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Some authors are so famous, their works part of the collective imagination of a society, that you think you already know what they write about and how they write even if you've not read their books. Well, sometimes I think this way. I actually have read Truman Capote, however. I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s ages ago, but enough time has passed that the story has faded from my mind and only the movie made famous by Audrey Hepburn remains as a visual. When Chihiro recommended reading Capote's short story, "Miriam" I thought I knew what I was in for, at least I didn't expect a story quite so unnerving. I wonder if this qualifies as Southern Gothic? It seems very Daphne du Maurier-esque to me, and she can do creepy very well.
Mrs. H.T. Miller is a widow. She leads a carefully ordered life. A place for everything and everything in its place. "Her interests were narrow". And "her activities were seldom spontaneous". Until she met Miriam, that is. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, Mrs. Miller's name is Miriam, too. One wintry evening Mrs. Miller decides to take in a movie. Galoshes on, purse in hand she sets off and gets in line for her ticket when she is approached by an unusual little girl.
"Her hair was the longest and strangest Mrs. Miller had ever seen: absolutely silver-white, like an albino's. It flowed waistlength in smooth, loose lines. She was thin and fragilely constructed. There was a simple elegance in the way she stood with her thumbs in the pockets of a tailored plum-velvet coat."
When the girl and Mrs. Miller make eye contact, Mrs. Miller feels strangely elated. Miriam is too young to buy a movie ticket and allowed in the theater alone, so when she asks Mrs. Miller to do her the favor of buying her ticket, Mrs. Miller agrees. She gaily responds that it makes her feel like a criminal but hopes she hasn't done anything wrong. When the movie begins they each go their separate ways, but that's not the last of Miriam Mrs. Miller will see. Several days later Miriam will show up on Mrs. Miller's doorstep long after bedtime in the wintry cold and wearing a white silk dress, asking to be let in. Mrs. Miller is aghast that her mother has allowed her out so late at night. "Your mother must be insane to let a child like you wander around at all hours of the night--and in such ridiculous clothes. She must be out of her mind."
For such a young girl, perhaps ten or eleven, Miriam is very precocious. She has a large vocabulary and shows no fear. It's the fear she provokes in Mrs. Miller that's so unnerving. Although Mrs. Miller gets Miriam to leave (three slices of bread and jam later, and minus her favorite brooch), like a bad penny she keeps turning up. The thing is, Miriam makes Mrs. Miller realize just how alone in the world she really is. "It came to Mrs. Miller there was no one to whom she might turn: She was alone; a fact that had not been among her thoughts for a long time. Its sheer emphasis was stunning."
Some authors are so famous, their works part of the collective imagination of a society, that you think you already know what they write about and how they write even if you've not read their books. Well, sometimes I think this way. I actually have read Truman Capote, however. I read Breakfast at Tiffany's ages ago, but enough time has passed that the story has faded from my mind and only the movie made famous by Audrey Hepburn remains as a visual. When Chihiro recommended reading Capote's short story, "Miriam" I thought I knew what I was in for, at least I didn't expect a story quite so unnerving. I wonder if this qualifies as Southern Gothic? It seems very Daphne du Maurier-esque to me, and she can do creepy very well.
Mrs. H.T. Miller is a widow. She leads a carefully ordered life. A place for everything and everything in its place. "Her interests were narrow". And "her activities were seldom spontaneous". Until she met Miriam, that is. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, Mrs. Miller's name is Miriam, too. One wintry evening Mrs. Miller decides to take in a movie. Galoshes on, purse in hand she sets off and gets in line for her ticket when she is approached by an unusual little girl.
"Her hair was the longest and strangest Mrs. Miller had ever seen: absolutely silver-white, like an albino's. It flowed waistlength in smooth, loose lines. She was thin and fragilely constructed. There was a simple elegance in the way she stood with her thumbs in the pockets of a tailored plum-velvet coat."
When the girl and Mrs. Miller make eye contact, Mrs. Miller feels strangely elated. Miriam is too young to buy a movie ticket and allowed in the theater alone, so when she asks Mrs. Miller to do her the favor of buying her ticket, Mrs. Miller agrees. She gaily responds that it makes her feel like a criminal but hopes she hasn't done anything wrong. When the movie begins they each go their separate ways, but that's not the last of Miriam Mrs. Miller will see. Several days later Miriam will show up on Mrs. Miller's doorstep long after bedtime in the wintry cold and wearing a white silk dress, asking to be let in. Mrs. Miller is aghast that her mother has allowed her out so late at night. "Your mother must be insane to let a child like you wander around at all hours of the night--and in such ridiculous clothes. She must be out of her mind."
