SMITH, Alexander McCall 1948-

PERSONAL: Born 1948, in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); married; children: two daughters. Education: Studied law in Scotland. Hobbies and other interests: Plays bassoon in Really Terrible Orchestra.

ADDRESSES: Agent—David Higham Associates, 5-8 Lower John St., Golden Square, London W1R 4HA, England.

CAREER: Professor of medical law at Edinburgh University. Taught law at University of Botswana; helped create a criminal code for Botswana. Human Genetics Commission of the United Kingdom (vice chairman), UNESCO (member, International Bioethics Commission).

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

(Editor with Tony Carty) Power and Manoeuvrability, Q Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1978.

(With John Kenyon Mason) Butterworths Medico-Legal Encyclopedia, Butterworths (Boston, MA), 1987.

(Editor with Elaine Sutherland) Family Rights: Family Law and Medical Advances, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1990.

(With John Kenyon Mason) Law and Medical Ethics, third edition, Butterworths (Austin, TX), 1991.

(With Kwame Frimpong) The Criminal Law of Botswana, Juta (Cape Town), 1992.

(Editor with Michael A. Menlowe) The Duty to Rescue: The Jurisprudence of Aid, Dartmouth (Brookfield, VT), 1993.

(Editor with Colin Shapiro) Forensic Aspects of Sleep, Wiley (New York, NY), 1997.

(With Daniel W. Shuman) Justice and the Prosecution of Old Crimes: Balancing Legal, Psychological, and Moral Concerns, American Psychological Association (Washington, DC), 2000.

(With Alan Merry) Errors, Medicine, and the Law, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2001.

FICTION

Children of Wax: African Folk Tales, Interlink Book (New York, NY), 1991.

Heavenly Date and Other Stories, Canongate (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1995.

Morality for Beautiful Girls, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 2002.

Tears of the Giraffe, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 2002.

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 2002.

The Kalahari Typing School for Men, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2003.

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

Film Boy, illustrated by Joanna Carey, Methuen (London, England), 1988.

Mike's Magic Seeds, illustrated by Kate Shannon, Young Corgi (London, England), 1988.

Suzy Magician, Young Corgi (London, England), 1990.

The Five Lost Aunts of Harriet Bean, Blackie (London, England), 1990.

The Popcorn Pirates, Scholastic Young Hippo (London, England), 1999.

Author of more than fifty books, including children's books such as The White Hippo, Hamish Hamilton; The Perfect Hamburger, Hamish Hamilton; Akimbo and the Elephants, Mammouth, Marzipan Max, Blackie; The Ice-Cream Bicycle, Viking Read Alone; The Doughnut Ring, Hamish Hamilton; The Muscle Machine, Hamish Hamilton; Paddy and the Ratcatcher, Heinemann; and The Princess Trick, Puffin.

ADAPTATIONS: The story "Children of Wax" was made into an animated film; other stories by Smith have been read on BBC Radio. Film rights to The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency have been sold.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Portuguese Irregular Verbs and The Perfect Imperfect, to be published by Polygon with a third volume, c. late 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: The diverse accomplishments of Alexander McCall Smith, include a distinguished career as a legal scholar and more recent fame as a best-selling novelist. A professor of medical law at Edinburgh University, Smith has published many works on medical ethics and criminal law. For example, he has written about the duty to rescue and the impact of medical advances on parental rights. Smith also had numerous books of fiction for young children and short-story collections in print before he published a series of detective stories set in Zimbabwe. The first installment, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, became a best-selling novel in the United States after it was popularized by word of mouth. Readers and critics have been charmed by the stories, which are more about relationships, customs, and informal justice than sleuthing.

Born and raised in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Smith studied law in Edinburgh, Scotland. He then assisted in creating Botswana's first law school, taught law at the University of Botswana, and wrote a criminal code for Botswana. Many years later, in 1992, he would publish The Criminal Law of Botswana with Kwame Frimpong. The book interested critics with its discussion of how the country's criminal law is unlike others in southern Africa and how it resembles the Queensland Criminal Code of 1899. Two reviewers regretted that the work is not more detailed: in the Journal of African Law Simon Coldham advised that the book is "designed primarily for students," while James S. Read said in the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, that the book provides "a short and selective introduction" to the subject.

