Alexander McCall Smith's The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency is the first of a long series of mystery novels about Mma Precious Ramotswe, a middle-aged African woman who opens her own detective agency in Botswana. The mysteries she confronts are ordinary, but important for her clients, and Mma Ramotswe disposes of them with ingenuity and a healthy appreciation for the weakness of men.

Mma Ramotswe is an appealing personality, in turn wise, witty, and compassionate. Despite some trauma in her past -- an ugly divorce and the death of her infant child -- she is remarkably content with her life and with the state of her homeland, which is one of the fastest-growing and most stable countries in Africa.

Unfortunately, Mma Ramotswe's contentment gives the novel its own feeling of self-satisfaction, which manifests in a pleasant but rarely dramatic story: mystery Muzak. Each of Mma Ramotswe's cases is entirely self-contained, and she resolves almost all of them within a chapter. Usually, her first guess is correct; invariably, her methods bear fruit. With such little resistance, the story has difficulty generating excitement.

I'm also ambivalent about the voice that McCall Smith, a Zimbabwean-born Scotsman, uses for Mma Ramotswe. Mma Ramotswe is no idiot, but she is proudly provincial and not particularly self-refective. At times, I thought that her voice veered dangerously close to the caricature of the happy native, who is simple of thought and content with her shallow opinions. I'm sure this is unfair to McCall Smith, who develops Mma Ramotswe's character over ten volumes, and not just the one I read. But Mma Ramotswe's unreflective simplicity still bothered me, however slightly.

Copyright © 2009 Steven Wu