For such a young girl, perhaps ten or eleven, Miriam is very precocious. She has a large vocabulary and shows no fear. It's the fear she provokes in Mrs. Miller that's so unnerving. Although Mrs. Miller gets Miriam to leave (three slices of bread and jam later, and minus her favorite brooch), like a bad penny she keeps turning up. The thing is, Miriam makes Mrs. Miller realize just how alone in the world she really is. "It came to Mrs. Miller there was no one to whom she might turn: She was alone; a fact that had not been among her thoughts for a long time. Its sheer emphasis was stunning." Who's going to believe Mrs. Miller? And how is she going to make Miriam go away?
I'll leave the denouement to you to discover. This was a great story, one I recommend. It's a case of not being quite sure what's real and what's in Mrs. Miller's imagination. I suppose it could be read either way, and I'm not sure which is less disturbing. I believe this story can be found in The Complete Stories of Truman Capote, but I happened across it in First Fiction: An Anthology of the First Published Stories by Famous Writers edited by Kathy Kiernan. And yes, I'd like to read more of his work.
THE COMPLETE STORIES OF TRUMAN CAPOTE (Penguin Books 2005) - Book Review
Reviewed by Dan Schneider
Of the twenty stories that comprise the surprisingly slim (for a writer of his renown) ‘The Complete Stories Of Truman Capote’, only two can be classified as great, or at least excellent, while only two others can be called good. The rest are not even passable, despite the occasional memorable image or well-crafted sentence, for the narratives are weak, trite, and transparent. Now, this ration of twenty and ten percent success in goodness and greatness is one that if it were sustained throughout published literature, would leave our time to be considered a Golden Age. However, since the only things I read of Capote’s, before this book, were the excellent ‘In Cold Blood’, and the two Christmas tales, ‘A Christmas Memory’ and ‘One Christmas’, this book’s tales were a profound disappointment. More so considering the very two Christmas tales were the only arguably great tales, and the only good tales were also holiday stories: ‘The Thanksgiving Visitor’ and ‘Jug Of Silver’. One might argue, from this quartet, that Capote was the greatest occasional short story writer of all time. The rest of his work, however, ranged from passable to atrocious.
Part of the reason for this reality, however, is that the span of the tales range from 1943 to 1982, with twelve of the stories written in the 1940s - what might be called Capote’s apprentice period. Only ‘Jug Of Silver’ dates from that era. Reading those first dozen tales is to watch a great writer in utero, and growing. The first four stories are absolutely terrible- no plot, no point, no memorable scenes, characters, nor phrases. The first, 1943’s ‘The Walls Are Cold’, is a dull, trite tale about a young, flirtatious socialite, yet even this early the concerns and milieux are archetypically Capotean:
“The hostess straightened her trim, black dress and pursed her lips nervously. She was very young and small and perfect. Her face was pale and framed with sleek black hair, and her lipstick was a trifle too dark. It was after two and she was tired and wished they would all go, but it was no small task to rid yourself of some thirty people, particularly when the majority were full of her father’s scotch. The elevator man had been up twice to complain about the noise; so she gave him a highball, which is all he is after anyway. And now the sailors…oh, the hell with it”.
Even its trite end is predictably Capotean:
“She nodded and the hostess turned back down the corridor and went into her mother's room. She lay down on the velvet chaise lounge and stared at the Picasso abstract. She picked up a tiny lace pillow and pushed it against her face as hard as she could. She was going to sleep here tonight, here where the walls were pale rose and warm”.
Yet, even if one looks at the final eight tales, that span over thirty years, only three of them succeed, and do so when recalling true memories- or so Capote claimed. He even termed them his “nostalgic fictions”. It’s always been assumed that Capote turned to longer forms, novellas and novels, because his great financial success with ‘Other Voices’, ‘Other Rooms’, ‘Breakfast At Tiffany’s’, ‘The Grass Harp’, and ‘In Cold Blood’, made shorter forms less appealing. But, let’s give the writer his due in knowing his strengths and weaknesses. My guess is Capote knew he was not cut out to be a short fictionist, and was lucky that his financial success basically forestalled any real need to ‘prove’ himself in that genre.
