." there's a wonderfulscots expression, "i kent his faither" -"i knew his father". it's that sort of societythat i think we miss. we can't turn the clock back,much as we'd like to. you know, we can't really re-createthat sort of society, although i supposewe'd dearly love to. well, i think what we might wantto do is re-create it selectively.
yes. yes, maybe we can do itselectively. so that the aspects of community...we want the aspects of community but not the contagious diseases. that's right, yes.yes, that puts it very well. yes, we want modern plumbing,effectively. absolutely. one other thing that thosetwo characters have in common is that they're women of affluence,relative affluence, in their communities,
who have a choice about what they do and have chosen this career,at least as a part of what they do, of investigatingother people's problems. and it's quite interesting. how do you think about moneyin that context? well, it's interesting thatwhen i created isabel dalhousie, i created her as somebodywho'd inherited a bit of money and therefore she had the time to run her review,her applied ethics journal.
i suppose in a sense,for dramatic purposes, it was suitable that isabel shouldhave a bit of money, which, in fact,she's quite generous with. and then i realised that actuallypeople slightly resented... ..some of the readersslightly resented that, the fact that isabel didn'thave to work for a living. in fact, she does work -she runs this journal - but she's not in what you'd callpaid employment. and i was slightly surprised.
and so i had to make it clearto people that she actually was reallyquite generous with her funds and that she gave money to scottishopera and various other causes, because otherwise i feltthat they would misjudge her, and i didn't want themto misjudge her. how did you find outthat they slightly resented her? they told me. (laughs) you know, if you want to know whatreaders feel, you can in extremis. -you can listen to them.-(laughter)
so i had letters.and some of the letters said... this is the early stages of isabel. some of the letters said,"i'm trying to like this woman." now, of course, what i had done was i had painted her asa fairly typical edinburgh woman of that particular sortof intellectual interests - her interestsare interests of the mind - and people misinterpreted that. particularly my readers in the unitedstates misread her, i thought.
they had a different picture of her. -so i had to try and soften her.-in what way? well, i mean, i was... i thought that she wasa very credible edinburgh lady. edinburgh isa slightly brittle place. a slightly spiky place. i don't know if you ever saw maggie smith's wonderful portrayalof jean brodie in 'the prime of miss jean brodie'.
that's what edinburgh is like. the typical world,that's what it used to be like. and i suppose the concert hallversion of edinburgh is a bit that. and those people, those rathersort of dryly witty ladies of which isabel was an example,are actually quite nice. they're very amusing company. but i think some of the readers felta little bit intimidated by her and i didn't want that to happen, so i went out of my way to point out
the more positive aspectsof her character. she's certainly somebody... from memory of those earlier books,where... ..it was a lot of thinkingand a lot of talking and a lot of reflection on things, and in some ways i think she has,whether through that process or whether through the processfor readers of her relationship with jamie,having a child, all of those things have kind ofvaried her preoccupations.
yes, they have.i think that that's right. i think the relationship with jamiewas quite important in that respect, in that what i'd originally plannedfor isabel was that jamie would be a friend,a platonic relationship, because jamie, after all, was theformer boyfriend of isabel's niece, and, you know,then i came under great pressure to let things geta little bit steamier. -(laughter)-or put in a kidnapping. or a kidnapping! (laughs)
and one friend of mine in particularwho lives in edinburgh who reads those manuscripts - after i write an isabel book i giveit to my friend peter stevenson, and he, in fact, i've written himinto the books. he appears as a friend of isabel's. and i showed it to peterand peter said, "when is isabel going to reallytake matters further with jamie?" and i said,"no, they're just friends." and then i had an interviewwith a journalist.
i went down to london and was interviewed by a journalistfrom the 'daily express', and she said, "you've got to letisabel have an affair with jamie." and i was pretty shocked by thisbecause... and i said, "these books take placein edinburgh "and we don't go infor that sort of thing." -(laughter)-no edinburgh cougars. (laughs) yes. and so i did eventually,i allowed it to happen
and they became closer. in fact, sufficiently closefor little charlie to be born. and so i've sort of... she's maybe more humanas a result of that. and i'm fine to see her progressingin that way. it's very interesting,and i think it means that you get that philosophical mindturned to other kinds of matters, to thinking about children and thefuture in a different kind of way. -yes.-yeah.
