No mystery to Mma Ramotswe

The pleasures of Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith’s No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series are numerous, and “The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection”, the latest instalment, will satisfy most of them. Let’s take a brief inventory.  

Mma Ramotswe’s compassion for others: One of the plot lines has her trying to uncover why the dedicated matron of an orphanage has been wrongfully dismissed. 

The down-to-earth characters, like cooks and mechanics, who muse about their homespun philosophies: In this instalment we have Phuti, the owner of the Double Plus Comfort Furniture Store, who wants to build a house for himself and his wife. Mma Makutsi recalls his father giving him a lesson in doing business: “Look at their furniture. A man who has a rickety chair is a rickety businessman.”   

The author’s gift for sharp and succinct characterisations, as evidenced by how he sums up the owner of the orphanage: “Splitting the top with a fingernail, he began to use the stick as a toothpick; a gesture of calculated unconcern.”  

The humour that never trades on vulgarity but often plays on wry observations: “You have your bill-paying face on,” Mma Ramotswe says to her assistant detective, Mma Makutsi. 

Most of the characters return from book to book, and the references to cattle and “bush tea” and how Botswana’s first and only private detective is “traditionally built”, are constant refrains. But McCall Smith always has a few surprises up his sleeve that he whips out like a stage magician. The back of the book says Mma Ramotswe “meets her hero” in this instalment. To reveal any more than that would be heresy in the eyes of her admirers, but I will say that Charlie really surprised me after his fellow mechanic, Fanwell, gets in trouble with the law. (They both work with the detective’s husband, Mr JLB Matekoni, the country’s finest mechanic, who owns Tlokweng Speedy Motors.) 

In the earlier books Charlie comes across as something of a boyish, irresponsible, would-be Casanova, but he’s cast in a different light here, both brighter and much darker.         

Above all, I think the popularity of this series stems from the fact that it’s not only set in a more exotic country, it’s also set in what seems like a different age. The people of Botswana who populate these books have not sunk into cynicism. They have not lost their manners or integrity or basic sense of decency. They do not drop the f-bomb constantly, or tune each other out with the Internet. They do not numb themselves with alcohol or TV violence. They don’t twerk or shoot selfies. 

At times this can seem like a con as much as a pro. Are some of the characters a little too good? Does the author need to tell us that Mma Makutsi has never once asked for her salary early? Do we need to know that Fanwell has never ever grumbled about having to support his poor family? Perhaps not. Is McCall Smith sentimentalising Botswana and its people? Perhaps a little. 

These questions aside, the old world that the characters inhabit, with its simple pleasures like chatting over tea, is also vanishing. Mma Precious Ramotswe and her cronies wish to preserve what they can from the “juggernaut of reform and efficiency and cost-cutting” that has cost the matron her job in the orphanage.     

To defend this humble way of life against such juggernauts is the detective’s job. And that she does so with such grace, kindness, wit and a tenacious dedication to justice makes this a fine series of mysteries that, more importantly, are exemplary in their humanity. 

 

Jim Algie’s latest book is a collection of prize-winning short stories, “The Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand”, published this year by Tuttle. Find more bytes and pixels at www.JimAlgie.com.

 

 

 

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection 

By Alexander McCall Smith 

Published by Little Brown, 2013

Available at major bookshops, Bt350 

Reviewed by Jim Algie