Most of the tales deal with an assortment of prototypically Southern ‘white trash’ problems circa the 1920s through 1940s: religion, sexual crises, circus freaks, bullying elders, train rides to unknown parents, eccentrics galore, racism, social faux pas, romantic failures, poverty, schemes and scams, and silver jugs and diamond guitars. In many of the earlier tales the symbolism Capote uses is obvious, heavy-handed, and downright weak - an old mink stole that must be sold, a beautiful guitar that calms savage hearts, alluring but dangerous strangers, and, worst of all, the stereotype of the tormented artist wannabe, who endures the daily hell of preachers, accountants, gossips, and crooks.
For example, in ‘The Shape of Things’, from 1944, two women and a soldier on a train are threatened by another soldier heading home after being shellshocked. ‘A Mink Of One’s Own’, also published in 1944, has a woman visited by an old friend, back from Europe, after the Second World War. The friend gives a coat to the woman, and she pays four hundred dollars for it. Later, the woman realizes the coat is rotten. ‘Miriam’ is a 1945 tale that is steeped in the Southern Gothic tradition, although set in New York City, about a little girl named Miriam who haunts an old widow of the same name. Is it the woman’s earlier self? Is it in her mind? Is she insane or haunted? It’s a typically Rod Serlingesque tale of the sort that dominates Capote’s 1940s oeuvre. ‘My Side Of The Matter’, also from 1945, has a Capotan narrator who is a prisoner of his wife and her family. ‘Preacher’s Legend’, also from 1945, follows a stupid old black man, who is hunted by two hunters he deludes himself into believing one of them is Jesus Christ. ‘A Tree of Night’, again from 1945, follows an innocent student, sitting on a train next to a slutty woman and her mute companion, who engages an old childhood fear. ‘The Bargain’, a highly trumpeted previously unpublished story from 1950, follows a suburban housewife’s ups and downs that parallels the earlier ‘A Mink Of One’s Own’, except that the recipient of the coat is a bit more savvy, and aware of the reality of the deal:
“Still trailing the clumsy coat, she went to a corner of the room where there was a desk and, writing with resentful jabs, made a check on her private account: she did not intend that her husband should know. More than most, Mrs. Chase despised the sense of loss; a misplaced key, a dropped coin, quickened her awareness of theft and the cheats of life”.
‘A Diamond Guitar’, another 1950 tale, is about a musical instrument that is the prized possession of a convict, and one of the few early tales that is not awful.
All of these tales have one, or at best, two dimensional characters that suffer and are put out of their misery, one way or the other, usually by simply accepting it - the cruelest form of spiritual death. These tales most remind me of a cross between Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, lacking the brocaded, inert nature of Welty’s tales, and not quite as grotesqued as O’Connor’s overrated stories. The few later tales are better, on the whole, but 1975’s ‘Mojave’ is another trite clunker about the estrangement of lovers:
“That is the reason I have to kill him. He could never have loved me, not if he could ignore my enduring such hell. He says, ‘Yes, I love you Jaime; but Angelita, this is different.’ There is no difference. You love or you do not. You destroy or you do not. But Carlos will never understand that. Nothing reaches him, nothing can- only a bullet or a razor.
She wanted to laugh, at the same time she couldn't because she realized he was serious and also because she well knew how true it was that certain persons could only be made to recognize the truth, be made to understand, by subjecting them to extreme punishment.
Nevertheless she did laugh, but in a manner that Jaime would not interpret as genuine laughter. It was something comparable to a sympathetic shrug. ‘You could never kill anyone, Jaime.’
He began to comb her hair; the tugs were not gentle, but she knew the anger implied was against himself, not her. ‘Shit!’ Then: ‘No. And that’s the reason for most suicides. Someone is torturing you. You want to kill them but you can’t. All that pain is because you love them, and you can’t kill them because you love them. So you kill yourself instead.’”
Ugh! Fortunately, his four holiday tales – ‘Jug Of Silver’, ‘The Thanksgiving Visitor’, ‘One Christmas’, and most of all, the justly celebrated ‘A Christmas Memory’, represent a quantum leap upward. ‘A Christmas Memory’ is so chock full of great scenes and paragraphs that it seems to differ as fundamentally from the rest of Capote’s short fiction corpus as Robert Frost’s titanic poem ‘Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening’ does from the rest of his poetry, in both quality and tone. It starts with this great, rich and emotionally resonant, opening:
“Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.
