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Out of Botswana

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Vv New Delhi
Has there been a falling off in detective fiction in the past few decades? Do the British writers mired in the golden age of classic whodunnit's like Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers still reign supreme simply because they could put two and two together?
 
Has the American school of 'hard boiled' detective thrillers brought British crime writers out of their 'cosy' past? Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, the originators of the 'hard boiled' school had rescued the gumshoe from the mean streets of pulp fiction.
 
And they had been followed by Sara Paretsky and Sue Crafton whose female private eyes acquired such a following that for a time male gumshoes seemed likely to become an endangered species. And with that, put the whole genre of crime detection in the melting pot.
 
So where does Alexander McCall Smith, a professor of medical law at Edinburgh university fit in with his The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency (Anchor Books, $ 11.95)?
 
It is neither the British 'cosies' (detective stories and domestic crime) nor the 'hard boiled' urban-jungle thrillers where the tough guy tells the murderer, "I'll blow your head off and piss in your neck." In fact, it isn't a thriller at all; it is pure, wholesome fun and because they are not truly original detective stories, it has become a bestseller worldwide.
 
Precious Ramotswe is Botswana's only female detective who has set up an agency "to help people with the problems in their lives." Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in the capital, Gaborone, she found that her services were in considerable demand.
 
"She was consulted about missing husbands, about the creditworthiness of potential business partners, and about suspected fraud by employees. In almost every case, she was able to come up with at least some information for the client; when she could not, she waived her fee, which meant that virtually nobody who consulted her was dissatisfied. People in Botswana liked to talk, she discovered, and the mere mention of the fact that she was a private detective would let loose a positive outpouring of information on all sorts of subjects. It flattered people, she concluded, to be approached by a private detective, and this effectively loosened their tongues. This happened with Happy Bapetsi, one of her earlier clients. Poor Happy! To have lost your daddy and then found him, and then lost him again....
 
"Precious Ramotswe is a genuine one-off and so are the cases she is asked to solve "" such as tracing a missing schoolboy kidnapped by a witch doctor or tracking down an adolescent Gujarati girl whose parents suspect she had got out of hand because she had a boyfriend tucked away somewhere!
 
Or uncovering a con man or learning about boys and goats. Mma (she is called Mma by those wanting to be informal) Ramotswe is a welcome change from the stereotypical fast-talking, hard-drinking gumshoe; she is easy going, drinks bush tea and is a comfortable dress size, 24, which makes it impossible not to notice her: "Hey, fat lady, what are you hiding under that tree?" And her heart is even bigger (she always has a sneaking sympathy for the hunted) and her methods of detection are simple and direct.
 
Mma Ramotswe honestly believed that everything you wanted to know about a person was written in the face. It's not that she believed that the shape of the head was what counted "" even if there were many who still clung to the belief; "It was more a question of taking care to scrutinise the lines and the general look.
 
And the eyes, of course; they were very important. The eyes allowed you to see right into the person, to penetrate their very essence, and that was why people with something to hide wore sunglasses indoors. They were the ones you had to watch very carefully." It is always the quiet ones who are the most dangerous.
 
This is not a thriller but a charmer that tells you as much about Africa as about methods of detection and the idiosyncrasies of human beings. The problems that people come up with are not really the big existential questions for which there are no apparent solutions.
 
They are the everyday inconveniences, the crush of daily frustrations, which arise because we don't have the patience to let them work themselves out in the normal course of things. This is the best feel-good book to come for a long time.

 
 

Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper

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First Published: Feb 21 2004 | 12:00 AM IST

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