He trained as a lawyer, and ended up in Botswana helping to create its first law school.īut for all the writer's law-and-order background, the series turns out to be less about solving crime and more about solving people's problems - which are often fairy-tale-like mysteries. McCall Smith was born and grew up in what is now Zimbabwe, neighbor to Botswana. She's fairly typical of many people whom you meet in that part of the world." "She's a very intelligent woman, she's kind, she's forgiving - she's just the sort of person you'd like to sit down and have a cup of tea with. "Well, she's a woman of great intuitive ability," McCall Smith says of Ramotswe. "It was amazing to me that an entire culture of people could be so generous with their energy and spirit." "I kept meeting women who were sweet - just genuinely sweet and smart," she says. Scott says she discovered a strong sense of the character while filming in Botswana. "But there's another thing that she has - she tries to achieve some sort of resolution between people, which may mean actually forgiving somebody." "She does have a very strong sense of justice and what is right," McCall Smith explains. McCall Smith found his flesh-and-blood heroine in Scott, who portrays Ramotswe as having enormous confidence and a sense of her own beauty - even when the skinny girls come around to call her "fatty." It's the first leading role for the performer. Singer Jill Scott plays Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's only lady detective, in the series. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith's charming, best-selling book series - comes to American audiences this Sunday as an HBO miniseries. Thankfully for his fans, his prodigious writing and his love for language continues, and he even shares with us a word that he's recently fallen in love with.Anika Noni Rose plays Mma Makutsi, Ramotswe's quirky secretary. In fact, "initially, I started writing a short story," he admits, "and had no idea it would turn in to 11 novels." However, even as the words flowed and the character wrote herself almost, McCall Smith could never have expected where this story would take him. "For years the idea bubbled away beneath the surface and then I sat down and lo and behold it transpired that she had a detective agency and she stepped on to the page and I started writing about her." "The initial inspiration to write about a woman in Botswana came a long time ago when I happened to see one particular woman in Botswana chasing a chicken around a yard and I said to myself, 'I wonder what her story is, I wonder what that woman has seen in her life'. The reason for McCall Smith's travelling is the amazing success, including an adaptation for television featuring soul songstress Jill Scott, of his No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. "Of course, when you choose to be a full-time writer that's the one thing you can't be," McCall Smith says, exasperated, "because you spend a lot of time travelling and talking to people and you don't have any time for writing!" "I enjoyed doing that," he notes, "but in my spare time I was writing and eventually it got to the point where I was in a position to say to myself, 'well what do you really want to do?' and I chose to be a full-time writer. Perhaps his life as an academic has helped as McCall Smith was a professor of medical law before becoming a writer. "I'm not sure if writer's block exists as a condition," he exclaims. Douglas Adams once famously said that writing was as easy as staring at a blank page until your forehead bled, but one famous author has no such difficulties.Īlexander McCall Smith has written over 60 books and says he can write up to a thousand words a day.
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