A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable- not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. ‘Oh my,’ she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, ‘it’s fruitcake weather!’
The person to whom she is speaking is myself. I am seven; she is sixty-something. We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together- well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each other’s best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880s, when she was still a child. She is still a child.”
Buddy and his cousin, who is likely the woman named Sook Faulk, from a few other of the tales, have good and bad, light and dark times, and the tale tells how these two eccentrics- a shy introverted boy and a weird old woman- help each other through life. Here is a typical description of their Southern survival:
“We eat our supper (cold biscuits, bacon, blackberry jam) and discuss tomorrow. Tomorrow the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pine-apple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings: why, we’ll need a pony to pull the buggy home”.
The tale details such elementally rich details as the old cousin’s superstitions and desire to have Buddy watch movies for her and tell her of them, to save the strain on her eyes, and then we get the sundering of the past, and the tale ends with this extremely powerful and moving coda on the death of Buddy’s old cousin:
“This is our last Christmas together.
Life separates us. Those who Know Best decide that I belong in a military school. And so follows a miserable succession of bugle-blowing prisons, grim reveille-ridden summer camps. I have a new home too. But it doesn’t count. Home is where my friend is, and there I never go.
And there she remains, puttering around the kitchen. Alone with Queenie. Then alone. (‘Buddy dear,’ she writes in her wild hard-to-read script, ‘yesterday Jim Macy’s horse kicked Queenie bad. Be thankful she didn’t feel much. I wrapped her in a Fine Linen sheet and rode her in the buggy down to Simpson's pasture where she can be with all her Bones....’). For a few Novembers she continues to bake her fruitcakes single-handed; not as many, but some: and, of course, she always sends me ‘the best of the batch.’ Also, in every letter she encloses a dime wadded in toilet paper: ‘See a picture show and write me the story.’ But gradually in her letters she tends to confuse me with her other friend, the Buddy who died in the 1880s; more and more, thirteenths are not the only days she stays in bed: a morning arrives in November, a leafless birdless coming of winter morning, when she cannot rouse herself to exclaim: ‘Oh my, it's fruitcake weather!’
And when that happens, I know it. A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.”
The two other Christmas tales are good, ‘Jug Of Silver’ and ‘One Christmas’ - which rivals its earlier, and more famous, Christmas predecessor, with an ending just as powerful, albeit less melancholy. That tale follows the same young boy alone on a trip to New Orleans to visit his absentee father, and his later recollections about what he missed out on during that trip - both then, and in the intervening time. ‘The Thanksgiving Visitor’ is another very good story that follows Buddy, as he and Sook plan for a Great Depression era Thanksgiving. Sook invites an even poorer family to their home for supper, thinking a young boy, Odd Henderson, will make a good pal for Buddy. But, Odd has bullied Buddy at school and Buddy cannot stand him. He also feels jealousy over Sook’s fussing over Odd’s upcoming visit. When Odd comes he steals a brooch of Sook’s and Buddy finks on him. Sook covers for Odd and explains that Buddy’s intent to hurt Odd was worse than Odd’s thievery borne of poverty. Years go by and Sook’s kindness seems to have been a turning point in Odd’s life, yet the tale is not moralistic, and succeeds with a sharp end.
Capote died at the age of 59, in1984, a withered shell who looked a good quarter century older - filled with hatred and spite, addicted to drugs and alcohol, yet somehow won the O. Henry Memorial Short Story Prize for ‘Shut A Final Door’, one of his early pieces of dreck about a plagiarist. Yet, it is clear from this collection that the man simply was not adept with the form, save for a few pieces that could more easily be termed memoirs. The rest of the stories feature ill-formed characters that often veer into caricature, hazy premises and awfully contrived endings that ring too hollowly of artifice, and read like Southern Gothic lit lite. Fortunately, the short story form was merely a practice field for the too few greater works Capote would produce. Would that other writers’ failures bore such bounty in other fields, Elysian or made of pulp.
Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.' takes you through the back door of 'Tiffany's
By Craig Wilson, USA TODAY
It's one of the most famous scenes in film history. Audrey Hepburn steps out of a cab in the early morning darkness, looks up at the Tiffany & Co. building on Fifth Avenue, strolls over to a window and begins to nibble on a Danish pastry as she eyes the jewels inside.