no, i think... but so... if we go back to botswanafor a little while and look at some of those issueswith mma ramotswe, it's the sense of a woman of relativeaffluence and power and choice and being able to exercise that alsoin relationship with men, having gone throughthat very traumatic experience in her earlier life. -awful marriage, yes.-yeah. did... with the way her relationshipwith j.l.b. matekoni works,
tell us about how that came about. well, again, i hadn't really plannedfor them to get together. this is an interesting thing. i put my characters into the book and then somehow they pair offwith one another, and it's not really intended. domenica and angus lordiein 'scotland street', they're about to get marriedin the next book. so i suppose it's just biology -
if you put two characters together,they do that. but, in fact, mma ramotswetook five volumes to marry mr j.l.b matekoni. it really did go on. and mma makutsi was engagedto phuti radiphuti for three or four volumes as well. so we have these long engagements, and we had a long engagementfor isabel as well. -yes, yes.-so i don't know what that signifies.
-caution.-caution possibly, yes. that's one interpretation of it.(laughs) we've seen the first episode here of'the no.1 ladies' detective agency' on television last week and presumably the second last night,although i didn't see it. what did you think ofthe television adaptation? i was very pleased with it. i was very pleased that anthonyminghella had bought the film rights, and i thought that the first one,which was a feature film,
which was shown tokick the television series off, was absolutely beautifully done. jill scott, who played mma ramotswe,was wonderful as the character. she'd never been in africa before. jill scott, she was by way of beinga blues singer and jazz singer, a jazz and blues singer, in america. and anika noni rose,who played mma makutsi, hadn't been to africa either. j.l.b. matekoni had -
lucian msamati, who played that role,was african. but i think they did itreally, really well and there was beautiful musicand it was visually so lovely - the gorgeous shotsof the countryside. and anthony minghelladid botswana proud, in my view. he went out therebefore he started to film, he went out several times,he visited the various locations. he really tried to get the ethosof the country, and, indeed, he respectedthe ethos of the books,
for which i was most grateful. i thought he wasa very great film director. and he stamped that on the series. and there's a stunningly good onewhich will be the fourth one. so two have been done so far, so not the next onebut the one after that. do look out for that. an absolutely lovely film. it's where the american womanmrs curtin goes to botswana
to see what happened to her son,who died when he was there. and that is just the most beautifulbit of acting. there's a scene there where the little girl interpretswith her san grandfather, and the filming is just so lovely. it's just beautifully moving.so i'm very pleased. and that's quite unusual, for authors to say that they likethe film version of their books. usually authors moan tremendouslyabout the film version of their books
and say they had nothing to do withthe book and they stamp their feet. but actually i'm very pleased. i thought they did it very, very well and i haven't had any stampingattacks on that front yet. well, i'm glad to hear it, although of course in a theatreyou're perfectly safe to stamp. something that has come about i thinkeven more with those film versions, for many people, untilthey had read one of your books, many peoplein your western readership
would never really havethought about botswana, would not have knownanything about it, and suddenly found this greatpleasure in reading about it, understanding it, understandingthe culture and the people, a then seeing those film versions, also seeing that landscapereally come to life. this is a tremendous responsibilityfor you, i would imagine. yes, i think that's quite right, ann. i've been very conscious of that.
and i've never...i've never said ever that i'm portrayinga social-realistic view of botswana. i've said that i've been selectiveall the way along and i've said that i really wantto talk about the positive things in that country. and generally speakingit's a remarkable country and it's got a wonderful recordand i'm celebrating that. but i do feel that so many outside writerslooking at sub-saharan africa
get very negative and they dwell on all theterrible things which happen. and terrible things do happen, but i think thatthat's rather unfair to africa, because obviouslyit's like anywhere else - there's a mixture of good and bad. so my books deal with the good. and as far as botswana's concerned, i've said thati'm going to talk about
what i see as being very positivecharacteristics of botswana. i accept that there will be respectsin which one could be critical. but that's not my particular job. i think the books had a big impact,i'm told, on tourism in botswana and you can do a mma ramotswe tour. if you go to gaborone,you can go on the mma ramotswe tour. they've got eitherthe one-day tour or the two-day tour. and i'm not sure what exactlythe difference is. it's possible the two-day tourgoes slower.
