A man of many parts - Alexander McCall Smith

Five novels in four years, with a baboon opera and an updated literary classic in the works, is a feat for any writer. But with his latest 44 Scotland Street novel about to be launched at The Scotsman in a special reader event, Alexander McCall Smith shows no sign of tiring, says David Robinson

IN HIS great series of love poems Dain do Eimhir (Poems to Eimhir), the poet Sorley MacLean writes about visiting Edinburgh. When it wasn't lit up by love, he found it "a grey town without darting sun"; when it was, it became transformed – "refulgent, white-starred".

When Alexander McCall Smith writes about Edinburgh in 44 Scotland Street, it undergoes a similar transformation. The city sloughs off its everyday worries, its reputed unfriendliness, its fears of crime, its daily round of petty annoyances. Instead, it becomes an easier place in which to live and a more enjoyable one, with a sunnier disposition, a natural venue for the gentle comedy of manners that has unfolded in these pages along with the rest of the plot in Britain's first "daily novel".

Four-and-a-half years after he first started writing the series in The Scotsman, McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street now has a readership that stretches all the way round the world. In translations and foreign editions of the series's novels, readers from Los Angeles to Lithuania, Lucca to Lodz, Lyons to Leipzig are following the latest travails of Bertie, that much-put-upon six-year-old, the latest escapades of Bruce, that great New Town narcissist, and Domenica, that occasionally underestimated anthropologist.

We're now up to volume five in the series. The Unbearable Lightness of Scones went into the bookshops last week and is already climbing up the bestseller charts. Next week it will be officially launched at The Scotsman in a special reader event (see panel).

As Scotsman readers already know, volume 5 of 44 Scotland Street is played out against such exotic backcloths as Singapore and Western Australia – and even Glasgow.

The main focus, however, remains on Edinburgh. An Edinburgh where no tramworks snarl up traffic, where police sirens seldom wail through the night, where the bleak necessities of getting and spending are generally banished. A city where we aren't alienated from each other, where good manners might reasonably be expected to prevail.

Is it, then, a completely unrealistic place, this Edinburgh? Not at all. "When I walk round the New Town," says McCall Smith, "I meet plenty of people like Domenica, Antonia, Angus Lordie and Matthew. I've even spotted the occasional Bertie and his mother Irene. I'm not saying the pushy mother is a particularly Edinburgh phenomenon, but there certainly are quite a lot of them here."

That holds good for the rest of the cast too. McCall Smith has a keen eye for human foibles, social niceties, the small comedies of snobbishness: these are as clearly etched in 44 Scotland Street as they were two centuries ago by that other great chronicler of bourgeois Edinburgh, the caricaturist John Kay. Unlike most comedy, however, McCall Smith's is entirely without malice: he writes about his characters with obvious affection. It's this, and his sense of fun, that lights up his tales of the city, transformatively turning its sunniest side up.

All of this – five novels in four years, each begun and put into print while still being written, like a tightrope walker starting his performance without knowing where the rope will take him – would be achievement enough for any ordinary writer. But as his long list of new projects make clear, McCall Smith's writing is anything but ordinary.

Most writers, for example, haven't opened an opera house, much less one in the African bush. Yet last month McCall Smith did exactly that, just outside Gabarone, the capital of his beloved Botswana. Even that isn't enough. Within a year, the No 1 Ladies Opera House will be staging an opera that its founder is writing even now.

The idea began when McCall Smith and his wife, Elizabeth, were on a wildlife safari holiday with friends in Botswana's Okavangu Delta. He says: "I knew that there were two American primatologists in the region who'd spent 12 years researching baboon behaviour. I asked our river guide if he could take our canoe across to where they worked.

"I'd read their book – Baboon Metaphysics – which basically looks at how baboons view the world and how they react to others in their clan. There are two odd things about baboons, firstly that they're matrilineal, but even more peculiarly that they're the only animal we know about in which status is conferred from one generation to the next. In our terms, it's as if the baboon queen's offspring are regarded as princes just by virtue of who their mother is. And this struck me as being so unusual that I thought I'd write an opera about it – and of course we'll be using African musicians and singers to perform it at the opera house."

He's working on the project with Edinburgh composer Tom Cunningham, who last December set to music six of McCall Smith's poems for Capella Nova's Christmas performances of Scotland at Night. And while the baboon theory of mind might seem an unusual source of inspiration for an opera, it's not even the only animal-related enterprise on his books.

There are two others. He's completed a script for a major feature film which is due for release next year. But he's also bringing into the 21st century the story of Rikki Tikki Tavi, the valiant snake-attacking mongoose in one of Kipling's Jungle Book Stories.

"I've always liked these, from boyhood on, but I thought that it would be a good idea to move the story into the present and make it one for grown-ups as well as children. So while it was originally set in the late Raj, I'm changing that to modern India.

There'll also be a film project based on the book – although somehow we'll have to ensure that the snakes aren't harmed in the making of it!"

At the same time as these projects are taking shape, McCall Smith will be working on the latest volumes in his two other major series of novels. The Comfort of Saturdays, the latest in The Sunday Philosophy Club series of novels about the Merchiston amateur sleuth Isobel Dalhousie, comes out in October, and he is already planning the tenth book in the series that made his name, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, featuring Mma Ramotswe, which will come out next March.

Before then, though, he'll also be unveiling a novel which on the surface doesn't appear to be related to anything he's written before. La's Orchestra Saves the World, set in Suffolk just before, during and in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, is a literary novel about a widow who forms an amateur orchestra to entertain the locals but also to help her come to terms with her grief. It's out in November – and the advance word is that it's the best thing he's written.

Meanwhile, in between writing books, opening opera houses, and being the world's first librettist of the baboon mind, there are book festivals, media interviews, speaking events, and charity functions at attend all over the world, and a schedule that would exhaust a man (or even a team of men) half his age.

And above all that, there's an even greater mystery: not just that one man can do all of this, but that one can do it with wit, charm, intelligence and kindness too.