The Sherlock Holmes fans who wept when they thought their hero had died at the hands of Moriarty now have another hero. That hero is Precious Ramwotse, a woman who could number her cattle as evidence of a prosperous family that she had left to set up a detective agency.
The very idea of creating a female detective agency in a rural country in southern Africa should never have got off the ground. It was doomed from the start. But no. This was beyond guesswork. Thanks to the compassion showing up in all her stories, the dusty streets of Gaborone become the setting for the clients coming to Precious. She has given up her cattle, the prime indicator of wealth in Botswana, and swopped it for the teapot and typewriter of her office.
Precious Ramwotse’s detective agency now runs to 22 books with ten million sales in English, 46 translations and a great following in the USA. The tales come from Scotland, from Alexander McCall Smith, a professor of medical jurisprudence born in 1948 and recipient of numerous degrees and honours in Scotland and Botswana.
The true hero of these stories is Botswana itself. It has not fallen into the hands of a bureaucracy. Its people are its story. When Mrs Ramwotse takes on a case, she drives her ageing car into the outback, to the kind of country she knows well. And to people who will readily confide in her.
A reader finds a compulsion to say what it is exactly that ensures close attention. The pace? Admittedly less fierce than that of a European country. The skeletal nature of the office and its equipment? Undoubtedly nostalgic. The domestic and other problems that come into the office? Engrossing. But above and beyond these characteristics is compassion, unstated, pervasive and wholehearted.
It will greatly surprise me if the 21st century brings us anything better than Mrs Ramwotse. Alexander McCall Smith thinks kindly of his characters. It is this that has readers enthralled.
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