Her hair is swept up, her demeanor that of quiet sophistication, her little sleeveless dress is black. Of course.
If only it were that simple.
Much has been written about Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and just as much has been written about the movie of the same name. Author Sam Wasson is now adding his own take on the classic in Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Women.
Anyone even slightly interested in Capote/Hepburn/Breakfast at Tiffany's will delight in his account, although a lot of it is old news.
Yes, Capote was not happy with the film version, with its possibility of multiple endings. Yes, Marilyn Monroe was Capote's first choice for Holly Golightly. Yes, Hepburn didn't even want the part, thinking it was not the image she wanted to project. She didn't like Danish pastries, either. She wanted to eat ice cream in the opening scene, but director Blake Edwards convinced her that ice cream was not for breakfast.
There were some who didn't even like the movie's now-classic theme, Moon River.
But through intensive research and interviews, Wasson is able to tell the story from an insider's point of view, giving readers a behind-the-scenes look at what it took to make the movie — the egos, the budget restraints, the folks at Tiffany's who had never before allowed cameras inside. In short, it's a good page-turner even if we do know the ending.
There are some surprises, too. Hepburn wasn't a beauty?
"Her legs were too long, her waist was too small, her feet were too big and so were her eyes, nose and the two gaping nostrils in it," writes Wasson. "When she smiled she revealed a mouth that swallowed up her face and a row of jagged teeth that wouldn't look too good in close-ups."
And then there was Hepburn's virginal image to deal with. Holly Golightly was anything but chaste, and in the puritanical late '50s, nice girls did not sleep around. Did the movie set the stage for the free-sex '60s?
You be the judge. Just remember what Ms. Golightly believed: Nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany's.
McCall Smith has many books brewing, just like bush tea
By Carol Memmot, USA TODAY
EDINBURGH — Scottish writer Alexander McCall Smith, creator of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, owns way too many books.
That's why, on this unusually mild fall day, he's apologizing for the "banging and crashing" as workers refurbish an upstairs library so the author can shelve his vast collection of titles – many of which, not surprisingly, he has written.
Best known for his popular series starring "lady detective" Mma Precious Ramotswe, Botswana’s only female private eye, the prolific McCall Smith is also the author of four other ongoing series, about 40 children's books –The Perfect Hamburger has been in print for 30 years – and 14 non-fiction titles, including Law and Medical Ethics. His books are published in 45 languages.
"That's why we have a shelving problem," he says with a laugh, and he will burst into spontaneous laughter many times over the next two hours. "We're doing about four books a year translated into 20 to 25 languages, and the publishers usually send six complimentary copies of each. So that's 50 to 60 editions coming into the house."
His newest, La's Orchestra Saves the World (Pantheon, $23.95), will be published Tuesday. It's a stand-alone novel about a woman who leads an amateur orchestra in World War II-era England and her relationship with a Polish immigrant. It was inspired by a short story McCall Smith wrote for the BBC and his interest in rural Suffolk. "I like that particular bit of England," he says, "and I was really interested in what had actually happened to the Poles during World War II and how badly they were treated."
McCall Smith and his wife, Elizabeth, a recently retired physician, have lived in this sand-colored stone Victorian in the stately Merchiston neighborhood, about 10 minutes from the center of this ancient city, for 25 years. It's where they raised their daughters, Lucy, 26, and Emily, 23, who are studying medicine.
It's a literary neighborhood.
Ian Rankin, Scotland’s top-selling crime novelist – he's the author of the Inspector Rebus series – lives two doors down. "He's a very nice chap," McCall Smith says. "We often meet for coffee at a nearby Starbucks.”
And J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame "lives just around the corner," he says. "She's very charming but very private."
A private, humble man
McCall Smith, 61, has welcomed a reporter into his home, but he's somewhat private, too. He speaks humbly of his writing career and the popularity of his books.
"I think I'm quite fortunate in being able to write very quickly," McCall Smith says. "I think if I was doing something I regarded as unpleasant, it would be another matter. I enjoy it very much."
Others are more willing to praise him.
"I'm not familiar with any other person who's routinely producing three books a year all by themselves," says Edward Kastenmeier, McCall Smith's editor at Pantheon, his U.S. hardcover publisher. "Sandy (McCall Smith insists on being called Sandy) is producing a phenomenal body of work and writes every word that comes out under his name."
