Alexander McCall Smith: Warming breakfast serials

Alexander McCall Smith talks to Rhiannon Batten about his fictional return from Botswana to Edinburgh

This week, Edinburgh's tour guides found themselves with another stretch of pavement to add to their literary itineraries. Scotland Street, a graceful run of Georgian buildings on the eastern edge of the New Town, is not only the most patriotic address in the city. It's also the setting for Alexander McCall Smith's latest novel, 44 Scotland Street (Polygon, £14.99), which centres on a group of archetypal residents in one of the New Town's stately tenements.

What sets 44 Scotland Street apart from McCall Smith's other works - his seven-million-selling series of No 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels, his Professor Von Igelfeld novellas and even the new Edinburgh-based Sunday Philosophy Club series - is that the book was originally published in installments in The Scotsman newspaper. The first daily serialised novel ever in a British paper, 44 Scotland Street ran over 109 episodes between January and June last year; a second volume of the story finished last week.

The idea of a serialised novel came to McCall Smith when he bumped into Armistead Maupin in San Francisco a couple of years ago. "I was at a party given by the novelist Amy Tan," he says. "I went along and there were all these literary types, including Isabel Allende, who reads the Botswana books, and Lemony Snicket, who was playing the squashbox. Somebody said, 'As Armistead just said'... I turned around and it was Maupin.

"I'd read Tales of the City and said that I'd enjoyed them, etc." When he came back, he wrote an article for The Herald about "what a pity it was that newspapers didn't do serial novels any more". The response from the paper's main rival, The Scotsman, was - "You're on". When McCall Smith suggested that a chapter every week was quite a tall order, the reply was "no, not weekly, daily". The author was so flabbergasted that he agreed.

The serialised novel isn't a new phenomenon. By the mid-19th century, sequential works by Charles Dickens, Henry James and Thomas Hardy, among others, had become popular. McCall Smith says he ignored his predecessors when approaching 44 Scotland Street. "I rather suspect that authors in the past published complete chapters and therefore it made no difference," he shrugs. Instead, he had a vague idea that he would write about a group of people living in a single tenement stair. "But then I had to keep writing because newspapers use up stuff so quickly. You spend all this time writing and then, bang, it's gone."

Fortunately, as one of the lucky few who find little difficulty in knocking out 1000 nicely-turned words per hour ("I used to do 4000 words regularly every day but in August I went down to about 3000"), there was little danger of McCall Smith coming up against writer's block. "In my view, it's what I imagine it's like to walk along a tightrope, in the sense that you don't look down and you don't look back. You have to continue."

There were other challenges presented by a daily serial. First, that you can't go back and change what you have written: "Unless you resort to cheap tricks, such as suddenly saying that something was all a dream, à la Dallas, the die is cast." Then there was the matter of writing for a newspaper audience, and competing with other material on a page. "If you waffle away, you lose them."

Keeping readers' attention doesn't seem to have been too difficult for the professor of medical law, currently a third of the way through a three-year sabbatical from academic work. Many sent him feedback and one fan, Florence Christie ("in her eighties, a great spirit, a lifelong pacifist, a remarkable woman"), wrote encouragingly every few days.

"She's a very good judge on a number of issues. It's a great privilege for a writer to know that every morning the latest episode is being read by all sorts of people, all sharing the joke. Because it is really, it's one big joke. One of the characters in the novel [Bruce] is a profound narcissist. Lots of readers got very cross with him. I had a letter from one woman who said 'could you please do something nasty to Bruce... preferably involving a steamroller'."

When Bruce got away with something, the whole of establishment Edinburgh seemed to choke on its porridge. With a cast that runs from Tory bore Ramsey Dunbarton and free-thinking bohemian Domenica Macdonald (who, like McCall Smith, drives a custard-yellow Mercedes) to pushy mother Irene, who forces five-year-old Bertie to play the saxophone, speak Italian and sleep in a room painted pink to offset gender stereotypes, 44 Scotland Street is clearly both for and about the Edinburgh bourgeoisie.

The story and characters are in such tight synergy with The Scotsman's readership that it makes you wonder how much input the newspaper had. McCall Smith insists that it gave him no direction. But did he consider bringing Mma Ramotswe, of the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, to Edinburgh? "She would be interested to see the Firth of Forth," he says, "and she'd be very polite about it, but she'd find it pretty cold."

In the end, McCall plumped for a social comedy which celebrates the eccentricities of what has been his home city ever since he arrived at university there, after a childhood in Southern Rhodesia. "It's not your average city," he says. "In a place like the New Town you get a lot of interesting characters. I suppose what I'm doing is just depicting those and having fun - and at the end of the day hoping that people will have had occasion to smile and to perhaps have the cares of the world eased for a little while, if that doesn't sound too pretentious."

Those who take the view that McCall Smith's books paint too sugary a picture of life aren't going to find a sudden change of direction. There is no hint of the "miserabalism" of Edinburgh-set novels like Trainspotting, for example. He once levelled that charge at fellow-writer Irvine Welsh. But, for a man who openly praises Blair and Brown for their stance on Africa, who counts the philanthropist and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates among his fans and who himself gives regularly to charity (recently pledging the equivalent of six months' local salary for a literary competition in Botswana), was McCall Smith uneasy writing about some of the world's more privileged citizens?

"I don't have a difficulty with that. The people in the book aren't the idle rich. It's certainly a different cast of characters and a different milieu from some of my other books, but none of them has callous attitudes. They have their fair measure of human compassion. I am writing about the bourgeoisie, I suppose, but then somebody's got to write about them."

It was also another chance to write about a country he is deeply attached to. Although never a member of the Scottish National Party (he's a long-term Liberal Democrat), in the late 1970s McCall Smith was involved in the cultural side of Scottish nationalism. "I think that there was a spell when Scottish culture was somewhat fragile," he says. "It's much more confident now, and with the advent of the Parliament there's less sense of Scottish culture being threatened. I think it would be a pity if certain things that are distinctive were to be lost; for example, the strong communitarian values, the poetry of the Scottish renaissance - if children in Scotland ceased to know who Robert Burns was.

"That's quite different from saying that one should just write about one's own backyard. I don't think that one need do and, indeed, I don't. But I'm delighted that I'm able to find an audience for things which are set here, which are Scottish, and I'm delighted that those appear to be exportable and to be read abroad."

He refers to the fact that US and Canadian publishers have bought both publication and audio rights to 44 Scotland Street. "Initially I thought it would be purely Scottish, but I've tried to avoid references that are entirely private or of no interest. I think that's the real key, giving the book a real setting but at the same time making it a story of universals."

Perhaps the proof will be finding out whether Bill Gates will engage as happily with goings-on in Edinburgh art galleries, coffee shops and Conservative Party balls as he has with the bush tea-drinking, "traditionally built" Mma Ramotswe in Botswana. If he needs a little help with the background, there are always those literary tours.

Biography: Alexander Mccall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith was born in Southern Rhodesia in 1948. After the Christian Brothers College, Bulawayo, he studied law at the University of Edinburgh, where he has stayed as a legal academic. He became professor of medical law in 1991. In the 1980s, he helped set up the school of law at the University of Botswana, a stint which inspired his worldwide bestsellers about The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency. Since 1998, the six-novel series has sold more than seven million copies. This month, Polygon publishes 44 Scotland Street, a serial novel that first appeared in The Scotsman. McCall Smith has been vice-chairman of the UK Human Genetics Commission. Married to a GP, he has two teenage daughters.