
Alexander McCall Smith is one of the most prolific and best-loved authors in the world. He's written and contributed to more than a hundred books, spanning a variety of genres from crime fiction to humour to general fiction to children's books to scholarly works related to his area of expertise, medical law. Before he became a popular writer, McCall Smith was an academic. He spent many years as a professor of Medical Law at universities in the UK and abroad before turning his hand to writing fiction.
Among his most popular books is the 44 Scotland Street series. It began with the first book, also called 44 Scotland Street, which was published as a daily serial in The Scotsman. Novels were routinely published as serials in newspapers and magazines in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the practice has since fallen out of favour, a fact that McCall Smith lamented in an article that he wrote for The Herald, back in 2004. The editors of The Scotsman read that article and decided to take up the challenge that he’d unwittingly laid down. They offered to publish a novel as a daily serial, if McCall Smith would write it. And so, 44 Scotland Street was born.
It was a unique experience both for the writer and his readers, because the book was being written as it was being published. Readers of the newspaper got to read one chapter a day. They wrote in to voice their opinions about the characters and plot points as they developed, and they got involved in the story and the writing of it in a way that readers rarely get to do. It probably helped that the characters and the setting of 44 Scotland Street are so appealing. These are people who feel like they could be your neighbours and friends. And reading about them and their doings has the flavour of a chatty, gossipy exchange among friends, talking about mutual acquaintances at their weekly catch-up.
The series is set in Edinburgh, in an apartment building (number 44) on Scotland Street. The people who live in this building are a mixed bunch, college students, couples, young singles, and older folk. There's Pat, a twenty-year-old, who's on her second gap year before she goes to university, Bruce, her new room-mate, a handsome young man who's a little too pleased with himself, Domenica McDonald, one of their older neighbours who describes herself as an anthropologist/dilettante, young Bertie, an unusually intelligent five-year-old boy who speaks Italian and plays the saxophone though he desperately doesn't want do either, and his pushy parents Irene and Stuart who can't seem to let their little boy be a little boy. Though to be fair to Stuart, Irene does most of the pushing.
In addition to the folks who live at number 44, the book features a few other characters who add a bit of their own colour to the scene - Matthew, the kind, but somewhat vague young man who runs the art gallery that Pat works at, Angus, a middle-aged portrait painter who along with Domenica, takes Pat under his wing, and Big Lou, who aside from Bertie, is my favourite character in the series. Big Lou owns a coffee shop, that once used to be a second-hand bookshop that was sold when the owner died. She bought the shop and the stock. She wasn't a reader, but she took all the books home and began to read them because, well, she had them. Now she’s reading Proust and pondering the nature of memory and imagination.
These are characters that feel real, they're people you come to care for, and people you definitely want to keep reading about. The series is an account of their lives, their doings, their thoughts, and their conversations...it's classic slice of life writing that Alexander McCall Smith brings his unique genius to. The writing is engaging, funny and charming. The dialogue runs the gamut from gossip to neighbourly chatter, from deep personal conversations to intellectual musings on the nature of free will. As in any slice of life writing, the story is driven by the characters. But there's plenty of plot here as well, you never quite know what is going to happen next.
44 Scotland Street was intended to be a standalone book. But by the time he finished writing it, McCall Smith found that he wasn’t yet ready to let go of the characters who inhabit this world, and neither were the readers who had thoroughly enjoyed their daily instalment of the doings of the folks at number 44. And so he wrote book two, Espresso Tales. Books three, four and five followed. No one saw any reason to stop there, so the series continued and it is, remarkably, still going. Book seventeen, The Stellar Debut of Galactica MacFee was published just two months ago. This is now the longest running serial novel in the world.
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