or maybe you have to uncovera particular infidelity yourself. yes, you have some challenge or... no, i think it's more likelythey stop and then they say, "well, you sure you saw that?" and they reverse and you take a look. they'll take you to mochudi,where mma ramotswe grew up, they take you to the little operahouse that we established there, the no.1 ladies' opera house, which is a little bit smallerthan this establishment.
and then they take you past the housewhere they say i lived, but i think they've gotthe wrong place. but it doesn't matter.they've chosen a convenient house. as long as everybody'senjoying themselves. as long as everybody's happy with it. can we talk a little bitabout 'scotland street' and about life in edinburgh? and as a bertie addict, i want to see if you might read usa little bit
from 'the importance of being seven',which is... i'd love to do that. poor little bertie.for the benefit of... is there anybodywho doesn't know about... does anybody need a backgroundon bertie? there will be some who won't know. bertie's a wonderful little boywho's six - he's been six for the last six years. the other characters in the bookshave gone on,
but bertie's actually stuckat being six. and his problem ishe's got a serious, serious problem with his mother, irene,who is a very, very pushy mother. we have a major problem in edinburghwith excessively pushy mothers, which i gather is a problem thatoccurs in parts of sydney as well. we could perhaps talk about thatlater on. but anyway, bertie's mother makes himlearn the saxophone, go to yoga lessons - he goes to yoga classescalled yoga for tots
where the children are so small many of them they have to be pushedinto the yoga position because they can't sit up yet. and he also goes foritalian conversation lessons - he goes to italian conversazioni so that he can appreciateitalian culture. and he has psychotherapy as well. poor little boy. anyway, this is a little excerptfrom the...
..not the latest,but the book before, which is called'the importance of being seven', which indicatesthat it's about bertie. and little bertie, his mother, irene,this dreadful woman, has a favourite charitythat she's very keen on which sends relief suppliesto romania, and it sends out-of-date drugsand out-of-date jeans to romania. and the romanians actuallydon't want either of these but nonetheless they get them.
and irene says there'sa big truckload of relief supplies going off to romania. and she wants to take bertieand his little brother, ulysses, who bearsan extraordinary resemblance to the psychotherapist, dr fairbairn, wants to take them downto say goodbye - there's a ceremony to say goodbye to these three big trucksgoing off full of relief supplies. there's going to be a bagpiper
playing 'will ye no come back again?'and so on. and so they go down there and the bagpiper plays,trucks go off, and then bertie looks aroundfor his mother and he can't see herand his mother is missing. and so he takes ulyssesback to the flat and he phones his dad at workand says, "mummy has disappeared." stuart, the father, comes backand indeed irene has disappeared. and the police are contacted.
she does get back later onin the book. i'll just tell you what happens before i readthis very short excerpt. she does get back. what actually happened was she got into one of the trucksto look at the relief supplies and then they closed the truckand they drove off. and they didn't hear her banging onthe side until they reached hungary. -and so...-(laughter)
so she's away. and in this little excerpt... this excerpt is from a chaptercalled 'the comfort of friends'. irene has been missing for three daysat this stage. she's not back butbertie's got to go back to school, life's got to continue. so he goes back to school,he goes to a steiner school and he's at the steiner school and he's got these perfectly dreadfulfriends at the steiner school.
there's a horrible little girlcalled olive who says that bertie's got tomarry her when they're 20 and she says she's got it in writing. and there's tofu, who is the sonof well-known edinburgh vegans, although his mother has just diedof starvation. and then there's pansy. and so, anyway, there's... i get letters from vegans about that. there's bertie in the playground atthe steiner school feeling a bit blue
because he's a 6-year-old boyand his mummy's missing. although she is very pushy,he is missing her. and olive and pansy see him standingin a melancholy way in the playground and they go up to poor little bertie, and bearing in mind this chapteris called 'the comfort of friends'. let's see what happens. and it's just a page,a very brief excerpt. "'you mustn't hold tears in,'said olive. "'it's better, you know,if you let yourself cry.
