A fat lady detective in Botswana, who drinks red bush tea and drives a little white van around the Kalahari desert, Mma Precious Ramotswe has quickly notched up legions of fans, since her debut six years ago in the best selling No 1 Ladies Detective Agency.
Now her creator, 56-year-old bassoonist and Scottish medical law professor, Alexander McCall Smith, brings us another equally lovable and quirkily eccentric heroine.
Forty-one-year old Isabel Dalhousie lives in Edinburgh. She edits a philosophical journal called ‘The Review of Applied Ethics’, attends symphonic concerts and art galleries, whilst ruminating on Auden and Kant, solutions to the Times crossword and repressed Albanian film makers, in her spare time.
All very arty, but Dalhousie is no dilettante. She may live an industrial age away from the stout, sturdy Precious Ramotswe but both woman are uncannily similar in their honesty and their matter-of-fact zeal for fighting the evil in their worlds.
A young man falls to his death after a performance by the Reykjavik Orchestra and Isabel thinks that it wasn’t an accident. Her doughty Scotswoman housekeeper Grace, quick to pronounce devastating moral judgments on the world at large seems to agree. Twenty-four-year-old Cat, who runs a delicatessen and is Isabel’s niece, protests at Isabel’s involvement,” You simply cannot get drawn into other people’s business like this”.
For Isabel though, there’s a moral bond between them (“I was the last person that young man saw… Don’t you think the last person you see on this earth owes you something?”) She embarks upon an investigation of sorts– meeting a whole congregation of characters from the predatory paparazzi McManus to the art collecting fund Manager Paul Hogg and his ‘man-eating ‘, art-swindling fiancé, Minty.
Intrigues emerge as she finds out the deceased young man was called Mark and was also a fund Manager, working coincidentally in the same firm as Paul Hogg, and that his flat mates Neil and Hen are hiding something.
It’s an interesting story, beautifully told. McCall Smith’s cameo characters from Grace and Cat, to Cat’s rejected suitor Jamie, are well developed and distinct. There are a profusion of profound little plots and sub-plots.
Grace’s friends husband’s mid life crisis– “He’s bought teenage clothes. Tight jeans. Sweaters with large letters on them. And he’s walking around listening to rock music” grumbles Grace; Cat’s suitable and unsuitable suitors; Jamie the musically minded “bit of a wimp”; Tony with the “touch of cruelty in [his]; Face and Isabel’s speculation, “Why should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunks were so much more interesting”.
These delightful digressions also echo and enrich the main narrative in their subtle meditations on the foibles of human behaviour and McCall treads gently and entertainingly (“was he married or… “, Isabel asks and then pauses ,”People often did not bother to marry…and yet it amounted to the same thing in many cases”).
All of which makes The Sunday Philosophy Club that rarity– an interesting detective story that’s not necessarily a hurried page turner, the development being every bit as satisfying as the denouement.
Deccan Herald September
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