Right up your street

RIGHT now, Alexander McCall Smith has a problem with Bruce. It's not a major problem, because Bruce is not a real person but a fictional character who's been in 44 Scotland Street ever since Britain's first "daily novel" started three years ago.

The fifth volume of the series begins on Monday. In the past three years, it's gone worldwide: you can read about Bruce and the other inhabitants of Edinburgh's most famous fictitious address in Lithuanian, Latvian, Turkish, French, German, Polish and (coming soon) Italian bookshops. Across America, 44 Scotland Street sells in the kind of numbers most writers can only dream about.

With well over a million copies of the series sold in the English language alone, there's already a huge readership waiting to find out what Scotsman readers will be the first to discover: what McCall Smith's gently comedic imagination has in store for all his characters (see panels) in the new series. But we'll start here with Bruce, because he's the one member of the cast who's causing his creator the most problems.

When the series began, Bruce was merely a moderately-pleased-with-himself New Town chartered surveyor. But as McCall Smith tiptoed out on to the tightrope of writing a series that appeared in newsprint long before he had any idea of how he was going to end it, Bruce started to become something more: "An echt, 84-horse-power narcissist of toe-curling proportions."

Nobody seemed to mind. Just the opposite, in fact: the more self-regarding he made Bruce, the more readers' e-mails told him they liked it. "The nature of this series," he says, "is that you can use a lot of things you wouldn't otherwise be able to get away with. You can tip over into the just-credible-but-quite-absurd."

That licence to exaggerate is most clearly seen with Bertie. Most six-year-olds, even tyrannically hothoused ones, can't speak reasonably fluent Italian or play the saxophone well enough to busk in Paris, but by now we expect nothing less from Bertie. Whereas at first Bertie was just a boy walking along to nursery with his mother and watching out for bears in the pavement cracks, by the fourth volume, he'd effectively become the series's central character, and the one whom audiences from Sydney to Seattle ask McCall Smith about most often.

Back to the bounder Bruce, though, because McCall Smith's dilemma about what to do with him is central to the whole nature of 44 Scotland Street. At the end of the fourth volume in the series, Bruce found himself engaged to the incredibly well-off Julia Donald, who is now pregnant with his child. Her father had set him up in his business, and outlined a cash-rich future if only he marries her. Surely, even if he has to pretend love, Bruce will stay with her - for the Porsche that came as an engagement present and the promised cash mountain, if nothing else?

"What I'm wondering about now," McCall Smith says, "is whether Bruce should go ahead with the wedding or call it off. Just how badly should he behave?"

When we talked, he'd finished the first 27 episodes of the series (he's aiming to have 40 written by Monday) and the full extent of Bruce's shoddy morality had still to be decided. "Up until now Bruce has behaved in a way that a self-centred narcissistic man would, but he hasn't really done anything very unpleasant to anyone else. If he leaves Julia with the baby, he would be behaving like a real rat... and that might mean bad things happening to Julia and the baby."

At this point, you might think, so what if they do? Bruce, Julia, and their unborn baby aren't real, so why should it matter? Life isn't fair; people like Bruce do cause heartache. But McCall Smith's series isn't painted in pain; instead it always has and always will look firmly at the brighter, more benign side of life.

"Scotland Street is a fable," he explains, "and I can defend that because it's a perfectly worthwhile thing to do. The fable actually raises a lot of issues in a way which is every bit as powerful and effective as a conventional novel. But there are certain constraints to writing them."

Take Big Lou, the Arbroath autodidact and café owner. She's been disappointed in love, sure, but she's not going to be a battered wife or mugged on the street. Cyril the dog might be kidnapped and charged with biting, but he's not going to be run over. Six-year-old Bertie might be dragged out to see a psychiatrist by his mother Irene, but that's about as uncomfortable as life for anyone in 44 Scotland Street ever gets.

"This is an Edinburgh, you may have noticed, in which it's always summer," says McCall Smith. "It doesn't actually rain very much, although the sky certainly has rain in it. We have long evenings, and it's often quite warm."

An escapist world, then? "The polite word is utopian fiction," he says, laughing. "Scotland Street is a good-natured enterprise. We're not doing anything really worrisome..." His face shivers into a brief frown.

And here we come to the real reason we are, I suspect, unlikely to see Bruce slam the door of Julia's elegant New Town flat and walk into the street with his now-abandoned baby's screams echoing inside his head. Because McCall Smith, through the hundreds of e-mails filter to him via this newspaper as well as his publishers, knows just what this generally happy, pain-free fictional world, means to his readers.

I've seen some of those e-mails myself. They come in from people who might be people who are seriously ill but find themselves laughing at one of Bertie's escapades until the tears roll down their faces. From people's widows and children who just want to write to him to say how much their loved ones enjoyed the series in their last days. From hospitals and hospices and places where there is the potential for real pain.

Of course, only a few of the letters and e-mails are as heartfelt and moving as these. For many 44 Scotland Street fans, what counts most is its change of tone from the news pages' daily diet of loss and disaster. There's not the faintest whiff of cynicism about McCall Smith's writing, not the remotest trace of cruelty in his sense of humour. It's hard to think of many writers (Wodehouse remains an honourable exception) who could even begin to write comedy with so many self-limitations already in place. And even Wodehouse, prolific as he was, never attempted the further hurdle of creating a daily novel.

