Readers can't get enough of African sleuth

By Deirdre Donahue
USA Today

The sleeper series of 2003 already may be in your bookstore: Alexander McCall Smith's gentle tales about Precious Ramotswe, a female private eye in Botswana.

Readers are devouring "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" and "Tears of the Giraffe," both released in late August; "Morality for Beautiful Girls" was released in November. (All are $11.95 paperbacks.) This April brings "The Kalahari Typing School for Me."

Published in 1998 by Scotland's Polygon Press, the first three were released in the United States by Columbia University Press in 2001. Then Anchor Books took over and brought out 20,000 copies each. The three paperbacks now have 300,000 copies in print in the United States.

That is astonishing for an Edinburgh author who has gotten rave reviews but done little publicity work in this country.

Although the series touches on tribal issues, tensions and the painful colonial past, it celebrates day-to-day life in Africa with a Jane Austen-like precision.

Claire Kerrigan of R.J. Julia's Booksellers in Madison, Conn., is not a big mystery fan, but she has been recommending Smith's books to customers. Kerrigan praises "the humor and the strength of the characters. ... They don't seem caught up in sadness, although they have hard lives." She particularly praises Smith's heroine, the smart, intuitive Ramotswe.