"'we won't laugh at you,will we, pansy?' "pansy shook her head. "'poor bertie. you must feel awful. "'and just think, you werethe last one to see her alive.'" "'that must make you feelreally dreadful. "'yes,' said olive.'that's really bad.' "she paused. 'i don't supposethere's any news yet, is there?' "'i don't think so,' said bertie.'the police are looking for her. "'maybe she just got lost.'"
"olive looked at him with pity. "'i don't think so, bertie, do you? "'i don't think you get lost atthe end of your own street, do you? "'no, no, i don't think she's lost.' "'she's probably kidnapped,'suggested pansy. "olive considered this possibility.'maybe,' she said. "'people do get kidnapped, even ifthey don't have all that much money. "'maybe they mistook herfor some rich person "'and are holding herin a cellar somewhere.'
"'or an old castle,' said pansy. "'could be,' said olive. "'somewhere like tantallon. "'you know that old castlenear north berwick, bertie? "'we went for a picnic there once "'and i thought that it would bea really good place "'for kidnappers to hold people. "'do you know if the police have "'looked in tantallon castle yet,bertie?'
"bertie shook his head. "'they put notices upin scotland street,' he said. "'they have pictures of my mummyon them.' "olive looked disapproving. "'i don't thinkthat's a very good idea, bertie. "'that could annoy the kidnappers. "'they don't like peoplegoing to the police.' "'no, they don't,' said pansy. "'that's probably made ita whole lot worse.'
"olive agreed. "'i wonder if they've senta ransom demand yet, bertie. "'have you had a letter yet?' "'i don't think so,' answered bertie. "'my dad hasn't saidanything about it.' "pansy remembered something. "'sometimes they cut offthe person's ear, bertie.'" "'and then they put it in an envelope "'and they send itto the person's house.
"'that shows thatthey've got the person.' "'that's correct,' said olive.'i've heard about that. "'that happens quite a lot in italy, "'but now we're all inthe european union.'" "'they may have sent your mummy's earalready,' said pansy. "'maybe your dad just thought it wasjunk mail and threw it away.'" "'that's quite possible,' said olive. "'we never open our junk mail.we just throw it away. "'it never crosses our mind
"'that there could be somebody's earin it.'" well, this encapsulates perfectlywhy bertie's addictive, and why, if you see anybody readingone of these books on the train, you have to be tolerant of theiroutbursts of hysterical laughter. he's a wonderful character andthose wonderfully awful children... aren't they horrible?they really are dreadful. that's just pansy and olive,that's not even tofu. oh, he's even worse.he spits at people he disagrees with. he's dreadful. (laughs)
can you talk to us a little bitabout those kids and where they came from and... -real life.-(laughter) -blood relations?-(laughs) but also bertie's life. i mean, i must say i didn't interpretwhen i was reading that. i didn't think he wanted his motherto come back at all. i think he was rather hopingthat she didn't and that he is desperate to be freeand to be free of this suffocation.
yeah. and the way you write it isso extraordinarily convincing from inside this little boy, and i just wanted you to talk to usabout where bertie came from and when he's going to turn seven. (laughs) i'm sorry about the seventhbirthday which hasn't yet arrived. i'm afraid he's not really going toturn seven very soon. -just 'cause i...-another six years. ..i like him so much as he is.
he's got the innocence of childhoodand he tells the truth. that's the other thing about bertie,that he tells the truth. everybody else around himis lying through their teeth and bertie tells the truth. he's so lovelyfrom that point of view. so he represents innocence and charm. and also i thinkthat an awful lot of little boys actually are somewhat suffocatedby their mothers, with...for the best reasons.
the mothers want their little boysto be concert pianists and things like that, and perfectly reasonable. yes, one-in-three-million chance ofmaking a living as a concert pianist. so i think that if you talkto a little boy, even a little boy who's gotabsolutely straightforward parents, it's very aspirational. they've got plans -they want to be something else. they are looking forward to freedom.
i think all children arelooking forward to freedom, to the point at which they're goingto be 18 or whatever. so it's entirely natural, and i think particularlywith little boys, because they've got so much energy and they want to go offand conquer the world, but then they have to... they're trapped at yoga for tots. ..go to yoga for totsand things like that.
so i've certainly knowna few little boys who have been enrolledin courses like that. i think it does exist. and do you thinkthe kind of yearning for freedom is exacerbated by this more... you know, we talk about it i thinkin an australian context quite often, which is that previous generationsof parents told their children, "don't come homeuntil you're bleeding" or "don't come homeuntil the sun sets.
