The case of the missing spark

When the proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency made her debut a few years ago, you could sense a little old lady beaming her benediction from Danemead in St. Mary Mead. Precious Ramotswe, a no-nonsense lady of ample girth, had no forensic lab, pursued no monstrous serial killers, put her trust in no profilers.

Instead, she relied on her knowledge of human nature, her ability to sift true and false out of a mountain of gossip, and on the wisdom collected by Clovis Andersen in his well-known tome, The Principles of Private Detection.

If Miss Marple had ever spawned a descendant, surely Precious Ramotswe of Botswana could lay claim to that honour.

Precious Ramotswe's struggles to set up her detective agency, aided by the capable Mma Makutsi, turned out to be the stuff of publishing legend.

Thousands of readers grabbed Tears of the Giraffe once they'd devoured The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.

If the applause for the third volume in Alexander McCall Smith's series, The Morality of Beautiful Girls was a shade more muted, well, he still had a huge audience glued to the trials and tribulations of his lady detectives, and he had pulled off at least two brilliant books, hadn't he?

Over the course of her adventures, Precious Ramotswe had solved the trickiest of cases, acquired a fiancee and two foster children, one of them disabled.

Her fiancee, the estimable Mr J L B Maketoni, had survived depression and returned to his thriving garage business, the Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors.

Mma Makutsi, proud possessor of a certificate from the Botswana Secretarial College testifying to her remarkable typing speeds, had acquired not one but two jobs, at the detective agency and at the garage.

Devotees of the series waited with tense anticipation for the next instalment, in the same manner a previous generation must have hung around the cinema halls eagerly awaiting the next Marx Brothers comedy.

The first thing that grabs you about the Kalahari Typing School for Men is that wonderful title. Unfortunately it is also the last really fabulous surprise McCall Smith delivers.

Mma Precious Ramotswe has a competitor in the bumptious owner of the Satisfaction Guaranteed Detective Agency; Mma Makutsi's thoughts are turning in the direction of romance; Mr J L B Maketoni is wrestling with children and with water pumps, both singularly uncooperative; and frankly, Mma dear, I couldn't give a damn.

The allure of McCall Smith's series lay in its simplicity. No First World crime novel can afford to ignore forensic science, technocrimes or the pressures of power politics in investigating agencies.

The skull beneath the skin has not just been laid bare, but been placed under the magnifying glass to the point where every armchair reader now doubles as an amateur pathologist or forensic sleuth.

We have serial killers coming out of our ears, each trying to outdo Hannibal the Cannibal with gorier murders and far more amoral mindsets.

There are few big cities left, from Los Angeles to Edinburgh, that have not had their mean streets mapped and remapped.

As either the body count or the levels of mental cruelty described or both grow more and more intricate, noir and crime and detective fiction fans could be forgiven for their ennui: dejà vu, deja dead, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

By transplanting the idea of a detective agency into a world with more innocent crimes, where even the worst transgressions appear to have newly emerged from a latter-day Garden of Eden, McCall Smith offered us ""plausibly "" a simpler, gentler amble through the heart of relatively innocuous darkness.

Botswana is one of the few countries left in the world where his amateur detectives could have exercised their gift for gossip so beneficently: shift a little further down the map to Johannesburg, and Toto, we're not in Kansas any more.

Jo'burg, where your business associate is just as likely to hand you a gun as a visiting card when you arrive, is like Gotham City, suitably updated for the 21st century. Botswana is St. Mary Mead, translocated to Africa.

Perhaps it was the novelty of the concept that carried readers through the first books, or perhaps it was just that McCall Smith preached less and was more interested in his characters.

But The Kalahari Typing School for Men throws the flaws in his fictional tapestry into sharp relief.

The neo-imperialism one could afford to ignore in the first two books can no longer be overlooked. The old, traditional Botswana that Precious Ramotswe and her creator drench in nostalgia, a world of good manners and respect for one's elders, seems as cardboard a notion as the idea of the idyllic Indian village.

And McCall Smith's genuflections to the problems of modern-day Botswana "" it has among the highest rates of HIV infection in the world "" are just that, pious gestures meant to assuage readers who want a small but not lethal dose of reality with their fiction.

The language, originally one of the series' greatest strengths with its clarity and simplicity, now seems cartoonish: you could cut-and-paste speeches made by one character and place them in another character's mouth without the reader even noticing.

But perhaps the biggest letdown for all of us who thought we were going to rediscover Christie in these times is that McCall Smith seems to have given up on the detective part of the detective agency.

It was refreshingly quaint, in an age of overelaborate, darkly tangled plotlines, to be presented with mysteries where you could guess the identity of the culprit or the final outcome.

Four books down the line, it's not quaint: it's ye olde paine in the necke again. Advance reviews indicate that the fifth and final book in the series, The Full Cupboard of Life, pretty much abandons the detective angle except for half a case shoved in for the look of things, and perhaps this is wise of McCall Smith. When you're running out of steam, someone needs to blow the final whistle.

Dame Agatha sustained her knitting detective through around 14 full-length mysteries, not counting the short stories; McCall Smith has less staying power.

I'm not going to be buying The Full Cupboard of Life, but I'll take my hat off to Precious Ramotswe nevertheless. The fat lady may have sung a trifle early, but she was one hell of a dame for a while.

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

Alexander McCall Smith
Pantheon books, Distributed by West Land
Pages: 186
Price: $10