Friends, Lovers, Chocolate - Book Review

This review appeared in the Deccan Herald November 6th 2005

A case of too much of a good thing

The latest book in the detective series is fairly radical in its own right, but not much new happens here, just more of the same.




Friends, Lovers and Chocolate is book two in the prolific Professor Alexander McCall Smith’s new detective series. His phenomenally successful first series, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency was set in Botswana.

This new series moves, fairly radically too— from dusty underdeveloped third world Africa to the rarefied cultural capital of Edinburgh. Its Scottish single woman-of-independent-means protagonist, Isabel Dalhousie finds herself (a bit like Miss Marple) drawn into strange situations, called upon by her conscience to investigate anything remotely grey in her vicinity.

Last time around in ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’, the forty-one-year-old editor of ‘The Journal of Applied Ethics’ found herself on the case of the strange suicide-that-wasn’t. This time Dalhousie is in the midst of an even more bizarre mystery. In a typical McCall setting of old world meets new (seen here as medical technology meets the supernatural), Isabel encounters a heart transplant patient.


Over mackerel and wine at the Arts Club, Ian of the transplanted heart, discusses his cellular memory theory (that it maybe “perfectly possible that the heart may be the repository of memory”) and of one such recurring memory of which he is “worried that it’s going to kill” him.

The mystery of a sinister memory he’s received via a heart transplant? It’s a theme that could with Stephen King be pregnant with possibility, but McCall Smith’s mysteries are mostly mundane (no racy chases of missing manuscripts please). His detective’s concerns are earthy and ‘slice-of-life’ and his protagonists, like the kindly car mechanic Maketoni, are prone to many delightful digressions on life, the universe and everything else.

So the story of the memory of “high browed face, with hooded eyes and a scar running just below the hairline” doesn’t go anywhere. The desultory detection that follows is dilute even by McCall Smith standards. And the ending when it eventually arrives is a complete anti climax.

So much so, that much of what had delighted in ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’, the elegant twists and turns and the rich ruminations now prove irksome. For nothing happens except more of the same.

Isabel’s love life is still in limbo. Niece Cat’s rejected suitor Jamie, who Isabel likes, continues to play platonic. Salvatore, the intriguing Italian of ambiguous origin (another aspiring Cat Suitor) vanishes as abruptly as he arrives. Also, interspersed with these everyday events are constant and even cloying references to Auden, Burns and Haydn.

There’s reams of reflection too (“Did the Turks go over their history with a moral fine tooth com?”) and some contemporary commentary (“exactly the same emotions and energy that had gone into witch-hunting now went into the pursuit of our preferred modern victims”). Good, but also decidedly a case of too much of a good thing.

Still, read it if you’ve never read McCall Smith.