In the office where McCall Smith, seated in a blue leather chair, writes at least a few hours a day, his cat Augustus Basil rubbing against his ankles, the shelves are packed floor to ceiling with books including his first children's title, The White Hippo, published when he was 28.
The surface of his mammoth wooden desk reflects a sense of whimsy and the serious business of writing books. There's a basket woven in Botswana (the setting for The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency), lamps decorated with monkeys, and a glass lion. There's a computer, piles of tiny notebooks in which he keeps track of the various series he writes, several pairs of glasses, stacks of papers, a coffee mug and, of course, more books.
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, the first book in that series, was first published in 1998 by a small Edinburgh publisher. First print run: 1,500 copies. "After that, I think," McCall Smith says, "they printed 500 more."
The novel's inspiration came years earlier.
"There was one particular moment when I thought I'd write about a woman in Botswana," he says, recalling a woman he met in Africa in 1981. "It was not a meeting of great significance, or so I thought."
The woman was going to give him a chicken that would eventually become his lunch. "She was running spectacularly around her backyard chasing the chicken," he says. "She caught the chicken and wrung its neck with very little ceremony and handed it over to us, and I thought: 'What a woman.' I thought about what sort of life she had had. I just had an impression of a character."
The series – there are now 10 novels in print – also had a run on television earlier this year. HBO Entertainment in association with The Weinstein Co. and the BBC produced a feature-length pilot that HBO ran in March, as well as six more episodes. Jill Scott starred as Mma Ramotswe; the supporting cast included Anika Noni Rose as Mma Grace Makutsi, the detective agency's efficient office manager, and Lucian Msamati as J.L.B. Matekoni, Precious' love interest and eventual husband.
The series' future is unclear. "HBO and TWC (Weinstein) continue to be in discussions about ways of continuing this franchise," according to a joint statement.
Hand-selling helped
Surprisingly, McCall Smith credits American fans and booksellers for what would eventually become his global success. "I owe it entirely to Americans," he says. "I'm very grateful and don't intend to ever forget it."
A bookseller who began recommending McCall Smith's books a decade ago was Jane Jacobs of Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass. While working at the Concord Bookshop, she read The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. The book was distributed in the USA at that time by Columbia University Press.
"I thought it was the most calming thing," Jacobs says. "It took me to a different culture and totally away from the frenetic pace of this world. I was in love with her (Precious) and thought I could sell the book to any number of people." And, she says, as soon as she started telling people about the book "it took off."
Jacobs calls the novels "lady reading but not chick lit and not old-lady-lit reading. Precious is appealing because she's overcoming all kinds of obstacles." Though the books are sometimes touted as mysteries, Jacobs says "they're not very mysterious. She solves little problems, life problems, not mysteries."
Readers are apt to relish scenes in which Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi sip bush tea while dissecting the mysterious behavior of men more than their investigations into missing relatives and stolen vans.
McCall Smith says he doesn't really consider the books crime novels. "Only in the most attenuated sense are they mysteries," he says. "I'm using some of the conventions of the genre, but what I really do is write about people and places."
And they are people and places McCall Smith knows well.
He was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where his father worked as a public prosecutor. He moved back to Scotland when he was a teen, studied law at the University of Edinburgh and became a recognized expert on medical law and bioethics.
More irons in the fire
Global fame as a novelist didn't come until he was in his 50s.
Random House began publishing McCall Smith's books in the USA in 2002. Kastenmeier thinks the timing, less than a year after 9/11, was relevant to their success. "I think it was a very good moment in the U.S. to be publishing material that was very heartwarming and charming."
Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, 10th in the series, was published earlier this year. It reached No. 13 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list. McCall Smith is under contract to write at least four more.
But the lives of his beloved Botswana characters aren't the only ones on his mind.
This year he also published The Lost Art of Gratitude, fifth in the Sunday Philosophy Club series.
A start of a new series, Corduroy Mansions, will be published in the USA in 2010.
In addition to writing novels, McCall Smith's travels to promote his books over the next year will take him to England, India, Australia, Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong and Canada. He'll visit a number of U.S. cities, including Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis.
He also finds time to play bassoon in The Really Terrible Orchestra, which he helped found in Edinburgh in the mid-1990s. The amateur group gives standing-room-only concerts – even traveling to New York for a sold-out concert at New York Town Hall in April. McCall Smith says with a laugh, "We always sound just a little bit on the flat side."