Most of Smith's legal scholarship treats subjects relating to medical and criminal law issues. He served as co-editor and contributor for Family Rights: Family Law and Medical Advances, which contains seven essays about the legal and ethical implications of new medical capabilities that affect the creation of life as well as the extension of life. The essays consider the impact of laws on a family's ability to make their own medical decisions. McCall's contribution, "Is Anything Left of Parental Rights?," addresses the increased autonomy of children.

Reviews of Family Rights described the book as an indepth treatment suitable for specialists and general readers. In the Sydney Law Review Belinda Bennett recommended it as "a very readable collection" that avoids jargon and explains the necessary medical and scientific terminology. Jenny L. Urwin said in the Journal of Medical Ethics that it provided "interesting and thoughtful analysis" on a previously neglected subject. The book's "interdisciplinary and comparative flavour" was noted in Family Law by Andrew Bainham, who also said, "The scholarship in this volume is, for the most part, as original as it is provocative and the two most impressive contributions are by the editors themselves." Writing for Nature, Andrew Grubb commented on the context of Smith's essay, saying, "Faced with this largely interventionist judicial attitude, it is left to Sandy McCall Smith to challenge its basis and to sound a note of caution."

In The Duty to Rescue: The Jurisprudence of Aid Smith helped compile essays that discuss the moral and sometimes legal duty to provide aid. The writings cover theoretical and philosophical concerns, the possible ways of putting theory into practice, and the state's duty to assist at-risk individuals. Reviewers said the work does a good job of addressing the diverse implications of making rescue a legal obligation. In a review for Choice, M. A. Foley called the book "rather comprehensive" and recommended it as a primary reference on the subject. In the University of British Columbia Law Review Mitchell McInnes commented that Smith's essay, "The Duty to Rescue and the Common Law," raises an interesting and incomplete point on the subject of how a legal requirement would impact the formation of individual moral intuition. Celia Wells recommended the volume and McCall's contributions in Criminal Law Review. She concluded, "This collection sweeps effortlessly across legal, jurisdictional, and philosophical boundaries posing on its way a series of fascinating questions and supplying some clues to the answers."

Smith is also a prolific fiction writer. His books for children reflect both Western and non-Western cultural influences, and are mostly written for new readers. One example showing Smith's African background is The White Hippo, a story set in Gambia about the unsuccessful efforts of villagers who want to protect an albino hippo from a white man claiming to be a photographer. In The Perfect Hamburger, an old man and a young boy join forces to try to save a family-run hamburger shop from being forced out of business by a chain restaurant.

The twenty-seven stories in Children of Wax: African Folk Tales are more suited for older children and storytellers. Smith collected the tales from old and young members of the Ndebele people of Zimbabwe. Featuring shape-changing animals and supernatural powers, they nevertheless contain realistic portrayals of hardship and danger. The stories often serve to condemn bad behaviors such as greed and unfounded trust and show that justice does not always follow wrongdoing. Library Journal's Patricia Dooley warned that this is "emphatically not children's pabulum." In a review for Choice, P. Alden was not quite satisfied with the authenticity of Smith's retelling, but said that the stories are "engaging" and that some are notable for their depiction of Zimbabwean women. A Kirkus Reviews writer admired the collection for its "evocative, involving narratives that reveal much about the culture from which they spring."

The collection Heavenly Date and Other Stories is comprised of original stories by Smith that are international in scope. Among them, "Intimate Accounts" is set in a fictional world, "Bulawayo" happens in Southern Rhodesia, and others take place in Zurich, Lisbon, and Northern Queensland. The dark and funny pieces relate all kinds of strange dates, meetings, and exchanges between men and women. In a review for the Times Literary Supplement, Andrew Biswell made note of Smith's inventiveness, stylistic range, and the "remarkable absence of excess baggage" in the collection that he thought showed the influence of African oral story-telling.

