Comforting thoughts from a man of so many talents
In the biographies of most writers, the books come one by one, often separated by an interval of two or three years; over a writing lifetime, there may be half a dozen, or ten, or at most some 20 or 30. When it comes to the literary biography of Alexander Mccall Smith, though, the rhythm is very different. Since his life as a writer of fiction for adults began to pick up pace in the late 1990s, his novels have come in great swathes and series, and now – including the children’s books he wrote in the 1980s and 90s – total more than 120.
At the top of the list stand Mccall Smith’s two dozen global best-selling novels set in and around The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, a small business in Botswana run by its wise and wonderful owner, Mma Ramotswe; but there are also the 44 Scotland Street series, set in Edinburgh’s New Town and still published as a daily novel in this newspaper, the Sunday Philosophy Club series, starring lady detective Isabel Dalhousie, five other shorter series, at least six individual novels, and 37 children’s books. Mccall Smith has sold scores of millions of copies of his novels worldwide, and has been showered with honours and awards, including a CBE in 2006, and a National Arts Club of America Medal of Honour. And all this is is to say nothing of his academic writing, which involves more than a dozen books on aspects of medical law, written between 1983 and 2004. Before his retirement from academic life in 2005, Mccall Smith was for many years Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh.
To list all these achievements, though – and to recognise Mccall Smith’s extraordinary work rate – is also to say nothing of his much more private life as a poet, which has always run alongside his fiction writing and academic work, and occasionally found expression in opera librettos and song cycles. Last year, Mccall Smith published his first poetry collection, In A Time Of Distance, partly inspired by the experience of lockdown; and now, to mark our 200th Scotsman Session since the start of the pandemic, he has not only recorded a reading of the poem Household
Gods, from that collection, but has also written and recorded a brand new poem called Daily Paper – a love song to The Scotsman, and a celebration of the ideal, perhaps now fading from our internetdriven world, of a daily paper that forms a reliable and trusted part of the furniture of our everyday lives.
“What I wanted to do, in the poem, was to capture that feeling of becoming accustomed to a newspaper as a feature of your everyday world,” says Mccall Smith, from his home in Edinburgh. “I think what the last year has done, for many of us, is to emphasise the importance of the habitual, the local and familiar. We’ve just lived through an age of very rapid globalisation, which has brought huge benefits to some, of course. But our sense of local belonging has been weakened by those conditions; and a great deal of the tension and unhappiness we see at the moment is perhaps attributable to the pace of that progress."
Alexander Mccall Smith’s poetry collection In A Time of Distance is published by Polygon, price £12.99