"go out and play,"particularly in australia. and there's a different styleof parenting now of which irene is perhapsthe most extreme example. i think thatthat's probably right. i think that if we think...those of us who are over 40, perhaps, think of the freedom that we hadin our upbringing and how children havevery little freedom now, i think it's really sad. you see these childrenwho aren't allowed
to go out and ride their bikesand have that sort of freedom. so there's a serious pointin the background. i mean, there are a lot of forceswithin society that would actually restrictour freedom in all sorts of respects, for health and safety reasons. for example, you know,dreadful restraints. in the uk...i don't knowhow bad it is in australia, but in the ukit's been virtually impossible for teachers to take kids on outingsfrom schools because if you go...
i mean, this is just utterly risible,it's ridiculous. but if you actually wanted to takeyour class down to the beach, you have to go first. the teacher has to go first to do arisk assessment report on the beach, so has to go and photograph the beach and make notes on the beachand then come back before you can take children to... i mean, this is just utterly absurd. and as a result of that,british kids go nowhere
and they never go to the beach. it's extraordinary,quite extraordinary. the government has saidit's going to try and change that and it's going to force childrento go to the beach. -(laughter)-in scotland. -yes!-really something to look forward to. -you will go to the beach.-(laughter) no matter how risky. we've got a couple of minutes left,i think,
before we want to open the floorto you to ask your questions and we've got londonand regensburg to go. so we might just have a glancing...a glancing chat about those. very interestedin 'corduroy mansions' and the cast of charactersthat you've brought together there living in london, because i think in some ways, having the talk that you did for usyesterday at the festival of dangerous ideas
looking about the social forces affecting peopleliving in big cities, it seems to me that some of thestories in that most recent book, particularly about peoplewanting to understand who their relationships are with, that they are single peopleliving alone or together in flats. -yeah.-discussions about where is home. what is their relationshipwith their family? what are the ties in their lives?
is it just their wonderful dogwho's led to mi6? so that whole thing about the dissolutionof those social structures and what it means for peopleliving in that kind of place. yes, i think that if you lookat a city like london, which i don't knowparticularly well... i obviously go down to londonquite a lot and know people there, but i gatherthat corduroy mansions, the way i describe it,
contains a fundamental impossibility,which obviously i have to ignore, which is that people would talkto their neighbours. and apparently this doesn't happen. and go to visit their housesand... yeah. and that doesn't happen in london. -it happens in edinburgh.-yeah. you talk to your neighboursin edinburgh and i think you talk toyour neighbours in this country. but apparently in londonyou wouldn't,
and in a place like wherecorduroy mansions is set, in pimlico, you might not knowwho your neighbours are, and that's always astonished me. but that's no good fromthe point of view of fiction because you could hardly write a bookin which nobody talks, and so i madethis tremendous fictional leap and had neighbours talkingto one another. and i think that'swhat people want to do. i think they want to talk to people.
i think they also want totalk to one another in trains. people have stopped talkingto one another in trains. you used to get tremendously boringconversations in trains. and now you just get to listen toother people's tremendously boring... you listen to other people'stelephone calls. but there was a wonderful... gerald hoffnung did a wonderful bit of unhelpful advice for visitorsto britain deliberately, the sort of advicethat you give to visitors
which is the oppositeof what you must do. he said, "always rememberwhen you visit britain "and you get into a railway carriage, "it is considered politeto go through the carriage "and shake hands with all the..." and you can think ofall sorts of versions. i thought of new york,advising somebody going to new york. "always remember when you get intoan elevator in new york "to make eye contactwith the others."
-(laughter)-and try and... we'll quickly detourto professor von igelfeld. -yes.-it's a beautiful... those books are beautiful satire of the most satirisable kindof academic, a philologist, a german philologist no less. what is it about it that you enjoy? is it revengeon every academic nitwit that you dealt within your past life?
