by Otto Penzler
Bloody hell, I thought. It could only be a matter of time before my first novel found a publisher.
Ahh, my first novel. It was called Summer Rites and was a black comedy about a hotel in the Scottish Highlands. It never did find a publisher, but I was already busy with my next book, The Flood. Taking to heart the adage "write what you know," I set this new book in a (thinly disguised) version of my hometown. It did find a publisher, a small press in Edinburgh that printed a couple hundred hardback copies and maybe seven hundred paperbacks, many of which went unsold and were pulped.
The same week I signed the contract for The Flood, I got the idea for yet another novel, set in Edinburgh this time, the gothic Edinburgh I'd been reading about at university, but very much in the present and featuring:
"Male hero (a policeman?)"
On March 19, 1985, I recorded in my diary that "I've not written any of it yet, but it's all there in my head from page 1 to circa page 250." On March 24, I wrote the first four pages and decided to give it the working title Knots and Crosses. By July 4, the first draft was finished, but for some reason I didn't start the second draft until September 18. I'd typed out the first couple of revised pages when, again according to my diary, my flatmate at the time, Jon Curt, suggested a trip to the pub where he worked. The pub was called the Oxford Bar: "splendidly uncontrived and open until 2:00 a.m." It would be a few years before the Oxford Bar appeared in a Rebus novel (I thought bars, streets, etc., had to be fictional in a work of fiction), but I was glad to have made its acquaintance.
From the above, it seems I've been guilty of a protracted lie. For years I've been telling people that I wrote Knots and Crosses in that apartment in Arden Street, right across the road from where Rebus still lives. But I vacated Arden Street in the summer of 1985 and moved in with two undergraduate students (Jon being one of them) in a place way over on the other side of the city. This means that Knots is even closer to Jekyll and Hyde than I'd guessed, having been written partly to the south of Princes Street and partly to the north.
Because my novel The Flood had been accepted for publication, an agent had come to ask if I was working on anything else. She decided that we should send copies of Knots and Crosses to five London-based publishers: Bodley Head, Collins, Century-Hutchinson, Andre Deutsch, and William Heinemann. Eventually, we'd get the thumbs-up from only one--Bodley Head. But that was all we needed, and I was especially thrilled that I would have the same publisher as Muriel Spark--at least for a short while.
My final diary entry for 1985 ends: "Year after year, there's improvement."
When the book was finally published, however, on March 19, 1987, I noted that it seemed to receive less publicity than its predecessor. Working with a publicity budget of zero, Bodley Head ran no advertisements and secured no interviews with newspapers or magazines. The book came and went without anyone really paying it any attention at all. It failed to make the short list for the Crime Writers' Association's first-novel award (won that year by Denis Kilcommons), though the CWA asked me if I wanted to join them anyway. It was at this point that I realized the awful truth: while trying to write "the Great Scottish Neo-Gothic Novel" I had somehow become a crime writer. Not that this gave me too many sleepless nights. I had said farewell to the character called Rebus and was moving on to a spy novel called Watchman. It would be another year or two before my editor cleared his throat and asked me what had happened to John Rebus.
"I liked him, and I think there's more you can do with his...."
I think his clearing of the throat was a way of telling me that he didn't expect Watchman to do any better than Knots and Crosses, but that maybe the crime genre was worth another try.
This editorial musing was, in retrospect, invaluable, but the gods also seemed to be looking favorably upon Rebus. A TV producer had shown some interest in that first novel. He had formed a new company with an actor (known for his role in a popular soap) and was looking for a promising project. If successful, the action of Knots and Crosses would have been moved to London (to accommodate the actor's English accent), and that might have been the end of my creation. However, my agent disappeared halfway through negotiations, and the deal fizzled out. (Don't worry, she reappeared some years later.)
Hide and Seek gave me a second bite at Rebus's cherry, if you'll pardon the expression. The name Hyde is implicit in the title--in fact, the book's working title was Hyde and Seek. I followed it up with a novel in which I dragged Rebus to London (where I was living at the time) so he could hate it as much as I did. By then the damage was done: three books down, I had produced a series. And for as long as Inspector Rebus proved a satisfactory vehicle for my investigations into contemporary Scotland, that series would continue. I just hoped a readership would eventually follow.
IV
So where did Rebus come from? Well, from my subconscious, obviously, from a young man's brain, filled with stories and strategies. But also from the books I'd been reading, the city I'd made my home, and the blood that had soaked into its pavements and roadways. Yet it still seems to me that he appeared as a bolt from the blue. I've looked at photos of myself in my student room in Arden Street, and have pored over my diaries from the time, seeking clues. The notes I jotted down prior to starting the novel shed very little light. I saw the book as "a metaphysical thriller" but spent very little time delineating Rebus's character. I wanted the story to contain lots of "puzzles and wordplay," wanted it to be "a very visual piece," and decided it should be written in the third person: "Don't need to go too far inside the main character's head." Rebus was to be a cipher rather than a three-dimensional human being. From a rereading of Knots and Crosses, I think it's true to say that the reader feels more distanced from Rebus in that book than in any of the others that followed. There was a good reason for this: I wanted Rebus himself to exist as a potential suspect in people's minds. Hence the momentary flashbacks, the hints of something awful in his past, and the "locked room" in his apartment. He also at one point almost strangles a woman who has invited him into her bed.
