McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club

Alexander McCall Smith has previously achieved some notice as the author of the Ladies No 1 Detective Agency (set in Botswana) and also the Portuguese irregular verbs series. He has now created a new detective based in Edinburgh, Scotland, which is where McCall Smith now lives.

The detective genre is notoriously used as by its authors as a platform for their ideas, such as Catholicism by Chesterton (Father Brown) or Judaism by Kemelman ( Rabbi Small). Here (as indeed in the Ladies No 1 Detective Agency series), McCall Smith's concerns are with morality and ethics. Indeed, he points this out to us, so to speak, by making his detective, Isabel Dalhousie, the editor of the Review of applied ethics and the convenor of the Sunday Philosophy Club of the title. That the Club never in fact meets — everyone is too busy to come — is only part of McCall Smith's point on applying ethics to the real world.

Besides ethics, this is a story, quietly and gently told, based on character. Nothing too much happens really; Isabel walks around Edinburgh, meets people, talks with them, and notices things. We get to find out about the characters, their characters, their moral choices and the results. There is a death at the beginning, and an explanation at the end.

There isn't really much detecting, even by Agatha Christie standards.

McCall Smith, Alexander. The Sunday Philosophy Club. 2004, Little, Brown, London. paperback. 281 pages.