-a pure pleasure?-no, it's not that. there's no sort of schadenfreudeinvolved in it. von igelfeld certainly has veryunfortunate things happen to him, but it's not that. although the aetiologyof those stories, so to speak, was i have a very old german friend, professor dr dr (honoris causa)reinhard zimmerman, who is also the godfatherto my younger daughter. and he's a very tallgerman professor,
he's about 6'5" or 6',something like that, a very imposing-looking professor. and he's a very strong tennis player. he doesn't have to move around, he just stands at the backof the court and reaches out. and reinhard came to see us once and i went for a run along the sideof the edinburgh canal. we went for a jog. and reinhard said to mewhile we were running along,
"why don't you write a story "about a german professorwho can play tennis?" and i said yes. and i wrote the first one which wascalled 'the principles of tennis' about three german professorswho can't play tennis but have got a bookthat tells them how to play tennis, and they thinkthat you can play tennis if you read the rules in the book, which was their sort of approachto life.
and i sent this story off to reinhard and he wrote back and said,"very funny." but he encouraged me to write more, so i wrote the first book, which was'portuguese irregular verbs'. and of course in those days - it was before the bookshad really taken off - my normal publishers wouldn't dreamof publishing fiction under the titleof 'portuguese irregular verbs'. so i have a small imprint of my ownin edinburgh
that i run with a friend of minethere. we publish a couple of books a yearat a complete loss, 100% loss. and we do the most peculiar books. we specialise in booksby friends' mothers. so if anybody's mother's written abook, have a word with me afterwards and we'll try and fit you into the publishing schedule. anyway, we'd published thisunder our little imprint. we printed 500 copies. and professor dr dr (honoris causa)reinhard zimmermann
bought 250 of them. so they went off to germanyand they were circulated. he sent them toall his german professorial friends and i had lettersfrom these professors saying, "very accurate,we know many people like that." and then i wrote a sequel which was 'the finer pointsof sausage dogs', and then the third book, which was called 'the villaof reduced circumstances',
and this new onewhich i've just got out which is called'unusual uses for olive oil'. i did a signing in melbourne, in hawthorn in melbourne, and this woman came up to me with acopy of 'unusual uses for olive oil' and said, "i'm an olive oil producer "and i've got every bookabout olive oil. "should i buy this one?" but of course if you ask an authorshould you buy his book,
of course they say yes and theyusually say, "buy multiple copies." but she did. and olive oil does come into it, but only as a meansof lubricating the wheel on this unfortunate dog that hasthree wheels, having lost... -(laughter)-it's a complicated story. the dog with...yes, a very complicated story. well, it's time for you to be ableto join the conversation. could we have some more lightsin the house, please?
there are microphones over hereon the aisles. and do feel freeto come and ask a question from one of those microphones. yes, here in the red shirt. (inaudible) is freddie de la haybased on a real dog? this is the dogin the 'corduroy mansions' books. thank you. thank youfor that question. no, he's based on a...
there's a boy calledfreddie de la hay. there's an actual real little boywho's the son of a bookseller and i thought,"what a wonderful name." so i called the dog after him,and he was quite pleased, the boy. -(laughter)-well, he's a very brave dog. so he's not based on a real dog. and in fact,i invented the breed for him - he's a pimlico terrier. and that doesn't exist either.
but people might perhaps liketo breed the pimlico terrier because he's a very, very fine dog. he was employed.he's had a chequered career. he was employed at london airport,heathrow, as a sniffer dog and then he lost his job when they did an inquiryon equal employment at the airport and they discoveredall the sniffer dogs were males. and they fired half of themand appointed female dogs to... ..which was a bad move.
it didn't work because all the male dogs weremore interested in the female dogs than in the contraband. but freddie goes on to havea wonderful career as a spy in that book. he was recruited by mi6,very successfully. (laughs) over here, number one. woman: just on issuesof gender equality, i'm very interested that you writefrom a woman's perspective
in a lot of your characters. is there a particular reasonfor that? thanks for that. no, not really. i think i find the conversationof women interesting, so therefore i decided in'the no.1 ladies' detective agency' it would be women's viewof the world, and i just find it interestingto reflect on what women talk about. they do have different conversationfrom the conversation that men have. i mean, women -i know this is cliched -
but women are more prepared to talkabout feelings than men are. if you go into the average bar and there's a group of men at the barand you hear them talking, you can be fairly sure that they'renot talking about their feelings. they might be talking aboutwayne rooney's feelings. they may be, yes. so that interests me. and i think as a novelist you have to be able to put yourselfinto other people's shoes.
