What distinguishes mysteries written by Alexander McCall Smith is his almost singular focus on morality. Although a number of other writers include ethics in the mysteries they concoct, McCall Smith typically reverses the focus in his works. His protagonists’ chief interests lie in examining the morality (or lack thereof) of human behavior contributing to the predicament; only then are the mysteries themselves explored and ultimately resolved. In interviews, he admits his penchant for writing mysteries featuring women with a heightened moral compass and an intuitive sense for detection, such as Precious Ramotswe and Isabel Dalhousie. He has acknowledged his personal interest in moral issues. Certainly his background in jurisprudence and medical ethics has prepared him to write knowledgeably on the subject.

Often McCall Smith’s protagonists are less focused on solving mysteries than they are on resolving human dilemmas. That success in the latter often leads to a break in the former is indicative of how his characters operate. The maintenance of personal relationships is crucial to the establishment of community trust and openness. As Ramotswe observes of her line of work in In the Company of Cheerful Ladies (2004), “Sometimes we are able to do something that helps somebody else. That is the important thing. That makes our job a good one.”

In the case of the Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency series, McCall Smith’s depiction of the lands and villages skirting the Kalahari Desert creates a literary terrain that is at once curiously exotic and comfortably familiar. Although the foliage (Namaqualand daisies and Tsama melons) described by the author may be unfamiliar to many readers, the human dilemmas, foibles, and hardships are not. Cheating husbands, embezzling employees, and blemished beauty queens are universal in their apparent normalcy.

Although subsequent series centered in Edinburgh may seem less exotic than Gaborone, Botswana, McCall Smith’s depictions of human life still combine the ordinary with the extraordinary in ways that charm. In the Sunday Philosophy Club series, Isabel Dalhousie witnesses unusual circumstances in common environments, such as a body falling from an upper balcony at an opera house and a coffee shop admission by a stranger that he has acquired, in addition to a new heart, the emotional memories of the donor. The Scotland Street series features an ensemble of characters representing cross sections of Edinburgh society. The rooming house at 44 Scotland Street is the ultimate urban landscape in which to explore social values and behaviors as exemplified by its inhabitants, among them a domineering mother, a narcissistic young man, and a struggling writer.

Certain authors of mystery novels, such as Patricia Highsmith and Robert Bloch, turn to the social science of psychology to account for criminal acts. McCall Smith, like the chief protagonists he creates, relies on moral philosophy to examine the choices men and women purposefully make. Rather than explain away their behaviors, he holds his characters accountable for their actions.

The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency

In The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency (1998), which launched McCall Smith’s career as a best-selling author, Precious Ramotswe is Botswana’s best and only female detective, hence the name of the agency. After receiving her deceased father’s estate (he bequeathed to her his cattle), Ramotswe sold most of the livestock and invested in a detective agency. The mysteries that require her attention are primarily domestic in nature: missing husbands, recalcitrant daughters, cheating spouses. An unconventional private eye, on occasion she abandons the advice of Clovis Andersen’s The Principles of Private Detection , which she used to start her agency. Rather than spy on suspects, she prefers to contact them and ask straight out...