A gentleman and a scholar

THANK you, Gordon, says Alexander McCall Smith, rising after posing for pictures in his peaceful back garden in leafy Merchiston. But he is not thanking the photographer, he is thanking his sleek, brown Tonkinese cat.

"Gordon and I have a very good relationship," says the author with his trademark deadpan humour - referring to the fact that Gordon is the only fellow male in a house full of women. "He’s a very intelligent and sympathetic cat."

Upstairs, I meet McCall Smith’s wife, Elizabeth, a Bruntsfield GP, as charming and hospitable as her husband. After a brief discussion as we wait for the tea to brew, we arrive at the conclusion that her sister went to university with my uncle. Small world.

Inside the west-facing study, which is bathed in afternoon sunlight, the shelves are bursting with books and papers are stacked around the large table. And with walls lined with art, the room is a chaos of creativity - testimony to a prolific mind.

For Alexander McCall Smith (Elizabeth calls him Sandy), 55, is a paragon of productivity. In addition to being professor of medical law, criminal law and ethics at Edinburgh University, he has penned 50 books, most famously his series of Botswana novels starring the "traditionally-built" private investigator Mma Ramotswe, the first of which, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, is currently the number one bestselling paperback in Scotland.

And that’s when he’s not acting as vice-chairman of the Human Genetics Commission, chairman of the British Medical Journal Ethics Committee and a member of UNESCO’s International Bioethics Commission. Or playing the bassoon in the legendary Really Terrible Orchestra (RTO), which he co-founded with his wife.

Indeed, McCall Smith is the unlikely professor who has rocketed to the peak of international bestseller lists - he has three books on Waterstone’s top ten bestselling list in Scotland at the moment.

The second book in the series, Tears of the Giraffe, is another in the top ten, while McCall Smith has also burst on to the scene with Portuguese Irregular Verbs, one of three novels following the humourous trials and tribulations of Professor Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, a punctual and fastidious German professor.

But it is five years since he first launched the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Scotland, through the small Edinburgh-based publisher, Polygon.

Ironically, it is only after the books’ publication and rapid rise at the other side of the Atlantic that anybody began to take notice.

"I enjoyed it when it was just with a small Scottish publisher because it was very intimate," he smiles. "Once published in the United States, they took off in a very dramatic fashion."

And now the whole world appears to be clamouring to get their hands on this Edinburgh professor. His diary is full of book launch dates in different countries and television and radio appearances.

But not a bit of it has gone to his head. "I think it’s a good stage in life for it to come about," he ponders, thinking about his new-found fame. "I don’t want my life to change at all. It doesn’t have any particular resonance.

"I wrote out of enjoyment and I didn’t anticipate that this would happen. Since last September, it’s been overwhelmingly busy and there is a sense that one’s time is no longer one’s own. The transition from being a private person to being a bit of a public person is quite daunting."

Born to a Scottish father and Southern Rhodesian mother, McCall Smith spent his childhood in Zimbabwe and went to school in Bulawayo, near the border with Botswana, where his fascination with "a country of empty spaces and echoing skies" began.

But, since moving to Scotland to pursue his academic interests at the age of 18, he has lived all of his adult life here. And it is his unique insight into two different cultures which seems to have struck a chord with his fans.

"People reading about Mma Ramotswe are very taken by the fact that here is somebody who is decent and there is none of the aggressive egotism which one finds in much of modern culture, where people are aggressive, rude and insensitive to others," he says.

"The in-your-face attitude that one sees in contemporary culture - the violence, aggression and foul language - is horrifying. Foul language is a form of aggression - it’s an invasion of the sensitivity of others. We’ve become so casual about that - about the way in which people are cruel to one another, rude, aggressive and competitive."

To illustrate his point, the father of two teenage daughters, Lucy, 19, and Emily, 16, disappears to the kitchen and returns with copy of the Sunday Times Magazine, its cover showing a picture of Damien Hirst and a young boy, both sticking two fingers up. Hirst’s face contorted in an expression of aggression.