so i think it's important that a male novelist should be ableto put himself into women's shoes, and there are some male novelistswho enjoy doing that. this is going downhill. ok, well, i'm hopingthat you'll be able to restore the moral toneof the conversation. i'm told that this willpick up my voice. along the same lines a bit, which is that you mentioned feedbackto your publisher
from women in america or whatever. what about feedbackfrom african women and men? indeed, in our book groupwe couldn't find fault with the very first timewe read one of your books, and so to be the devil's advocatei said, "do you think they felta bit patronised?" so i'm just interestedto know about that. thanks for that question,that's very interesting. i hope that they didn't feel...
i hope the people in botswanadidn't feel that. some, for all i know, may have. they're very polite people so they'd be very hesitantto draw my attention. i don't think it's patronising. i mean, i think mma ramotswecould be anywhere actually. i think she could be in scotland. she happens to be in botswanathat i'm writing about. i think she's a universal figure.
and i thinkthat people in botswana... ..a number of people in botswanasaid to me that they are very pleased that it presents a very complimentarypicture of their country. that's certainly somethingwhich has been fed back to me, because they are proudof their country, with good reason. and so they say,"well, this is a very positive... "..it is a very positive picture." so i don't think it's patronising.
and i actually also, in the sense that we have a bit of a laughwith mma ramotswe and certain things she's... exactly the samein my scottish books - big lou, with bertie, et cetera. i treat all my characters equally. so i know the pointthat you're raising and i'm certainly conscious of it, but i certainly, touch wood,people haven't...
..in botswana haven't reallyfelt that too strongly or if they have, they haven'traised it with me a great deal. what i do find,sometimes people in botswana - and this really gives megreat pleasure - somebody will come up to me and say, "oh, i've got an auntie just likethat woman, she's just like my..." and to me that's...i really love hearing that. that is really very encouragingwhen i hear that. mm. over here.
woman: yes, this follows ona little bit from what you've justbeen speaking about. i wondered whether you growsteadily more irritated or whether you grow to lovesome of your characters more or less as you write them? well, thank you for that question.that's extremely interesting. i suppose some of the characters,when they have irritating traits, will cause me to be a bit irritated. bruce in 'scotland street'who's a terrific narcissist
and who used that awfulclove-scented hair gel... i don't know whetherclove-scented hair gel exists, but it's the sort of thingthat would irritate, and i get very irritated with him. but i've got a certain affectionfor them and i think i've got affectionfor all of my characters, and if you actually lost that, if you lose that affectionfor characters, i think it's quite difficultto write about them.
you've got to be able to see thingsfrom their point of view. i don't do real villains and it mightbe different if i did real villains. we haven't really got many villains. well, we had charlie gotsoin the first book. he was pretty unpleasant. and in 'scotland street'we had lard o'connor, who's the glasgowinformal businessman... ..emerging businessman. and i bumped him off, which i wasactually quite sorry about,
when he fell down the steps at biglou's coffee shop and that was it. and the reason why i bumped him off was not because i didn'tlike lard o'connor. i really quite liked him. he was a sort of a lovable gangster,glasgow gangster, who ate deep-fried mars bars, which, actually,that i think is a myth. i've never seen anybodyeating a deep-fried mars bar, but it is said to happen in glasgow.
it doesn't happen in edinburghbut it happens in glasgow. anyway, lard o'connor,the reason why i bumped him off was not because i was irritatedwith him or disliked him, but i think because i wanted todescribe a glasgow gangster's funeral because i'd seen a pictureof one of these events where all the mournersall looked pretty miserable and they all had great big scarson their face. and so i wanted to describelard o'connor's funeral. and they go in for big wreaths,
they have big wreathswhich spell messages out, so lard o'connor hadthese big floral tributes, one which just said 'big man'and another one said 'quality' and another one just said 'deed',which is glaswegian for 'dead'. that was sent by one of his enemies. so, no, i like my characters,even irene, even bertie's mother. i've got a sort of affectionfor her, a bit. (laughs)i can't dispose of her. i've actually... it was in sydneyabout three or four years ago.