Nice.
Through sheer force of will, however, Rebus stuck around and grew into someone more fully formed, to the point where fans are now worried about his health and find when they meet me that I fall disappointingly short of Rebus himself. I'm just not as damaged as he is, as complex, or as dangerous to be around. I'm only the bloke who commits his stories to paper. What became obvious to me early on was that a detective makes for a terrific commentator on the world around him. He has access to the highest in the land and the lowest, the politicians and oligarchs, as well as the junkies and petty thieves. In writing books about Edinburgh, I could examine the city (and the nation of which it is capital once more) from top to bottom through Rebus's eyes. I was lucky too--there was no tradition of the crime novel in Scotland, so I could make my own path. And back then there were no crime novels set in contemporary Edinburgh, meaning that for a little while I had no competition.
I've been lucky also in that Edinburgh and Scotland continue to change in interesting ways, giving me plenty of plots while delivering up their secrets and mysteries only very slowly. I've been living in this city now for almost thirty years, on and off, and it continues to surprise me. Underground streets and chambers are still being discovered. Archaeological digs at the castle bring new truths to the surface. Exhibits long forgotten in the various museums turn out to have their own tales worth telling. As a subject, the city seems inexhaustible. This is, after all, a city of words. Where else in the world would you find the main railway station named after a novel (Waverley) and a vast edifice in the city center celebrating that work's author (the Scott Monument)? Robert Louis Stevenson brought his own imagination to bear on his hometown. Arthur Conan Doyle was born here. Muriel Spark grew up here. Robert Burns made his name here. James M. Barrie was a student here. Not to mention the likes of Carlyle and Hume. Right up to J. K. Rowling, Irvine Welsh, and Alexander McCall Smith in the present day.
Rebus, too,
is composed of words--millions of them--so you might think that by now I'd have got to the heart of what makes him tick, but he continues to surprise me, which is perhaps only fitting for a man whose name means "puzzle." For twenty years now, he's been living inside my head, but sometimes it feels as though I'm the one living in his. When a psychoanalyst interviewed me at a book festival a while back, he wondered if Rebus represented the brother I never had, or maybe the life of adventure I was never going to allow myself to lead. Both my parents served in World War II (my father in the Far East). One of my two sisters married a Royal Air Force engineer and spent much of her life thereafter traveling the world. As a kid, I once wrote to the army asking for information on joining up. But I was resolutely bookish, and all my adventures took place inside my head.
Maybe the psychoanalyst had a point; maybe Rebus really is an extension of my own personality--doing all the dangerous stuff I'd be too scared to do, breaking rules and conventions, getting into fights and scrapes, and even coming up against the occasional deadly force. Some commentators have decided that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a book about the creative process and the division between our rational mind and the darker fantasies we keep hidden from view. In which case, Rebus would be my Hyde, acting as a force of nature, saying the unsayable, doing things I could never bring myself to do--even though I could (and can) all too readily imagine myself doing them.
Sir Winston Churchill once called Russia "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." I've found the same to be true of Scotland and Edinburgh.
And of Detective Inspector John Rebus.
ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH
Alexander McCall Smith is a Scotsman born in Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in 1948; he studied law at the University of Edinburgh, where he is now emeritus professor of law. A highly respected expert on medical law and bioethics, he is the former chairman of the British Medical Journal Ethics Committee, the former vice chairman of the Human Genetics Commission to the United Kingdom, and a former member of the International Bioethics Commission of UNESCO. When his writing career became a full-time commitment, he discontinued his involvement in these areas.
His series about Precious Ramotswe of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, which began as a series of short stories for a small Scottish publisher in 1998, have become enormous international bestsellers (and the basis for a popular television series), as have his other books, notably the six volumes about Isabel Dalhousie of the Sunday Philosophy Club (The Sunday Philosophy Club, 2004; Friends, Lovers, Chocolate, 2005; The Right Attitude to Rain, 2006; The Careful Use of Compliments, 2007; The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday, 2008; and The Lost Art of Gratitude, 2009). He has also written three novels in the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, five in the 44 Scotland Street series, and three short-story collections, all of which are told with a gentle charm that cannot help but captivate readers. He has also written nineteen children's books. Professor McCall Smith lives in Edinburgh with his wife, a doctor; they have two daughters.
PRECIOUS RAMOTSWE
BY ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH
1
My entire childhood and youth were spent in Africa, in a bewitchingly beautiful but somewhat unhappy country then called Southern Rhodesia. The rest of my life, the greater part of it, has been spent in Scotland. I consider myself a Scot who has had one foot in Africa, which is a continent I love. Most people who have lived for any time in Africa are affected by it profoundly. It is a part of the world with which it appears to be very easy to fall in love. It claims the heart, and often breaks it--again and again.
That is why I write about it.