Isn’t that the most appaling image - getting that child to do that and that sneering, aggressive face?" asks McCall Smith. "It’s the profound corruption of innocence. People see that and become blase about it. It’s an institutionalisation of aggression and shared vulgarity.

"The world of Mma Ramotswe is the complete opposite of that and it does represent a side of life which is real. I’m not writing fairy stories - there are people like that - and I think it is useful to see it. When people get a glimpse into that world, they’re often quite enchanted by the possibilities of courtesy and decency and communitarian values. That’s striking a chord with people because most people are fundamentally decent and benevolent."

While he denies his writing is social commentary, the themes of respect, dignity, decency, spirituality and forgiveness all recur, spoken with an unswerving humour and unshakeable optimism, which lie at the root of McCall Smith’s appeal. For he is the antithesis of the bulk of contemporary Scottish crime writers - although whether his books are really about crime is a question in itself. For, ultimately, they are about life, shared humanity and community.

"Most Western societies have become quite materialist and have lost a great deal of spirituality," says the bespectacled professor. "We’ve become very cynical and glib. It’s a loss of belief in anything; if you don’t believe in any values, you become cynical.

"I don’t have a great taste for pessimism or cynicism. I prefer optimism. I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to be pessimistic. I don’t make it bleak. People wish to be affirmative.

"Nihilism has infected our view of the world. I see nihilism as being a very undesirable philosophy - you believe in nothing; you think everything is wretched and meaningless."

The Botswana of which he writes and which has captivated millions of readers worldwide - the books are published in 20 languages - is also one which possesses the tremendous capacity to forgive, a virtue which McCall Smith believes is sadly lacking in our own culture.

"There is a remarkable capacity to forgive in African culture," he says. "This was most dramatically embodied in President Mandela, who walked out of prison and astonished the world. Our own society seems so hooked on blame and recrimination, which we sometimes dignify by the name of accountability. Accountability is important, but it can tip easily into a witch-hunt.

"We are forgetting about forgiveness in our enthusiasm for blame. We always want to find out who’s responsible for things and blame them and punish them - much more than we used to do."

McCall Smith has begun writing the sixth of the Mma Ramotswe novels, having agreed to pen eight. And, in addition to his three von Igelfeld novellas - the others are quirkily named The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs and At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances - he is also busy creating a new series about a divorced 40-year-old Edinburgh detective, Isabel Dalhousie, the first of which, The Sunday Philosophy Club, will be published next year by Time Warner in London. A BBC adaptation is already underway.

"Isabel is a moral philosopher: she’s interested in issues of philosophy and right and wrong but not in a pompous way," reflects McCall Smith. "She gets involved in issues."

Based in Merchiston, Isabel is in good company, sharing the suburb with her creator, Harry Potter author JK Rowling and crime writer Ian Rankin. But despite its its concentration of star authors, the area affords McCall Smith the unconcerned anonymity he enjoys.

No stranger to a punishing workload, he has already signed up to write four books centring around the lives of Isabel - who edits a journal of applied ethics - her niece Cat, who runs a delicatessen in Bruntsfield and Cat’s various boyfriends, including her ex, Hugo, a particular favourite of Isabel’s.

And somewhere between the flurry of writing, lectures, seminars, conferences, speeches, readings and interviews, he makes sure he fits in his regular RTO rehearsals.

But you would imagine the idea of practising contradicts the orchestra’s raison d’etre. McCall Smith laughs.

"We don’t have an aim to be terrible; we just recognise the reality we are terrible," he smiles. "There’s absolutely no danger of our ever being anything other than really terrible."

A quality which definitely doesn’t extend in his writing, judging by his popularity.

"I have many commitments, but writing these books is such a pleasure for me that I shall always find the time. If I have any spare time, I tend to collapse," he says. "I lie down."

"It’s called sleep," I offer. "Yes," he smiles.

• The Professor Dr von Igelfeld series and the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books are both published by Polygon.