A lot is going on in McCall Smith's life, but he has found time to pursue a new venture: raising exotic British saddleback pigs on a farm in western Scotland.
When asked for what purpose, he says, again with a laugh, "Alas, it's the fate that many pigs meet."
Last year, P.D. James, one of the grande dames of crime novelists, published The Private Patient, her 14th novel starring Cmdr. Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard.
In her new non-fiction title, Talking About Detective Fiction, James, not Dalgliesh, is on the case as she investigates and then shares her thoughts on the history of the mystery novel, a well-loved and sometimes much-maligned genre.
James, 89, has been writing detective novels for 50 years.
She was asked to write this scholarly title by Oxford's Bodleian Library. It's a task she is more than capable of handling.
Her writing shows a vast knowledge and abiding love for the genre she describes.
"There must be a central mystery," she writes, "and one that by the end of the book is solved satisfactorily and logically, not by good luck or intuition, but by intelligent deduction from clues honestly if deceptively presented."
The book is filled with fascinating anecdotes about the genre's famous and infamous novelists. If you're trapped in the library with the butler, a body and a candlestick, you'll have plenty of detective-novel trivia to throw about until the police arrive.
Here's a sampling:
•The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins, about a diamond stolen from an Indian shrine, is considered the first true British detective story.
•The writers who most influenced the development of the detective genre are Arthur Conan Doyle (The Hound of the Baskervilles) and Edgar Allan Poe (The Murders in the Rue Morgue).
•The four most "formidable" women of the genre: Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.
Talking About Detective Fiction is fascinating.
It's as rich in characters and literary detail as the novels that have made James famous.
P.D. James solves the mystery of living a full life
By Carol Memmot, USA TODAY
ABOARD THE QUEEN MARY 2 — P.D. James, the reigning queen of the British detective novel, is in a festive mood, fitting for a legendary woman who's about to turn 90.
Over the past week she has ruled the waves aboard the world's largest ocean liner as it carried passengers from Southampton, England, to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in New York, where it docked Monday.
"She's a magnificent ship. It's lovely to be on her," says James, who, as a guest lecturer, shared stories with fellow passengers about her life and career.
And she was thrilled, she says, to meet so many American fans. "They are so enthusiastic. It's lovely to have a chat, shake their hands and sign a book." In all she signed 600 and will most likely sign as many on the return trip to England.
Chatting with a reporter in one of the ocean liner's private club rooms, James is relaxed and ebullient as she talks about her nearly 50-year career, the novels that have catapulted her to iconic status in the world of British crime fiction and her birthday on Aug. 3.
"I don't get tired of people telling me how well I look," James says with a laugh. "It's much better than people saying 'poor old thing, she looks over 100.' I think people love to say how wonderful you are, because if I am managing to keep well and feeling energetic, they'll be able to, too. It's rather consoling to them that 90 isn't the end."
James, who had a heart attack three years ago, looks healthy but frail. She says she feels well but tires easily. "I asked the doctor what's wrong with me, but all that's wrong is that I'm 89 and the old heart and lungs are not what they were."
Phyllis Dorothy James — she chose P.D. James as her pen name because she decided it "would look best on the book spine," but she's Phyllis to her friends — has written 18 novels since 1962. Fourteen of them star Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard.
"She is a legend in her own right as a crime writer and a national treasure," says Daniel Mallory, an expert on crime fiction based at Oxford University in England. "She's a huge best seller, but her books have real craft and real heft. They've got literary merit, but they are also cracking good reads. She's the crime writer to whose stature and status all other crime writers would aspire in this country."
She is so beloved in England that her portrait hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. In 1983 she was awarded the OBE (Order of the British Empire), and in 1991 she was made Baroness James of Holland Park.
He's the man
And then there's Dalgliesh.
No matter the setting, be it a sandy beach near a theological college, a plastic surgeon's private clinic, a church vestry in London or an island off the Cornish coast, Dalgliesh deftly solves the murders of characters including a housemaid, a government minister, a theological student and an investigative journalist.
"I have always thought and said he was the most intelligent detective in fiction," says Ruth Rendell, a longtime friend of James' and author of the Inspector Wexford series. "I get fed up with all these womanizing drunks. They are not sexy, whatever their creators may think, but Dalgliesh is. He is a most attractive man."