2
In 1980, I went to work for six months in Swaziland, a small country sandwiched between Mozambique and South Africa. I worked at the university there, and I lived in a house that had magnificent views of the mountains about which Rider Haggard wrote in King Solomon's Mines. I had not been in Africa for a long time and I found many memories came flooding back. I was there in the rainy season, and once again I experienced that extraordinary sensation--the smell of rain on the wind. I saw birds that I remembered seeing as a child. Outside my window was a great bougainvillea bush of the sort that grew outside my window when I was a boy.
The nearest town of any size was a place called Manzini. This was reached by a road that ran first past a hospital and then past a hotel called the Uncle Charlie Hotel. The Uncle Charlie Hotel had a dining room with a mural painted all the way round the top part of the wall, above the picture rail. This mural showed African animals--cantering giraffes, a pride of lions, scattered zebras--against a background of wide savannah. At one end of the picture there was a lake, and in front of the lake was a tiny flagpole with a painted Union Jack fluttering in the breeze.
I used a fictional hotel a bit like this in a short story I wrote many years later, "He Used to Like to Go for Drives with His Father." In the story, the owner of a hotel in Swaziland has a mentally handicapped son and a bored tennis-playing wife. He is very proud of a Mercedes-Benz car that he has, in fact, stolen and had repainted. The boy loves going for drives in this car, but the wife is determined that her husband should be punished for stealing it, and takes drastic action.
Swaziland struck me as an eminently suitable setting for such a story. I believe in the existence of a literary continent called Greene-land, so called because the places within it are exactly the sort of places where Graham Greene set his stories. Greene never used Swaziland, but he would have loved it. There was just the right sense of being caught at the wrong end of history; and the lives led there by outsiders (and most of Greene's characters are washed up from somewhere else) seemed to me to have that air of desperation, of dislocation, that makes a Greene novel so haunting.
I was still single then, and time at weekends hung rather heavy on my hands. On Sundays I would sometimes drive up to Siteki, on the ridge of the Lebombo Mountains, and have lunch in the Siteki Hotel, an old colonial hotel that appeared to have changed little over the years. They served Brown Windsor soup, a heavy beef-based soup that was popular in Britain until the 1950s, and the tables were covered with carefully starched white linen. It was extraordinary that such a place should have survived.
When I had rather more time--a break of three or four days--I would travel through South Africa, across what was then the Transvaal, all the way to Botswana. I had friends who lived in Mochudi, a village to the north of the capital, Gaborone. I would stay with them for a few days and then travel back to Swaziland.
The road to Botswana ran unswervingly across dry plains of red earth, taking a breather every fifty miles or so in some depressing little agricultural town of neat, soulless bungalows and shops with wide verandas. As one approached these towns, the sun would glint off the silver spire of a Dutch Reformed church like a sharp sliver of Calvinist disapproval. And all about there was a feeling of things having stopped, of waiting for something that was expected but had yet to materialize.
Then, after a God-forsaken town called Zeerust, the road turned north and headed for a final seventy miles or so to the Botswana border. Something happened now; the landscape changed, became more wooded; hills appeared, abrupt protuberances in the land like islands rising out of the sea. And as the landscape changed, so, too, did the atmosphere. Suddenly, as one neared and then crossed the border into Botswana, it seemed as if a weight of oppression lifted off one's shoulders.
3
There are places that immediately impress the visitor with some special quality, a quality that has nothing to do with what you see about you--the landscape, the buildings--but has everything to do with what one might call spirit of place. Arriving in Botswana, I felt that I had come to, quite simply, a good place. I have felt something like that on other occasions, if not so markedly; conversely, in other places one may pick up an atmosphere of sadness and loss, as on the site of a great battlefield--Culloden, for instance. In Botswana I felt a peacefulness that was redolent of social harmony, of human decency. It was very strikin
g, and it continues to resonate with visitors to that country. It is not imagined; it is really there. This was a place where human values were respected, where people lived together without fear, where kindness might be encountered.
How can it be that what happens in a particular setting can remain in that place? Marconi espoused the theory that sound waves never die away but simply become fainter and fainter. If this is true, then all the sounds ever made persist and, had we the instruments, we could indeed hear everything ever said, all the music ever played. Would a place of conflict, then, be a place of faint, agonized cries; a place of peace one of gentle singing?
Such resonances seem inherently unlikely, but there are still places that somehow reflect the contentment and peacefulness of those who have lived there. Whatever lies behind this phenomenon, Botswana seems to be such a place.
4
My friends in Mochudi were Howard and Fiona Moffat. Howard was then the doctor in charge of the small hospital there. His wife, Fiona, had been a librarian. They had two children, John and Claire, who went to Maru-a-Pula School in Gaborone.
I had known Howard since boyhood days. He is the great-great-grandson of the famous Scottish missionary Robert Moffat, who set up the mission at Kuruman in the Northern Cape and whose daughter, Mary Moffat, married David Livingstone. Robert Moffat was the first person to render the language of those parts, Setswana, into written form. He was a great friend of the king of the Matabale people, Mizilikazi, and went on several long trips up into Matabeleland, where Mizilikazi had his capital at Bulawayo. I had spent my boyhood in Bulawayo, the city of Cecil John Rhodes, the arch-imperialist of Victorian times.