The Kalahari Typing School for Men Return to Book Review Page Return to Home Page

By Alexander McCall Smith

Pantheon 2003

Novels with female private detectives emerged in England in the 1930s with Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple. Half a century later they started to catch on big in the United States with Sara Paretsky’s V.I Warshawski, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and, more recently, Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum.

The trend has now spread to Botswana, in Southern Africa, where female private eye Mma Precious Ramotswe has opened The Number One Ladies Detective Agency in the metropolis of Gaborone in the Kalahari bush country. Like her fictional U.S. counterparts, Mma Ramotswe is painfully short on resources but amazingly long on resourcefulness and aggressiveness.

Those looking for arch villains, hideous crimes, convoluted plots or brilliant deductions will not find them in this novel. But humor, irony and great portraits of fascinating characters and unusual settings abound throughout this compelling and beautifully crafted book.

It is likely that someone who knows African immigrants in the United States will comment on how quickly, relative to some other groups, they become full-fledged Americans, with largely the same aspirations, problems, habits and mannerisms as many fifth-generation descendants of European transplants. The characters in this book do much to explain this phenomenon. They wouldn’t be out of place if the book’s setting were a small town in rural New Mexico rather than Gaborone, Botswana. Mma Ramotswe’s gentleman friend is a mechanic with the notion—taken as entirely factual by a sizeable percentage of American males (and probably a good many U.S. females)—that automobiles have personalities. Her prepubescent son is having prepubescent boy problems that differ not a whit from any typical American male of the same age. A matron of an orphanage goes to extremes to acquire resources for her charges that would make an American political campaign finance director feel inadequate. A woman fearful of having life pass her by without finding a man finally gains the interest of her dream boyfriend and then dumps him because he just isn’t interesting enough. Some of the characters generate an entrepreneurial, aggressive spirit that wouldn’t be out of place in Silicon Valley or Wall Street.

All of this melds into an extremely enjoyable reading experience.