Art imitating law

We speak to newly knighted Sir Alexander McCall Smith about how his legal background inspired his remarkable career as a novelist.

The predominant thought many people would have had on hearing that much-loved Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith had received a knighthood in the 2024 New Year Honours list was: it’s about time. Since his literary breakthrough with The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in 1998, he has delighted readers with a continuous flow of novels – producing them at an astonishing rate of three or four a year – to become a fixture on bookshelves across the UK and beyond.

In truth, Sir Alexander’s knighthood is only his latest, albeit most prestigious, award. In 2006, for example, when he was more used to the title Professor McCall Smith, he was named the University of Edinburgh’s Alumnus of the Year. And in 2007 he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.

Those honours point towards Sir Alexander’s first career. Long before enchanting the world with the adventures of Mma Ramotswe, Isabel Dalhousie, et al, Sir Alexander studied law at the University of Edinburgh and subsequently pursued a career as an academic lawyer, first teaching at Queen’s University, Belfast before returning to Edinburgh.

“I started off doing my PhD in an aspect of Roman law but I changed that and became more interested in certain aspects of criminal law. Eventually, I completed my PhD on the defence of coercion in Scots law, looking at various other legal systems and how they responded to that,” Sir Alexander explains.

It was while teaching in the department of Scots law at the University of Edinburgh that Sir Alexander found his overriding interest focused on medical law. Along with the much-respected professor of forensic medicine, Professor Ken Mason, he co-wrote the textbook Law and Medical Ethics. It was the first of a number of academic publications that bore Sir Alexander’s name, over the course of a distinguished legal career that also included becoming the British representative on the UNESCO International Bioethics Committee, and vice-chairman of the UK’s Human Genetics Commission.

Showing the same dynamism that would later fuel his prodigious literary output, in addition to his work in Edinburgh, Sir Alexander also developed a close relationship with the joint University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. Sir Alexander – who was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe – would look after law students from those countries who came to train in Edinburgh.

“I did that for many years and got to know a lot of the lawyers from those three countries,” Sir Alexander says.

“I then spent a sabbatical spell at the University of Swaziland, as it then was, and I enjoyed that very much. I went the following year to help the University of Botswana set up its law school. That was back in 1981 and that was my first engagement with Botswana.”

In the following years, Sir Alexander looked into the possibility of a criminal code in Lesotho – “It was never enacted but it was a very interesting project looking at how one would codify a system of criminal law in Lesotho” – and he continued his association with Botswana, writing a legal textbook on the country’s criminal law together with the University of Botswana’s Professor Kwame Frimpong.

But the cumulative personal effect of his experiences in those southern African countries was forming in a quite different area.

“In the background, I was keen on writing and I spent such spare time as I had writing fiction. That was a completely separate pastime for me and I thought that was the way that it was going to be until lightning struck and I wrote a book called The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Then everything changed,” Sir Alexander laughs.

Such was the success of The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, set in Botswana, that Sir Alexander was asked by his publishers to write a number of sequels. The books were then imported by the Columbia University Press into America and they suddenly became very successful on the other side of the Atlantic, too.

“I was faced with all sorts of demands: could I go and speak to these people? Could I do a tour? And so I decided that I would take an unpaid leave from my legal post at the university and just go off and do this for three years. In fact, that proved to be impossible. I took an early retirement from my chair and became a full-time writer.”

The academic legal world’s loss was very much the fiction-reading public’s gain. As well as The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, Sir Alexander has produced the 44 Scotland Street series; the Corduroy Mansionsseries; the Detective Varg series; a great number of stand-alone novels and short story collections; more than 50 children’s books; and the highly regarded Isabel Dalhousie series – where the main protagonist, in a nod to Sir Alexander’s former life, is an expert in applied ethics.

“People often ask me how my legal career influenced my writing. The answer is: very substantially,” Sir Alexander says.

“Although I don’t necessarily write about legal matters since I left the faculty, and I haven’t kept up to date in the developments in the law, it’s nonetheless the case that, if you train as a lawyer, you look at the world in a particular way. It trains you to look at situations and ask certain questions about situations and analyse situations in a distinct manner.

“So my legal background substantially affects the way I look at human dramas and human situations. That doesn’t mean that you aren’t concerned about emotions and feelings and things like that, but you’re also concerned about analysing human action and working out why people do things and what the point is of them doing things in that way.

“That applies, I think, quite strongly in the Isabel Dalhousie series where Isabel is an editor of an applied ethics journal, and applied ethics obviously has some connection with the law. She looks at moral problems which also might be legal problems, and the way that I write those books is very much informed by the way that I thought about things when I was looking at them from a legal point of view.”

That awareness leads to a question as old as fiction itself: how much do literary characters reflect the writer’s own thoughts and opinions?

“Well…” Sir Alexander pauses and laughs. “People say that writers give themselves away every third sentence. In fact, it’s probably more frequent than that!

“Inevitably, one’s view of the world informs one’s writing and how you describe a situation is going to be affected by the way you feel about it. Your choice of subject is affected by your interests and your opinions. So I think the writer is never fully detached. That’s not to say that a certain amount of detachment isn’t a good thing: I think it is very important that the writer should always distinguish between descriptions of things from a first-person perspective and a third-person perspective.

“However, I find that I agree with many of the things that many of my characters say. In particular, I find that the opinions expressed by Mma Ramotswe, who is my principal character in The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, often reflect my own views of the world. Isabel Dalhousie is also to an extent an alter ego. So I think that one’s personal view comes in. You have to be careful, though, in not being too present in the story yourself – you’ve got to give the characters room to develop their own views, and those views may be at odds with your own.”

While plot and narrative are obviously key elements of any novel, perhaps what elevates Sir Alexander’s work and makes it so well-loved is his ability to portray and develop human relationships. If one considers other legal minds-turned-novelists, the first instinct is perhaps to think of writers of technical thrillers. In contrast, cast an eye over Sir Alexander’s bibliography and you will find an abundance of titles featuring words such as ‘charm’, ‘love’ and ‘passion’.

That’s not to say all the relationships in his books are harmonious. But fractious relationships are an important aspect of life that everybody has to understand – not least, Sir Alexander says, those who work in law.

“I think most lawyers at some stage in their careers, or some even every day, have to deal with people who may have a very different view of the world from themselves. What we have to do is to be prepared to recognise the position of the other and I think fiction can play a very important part in that,” Sir Alexander says.

“Reading fiction helps us to develop moral imagination, it helps us develop imagination about the other person’s feelings, and so we need to get into the shoes of other people. A failure to get into the shoes of other people inevitably results in conflict and misunderstanding.

“And then I think you have to recognise that there are different views of the world and there are different sensibilities, and that enables you to understand what it is that drives the other person and worries the other person. And then you try to work out whether there is some way of getting through to the person with whom you disagree, always recognising the vital role of compromise.

“In one of The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books, Mma Ramotswe says you don’t change people by shouting at them, and actually, she’s right. You don’t change people by shouting at them; you change them by showing them you have tried to understand where they are coming from and that you recognise their humanity. Of course, there are some people who will be purely malevolent and, in those circumstances, one’s options are very limited. But I think, generally speaking, love and reconciliation are absolutely central to the peaceful ordering of our affairs.”