This month’s champion author has a multifaceted career ranging from medical law/bioethics to fiction, crime, children’s books, and academic non-fiction. Sir Alexander McCall Smith was born in Zimbabwe and educated there and in Edinburgh. He earned LLB and PhD degrees at the University of Edinburgh, where he became Professor of Medical Law before retiring to full-time writing.

Smith’s chief claim to literary fame is the enlightening and entertaining series “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency”, featuring Mma Precious Ramotswe and set in Botswana. His background living in Zimbabwe was instrumental in bringing such an endearing character to life. At last count there were 24 novels in this one series and it looks like continuing. In addition to this series, he is a prolific author of short stories ( 6 collections to date), fiction ( including crime fiction), and children’s stories.

As a writer of fiction, he is adept at maintaining a theme of certain characters, as evidenced by the Precious Ramotsewe novels and extended to the Isobel Dalhousie series (based on a philosopher/ethicist) and 44Scotland Street[ based on a precocious young boy by the name of Bertie]. Smith garners his characters and associated stories from the living conditions within certain city areas and their associated buildings, especially from his home city of Edinburgh. Not to be too restricted, his series “Corduroy Mansions” extends such approach to a crumbling mansion block in London’s Pimlico district.

Like his predecessors in the “Author of the Month”, our champion this month has a wide coverage of human life in his novels. The various series are dependent on recurring characters, but his one-off novels cover World War II, French restaurants, spies, wine and love/life. He has a great sense of fun and the ridiculous and this is clear from such titles as “My Italian Bulldozer”, “The Second Worst Restaurant in France”, “The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse”, “La’s Orchestra Saves the World” and “Fatty O’Leary’s Dinner Party”.

The large and varied output of this author makes him compulsive reading as there is something for everyone!