Smith's inspiration for The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and the protagonist Mma Precious Ramotswe was his admiration for the women of Africa, according to an interviewer in Publishers Weekly. The novel and subsequent books in the series—Tears of the Giraffe, Morality for Beautiful Girls, and The Kalahari Typing School for Men—are mostly about everyday life in Africa. The character of Mma Ramotswe is the dynamic central force behind these stories. A solidly built, divorced woman in her late thirties, she uses a tiny inheritance to start a detective agency. Her work takes place in the city of Gaborone and in cattle country near the Kalahari Desert. She deals mostly with family conflicts, including cheating husbands, and employer-employee troubles. Mma Ramotswe runs a threadbare operation, but she does have an assistant, Mma Makutsi, a secretarial college graduate who has lost better jobs to her prettier classmates. Another key figure is J. L. B. Matekoni, a mechanic who assists them and later becomes engaged to Mma Ramotswe. The bride-to-be is a rather unconventional detective, one who also serves as family counselor, comments on manners and the lack of them, and is less concerned with legally administered justice than with doing right by her clients.

Mma Ramotswe and Smith's novels about her have charmed reviewers, who have found the novels fresh, amusing, and affecting. In a BookLoons review, G. Hall described the first installment as "truly unique," explaining that "the best part of the book is, in fact, not the mysteries but the stories of Precious and her father." Mahinder Kingra of the Baltimore City Paper judged that in this "deceptively frivolous" novel there is "as honest and sympathetic a portrait of contemporary African life as [Nigerian writer Chinua] Achebe's." Kingra commented that the book is "one of those rare, unassuming novels that seems to contain all of life within its pages, and affirms life in telling its story." Christine Jeffords noted in Best Reviews online that Smith "succeeds in giving his story a lilting, lyrical flavor that makes the reader feel almost as if she is listening to a story being spun by a native tale-teller." Comments on the first three novels by Anthony Daniels in the Spectator included the assessment "I know nothing else like them." Daniels credited Smith with an admirably simple writing style and the remarkable feat of "creating fictional characters who are decent, goodhearted but not in the least bit dull." And the critic advised that "for all their apparent simplicity, the Precious Ramotswe books are highly sophisticated."

When Alida Becker reviewed the first three books for the New York Times, dubbing Mma Ramotswe the "Miss Marple of Botswana," it dramatically increased public awareness of the series. As Becker noted, film rights for the series had already been sold to Anthony Minghella, director of The English Patient. In the Wall Street Journal, Matthew Gurewitsch found The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency to be no less than "one of the most entrancing literary treats of many a year." Gurewitsch exulted that Smith planned more stories about Mma Ramotswe and would be publishing a series of academic satires about a professor of Romance philology named Dr. Mortiz-Maria von Igelfeld.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Choice, February, 1992, P. Alden, review of Children of Wax, p. 903; July/August, 1994, M. A. Foley, review of The Duty to Rescue, p. 1792.

Criminal Law Review, January, 1996, Celia Wells, review of The Duty to Rescue, pp. 71-72.

Family Law, April, 1992, Andrew Bainham, review of Family Rights, p. 135.

International and Comparative Law Quarterly, July, 1993, review of The Criminal Law of Botswana, pp. 748-749.

Journal of African Law, autumn, 1992, Simon Coldham, review of The Criminal Law of Botswana, pp. 193-194.

Journal of Medical Ethics, June, 1992, Jenny L. Urwin, review of Family Rights, pp. 108-109.

Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 1991, review of Children of Wax, p. 793.

Library Journal, July, 1991, Patricia Dooley, review of Children of Wax, p. 106.

Nature, June 27, 1991, Andrew Grubb, review of Family Rights, p. 707.

New York Times Book Review, January 27, 2002, Alida Becker, "Miss Marple of Botswana," p. 12.

Publishers Weekly, July 22, 2002, Charlotte Abbott, "From Africa, with Love," p. 75.

Spectator, September 1, 2001, Anthony Daniels, "Something Really New out of Africa," pp. 36-37.

Sydney Law Review, June, 1992, Belinda Bennett, review of Family Rights, pp. 253-255.

Times Literary Supplement, November 3, 1995, Andrew Biswell, "Mr Self and Ms Ms," p. 25.

University of British Columbia Law Review, winter, 1994, Mitchell McInnes, review of The Duty to Rescue, pp. 201-204.

Wall Street Journal, September 4, 2002, Matthew Gurewitsch, "A Scholarly Scot Writes of African Intrigue," p. D8.

ONLINE

Baltimore City Paper Online,http://citypaper.com/ (September 5-11, 2001), Mahinder Kingra, review of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.

Best Reviews,http://thebestreviews.com/ (October 4, 2002), review of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.

BookLoons,http://bookloons.com/ (December 12, 2002), G. Hall, review of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.*