i did a lunch forthe 'sydney morning herald', literary lunch, and two ladies came up to mein the signing queue and said, "we want youto deal with that woman." -(laughter)-i'm with them. and they wanted me actuallyto dispose of her, bertie's mother. i can't dispose of bertie's mother. i did have hopes when she was lockedinto the container. that was all that we did.
and somebody also suggestedthat she could... she goes to this floatarium where she floats inthe floatation tank to de-stress. somebody suggested there could bea specific gravity error in... ..in making up this highly supportiveliquid and she could sink. but i really can't, because i don'twant bertie to lose his mother. it was bad enough having hertaken off in a lorry to hungary. we've got two more questions here,we've just got time for them, so we'll take this oneand from this lady here.
hi. i just wanted to knowif you ever get writer's block and how you deal with it? -if he ever gets writer's block?-thanks for that question. no, i'm very fortunate,touch all available wood, which is in short supply up here, for the fact that i don't appearto get that. i think writer's blockis possibly depression. i think when writers saythat they've got writer's block i think they're probably undergoinga short period of depression, rather,
or, alternatively,they've got nothing to say. i mean, that's reallyquite a posh way of saying, "i've got no ideas" -"i've got writer's block." of course, most people... i mean, some people havewriter's block, they get it at birth and they... ..and those peoplewill never write a book. (laughter and applause) and you can imagine the doctor...
..the doctor says,"i'm terribly sorry to tell you, "your baby's got writer's block." "but it can havea perfectly decent life." if it learnssome useful practical skill. some practical skills. and of course a lot of people feelthey've got a book inside them and they come and ask advice andthey say they've got a book for me. well, they could have an x-ray. -that's one of the...-(laughter)
have an x-ray. with modern sophisticatedimaging techniques, they can now tell, the radiologistcan tell what the book's about. they can tell whether it's fictionor non-fiction. -exactly, they say 'biography'.-it's a novel. these are the magnetic images.it's amazing. (woman laughs) i can't... thanks for that question.that's really good.
i can't even ask my question. would you...the man behind you? no, i will ask my question.it's terribly important. -(laughs)-alexander: yeah? do you ever roar in laughterwhen you're writing your own books? well, thanks very muchfor that question. no, but occasionallyi do have a small laugh. and...and my wife says,"what are you writing?" she can tell when i'm writingsomething which is tickling me.
often bertie scenes can sometimesamuse me. so yes, sometimes i do... -woman: i hope so.-(laughs) thank you for that. and we'll take this last questionquickly. i hesitate to ask the questionbecause i'm the first male. but did you know roald dahl, and do you think there may be an african influenceon both your writing?
right, the first question wasdid i know roald dahl, and the second question was couldthere be an african influence? i didn't know roald dahl,although we shared an agent, my first agent, gina pollinger,gina and murray pollinger. they actually were dahl's agentsthrough most of that and currently the dahl estateis handled by my current agent. but no, i didn't know him. i think he must have beenan extremely interesting man. the african influence -uh...possibly.
yes, i think the african influenceof african culture in 'the no.1 ladies' detectiveagency' is fairly strong. my main literary influencei think in relation to that book, 'the no.1 ladies' detective agency', and the subsequent booksin the series, was r.k. narayan, the indian writer,who's a wonderful, wonderful writer, his 'malgudi' novels. and i think they havereally influenced me in the way in which 'the no.1 ladies'detective agency' developed.
and there are other influences. barbara pym is one.benson, the humorist, is another. thank you. i'm very gratefulto our final question for bringing us back from the brinkof complete hysterics. not a seemly way to finish sucha serious session this afternoon. i want to thankalexander mccall smith very much for coming to talk to us. alexander: thank you.thank you very much.
-thanks, ann.-thank you. and thank you to you alsofor joining in the conversation. alexander mccall smithwill be signing books in the foyer at the bookshop areajust after this. and we look forward to seeing you at another ideas at the house talkin the future. noam chomsky, daniel dennett,david sedaris, although only one of thosewill give you anything like the number of laughswe've had this afternoon.
-thank you.-thank you.
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