Yet 44 Scotland Street works. There's not too much hard-nosed reality there, but somehow it doesn't matter. Even though some of the characters nudge slightly towards caricature, we still suspend our disbelief in them. Why?

Any number of reasons. Coiled round these fictive New Town lives - all recognisable Edinburgh types - is a mixture of wisdom, wit and affection. The plot is slow-moving: gently humorous conversations we can drift into; discursive scene-setting and exquisitely neat framings of moral dilemmas; enjoyably surreal rambles around topics such as canine dentistry or Moroccan psychiatry.

Invariably, McCall Smith's travels round the world also furnish a few exotic elements to add to the mix. He's just back from Rwanda, so it's "highly likely" we might somehow find the silver-backed gorillas he saw there making some kind of appearance in the series. We can also, after special requests in Australia, expect to find the odd Australian infiltrating Edinburgh's New Town.

"At the start I didn't really know what I was doing with 44 Scotland Street," he says, "but we've evolved a patter of having two or three episodes around a group of characters and then modulating to the next set, so there's a sense of wandering around a group of people. In the background, there are some major things happening, but one of the things I like about Scotland Street is that there is no hurry."

There is no remorseless series of cliff-hangers, then, but plenty of time to spend looking at the good things of life in Edinburgh (and occasionally beyond). "When I met [Tales of the City author] Armistead Maupin recently, we discussed how both San Francisco and this city lend themselves to serial fiction in a similar way. Certainly in Edinburgh there's a sense of romantic possibility about the place. There's also a very strong sense of civic community here - it's not composed of discrete, unconnected suburbs - and that gives it a certain kind of intimacy."

All of which has, admittedly, taken us a long way away from Bruce and the key point McCall Smith is wrestling with right now: how realistic he's going to make the new series. Will he be letting down those fans who expect a solidly upbeat saga from him if he makes Bruce walk out on his wife-to-be and child?

"Then again," he grins. "Julia could meet someone else. Julia could actually get rid of Bruce!" He giggles delightedly. "Or Julia could say, 'It's not your baby anyway. What makes you think it's yours?' That's being cruel to Bruce but - well, that's OK!"

He giggles again. Upstairs in his study, the Moleskine notebooks on which he writes down new ideas for his books lie open next to his computer. When I leave, perhaps he's going to go and write down one of Bruce's alternative futures.

As to which one it will be, we're just going to have to read the series and find out.

• The fifth volume of 44 Scotland Street starts in The Scotsman on Monday.

Having been born in Scotland Street, DOMENICA MACDONALD is the senior resident of No 44. An anthropologist, she has returned safely from her fieldwork in the Malacca Straits and now finds that there is much in Edinburgh to arouse her scientific curiosity. She would like to do an anthropological study of the Company of Archers, a strange group of men who dress up in green and carry bows. But would anybody believe such a study? Are such peculiar things even vaguely credible?

Domenica's neighbour, the mysterious ANTONIA COLLIE who's arrival was heralded by only a suitcase, is engaged in the writing of a novel dealing with the lives of early Scottish saints, but in Domenica's view Antonia is no saint, having stolen - or so Domenica believes - a blue Spode teacup from her flat. Then there is her taste in men, which seems to be getting worse...

...On the floor below lives the Pollock family - mother, IRENE, a disciple of Melanie Klein; father, Stuart, a statistician in the Scottish Executive (aka Government), BERTIE, that remarkable Italian-speaking, saxophone playing and yoga-aversive six-year-old, and his new brother Ulysses, who bears a striking resemblance to Bertie's psychotherapist, Dr Hugo Fairbairn.

Bertie merely wants to be six and to live the life of an ordinary boy. Irene, however, has other ideas and insists on inviting the odious Olive to the house. Olive hates Bertie's friend TOFU, and Bertie is not so keen on him either, although Tofu's suggestion that they should both join a paramilitary organisation (the Cub Scouts) is attractive to Bertie.

MATTHEW, the owner of a Dundas Street gallery, has now broken up with Pat, a rather bland young woman who, after several gap years, is now studying history of art at the University of Edinburgh. Pat dislikes BRUCE ANDERSON, a narcissistic surveyor, who has returned to Edinburgh and taken up with JULIA DONALD, a vacuous but well-heeled girl in search of a husband.

Matthew has met ELSPETH HARMONY, formerly Bertie's teacher, but now suspended. Matthew has proposed to her and she has accepted. They are well-suited to each other and plan to honeymoon in Australia.

ANGUS LORDIE, Domenica's friend and an accomplished portrait painter, continues to paint in his studio in Drummond Place, where he lives with his dog, CYRIL. Cyril, who is well-known for his gold tooth and tendency to wink at people, has enjoyed a brief fling in Drummond Place Gardens, with the result that six puppies have been delivered to Angus. Cyril seems to take this in his stride, but Angus is, quite understandably, at breaking point.

BIG LOU, a sympathetic autodidact from Arbroath, continues to observe the unfolding Edinburgh comedy from behind her coffee bar. She is still involved with her Jacobite boyfriend, who is still planning a visit to Edinburgh by a remote and obscure Belgian quasi-pretender. Big Lou could do better than this, but seems destined to attract dubious men. That famous gangster, LARD O'CONNOR, is one such, although Big Lou has little time for the portly Glaswegian. Lard, however, has ambitions to better himself and takes the view that best way of doing this is to spend more time in Edinburgh. Disaster surely awaits.