Dalgliesh, James says, most certainly "is a very attractive man. He had to represent the qualities I most admire in a man. So I made him very courageous but not foolhardy. I made him compassionate but not sentimental, which I hate. I made him a very good detective and I decided to give him an artistic interest and made him a poet, and there he was."
The soft-spoken and highly intelligent poet/detective was portrayed by British actor Roy Marsden in the TV series.
The last Dalgliesh novel, The Private Patient, was published by Knopf in 2008.
James isn't sure whether she'll write a 15th Dalgliesh novel, although she is writing another book.
"I'm writing a shorter novel and one that's entirely different because I felt I wasn't quite sure whether I could begin a new Dalgliesh, which takes about three years to do. I hate the thought of not completing it," James says in a subtle acknowledgement of her age.
"When you're a writer, you're never happy if you're not plotting or planning or writing, so I had an idea that excited me, but I'm keeping it very secret. It's quite different, but I think my readers will like it. But I don't like to talk about it until it's done."
What it won't be, she says with a smile: "It's not going to take place on the QM2, and a very disagreeable female passenger is going to be killed who's only on the boat because she's giving a series of lectures, and then we'd call in Dalgliesh and get it solved."
When the new novel is done — maybe by next February — she'll make up her mind whether she has the energy for a new Dalgliesh novel.
"I try to be very honest with my readers and with myself. I think it's very important when you turn 90 to make sure the standard is maintained. Nothing would be more dreadful for me than having reviewers saying, 'Considering that this novel was written when Baroness James is over 90 is an extraordinary achievement but not, of course, vintage P.D .James.' I would hate that."
No matter what she decides, she has fulfilled her lifelong dream.
A multi-faceted career woman
James, who splits her time between London and Oxford, was a successful career woman working as a hospital administrator and later in various government jobs, including as a magistrate in London and Middlesex. But she had always wanted to write a novel.
"I remember a moment in my 30s," James says, "when it suddenly dawned on me that if I went on delaying writing that I'd be a failed writer telling my children and grandchildren that I'd desperately wanted to be a writer. I thought that this would be appalling and that I'd really have to make time and get started."
James, born in Oxford in 1920, grew up in Ludlow and then in Cambridge, where she attended the Cambridge High School for Girls. She left school at 16 and was married at 21 to Ernest Connor Bantry White. Their daughters, Clare and Jane (named for Jane Austen, James' favorite author), were born during World War II. White, who spent part of the war in India with the Royal Army Medical Corps, returned suffering from mental illness. He was hospitalized and finally institutionalized. He was 44 when he died in 1964. James never remarried.
In a story that in some ways mirrors that of another celebrated British author, J. K. Rowling, James wrote her first novel, Cover Her Face, the first in the Dalgliesh series, in her late 30s on the train while commuting to and from work. Rowling was a single mother struggling to support her daughter and says her idea for Harry Potter came to her while she was riding a train in Great Britain.
Cover Her Face was published in 1962 and was critically praised. Despite its success and that of subsequent novels, James didn't retire to write full time until 1979.
Five decades after her first book was published, every new book she writes is "a major event," says Mallory, who has read all of them. He likens her celebrity to that of another British author, master spy novelist John le Carré. "He is seen as a real prestige author, but he's also accessible to the mainstream."
James is equally admired by American writers and booksellers.
"What I love about her is the complexity of her characters," says Tess Gerritsen, author of the Rizzoli & Isles novels (now a TNT series). "She gives us this deep, deep look into the English character, and she takes her time slowly, slowly delving into the people she's writing about. American writing tends to be more frantic. We feel we need to keep up with Hollywood's fast, fast world."
Betsy Burton of The King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City says she's been a fan since Cover Her Face was first published. "I'm a mystery buff to begin with," Burton says, "but she's the be-all and end-all. She is totally satisfying novelistically. People have tried to emulate her, but I don't think anybody else is as good."
Her friends marvel as James enters her 10th decade. "The wonder is not so much that she doesn't look anywhere near 90, though she doesn't, but that her mind is unimpaired by age, is still razor-sharp and packed with all sorts of esoteric knowledge," Rendell says.
James wrote in her 1999 memoir Time to Be in Earnest: "If 77 is a time to be in earnest, eighty is a time to recognize old age, accepting with such fortitude as one can muster its inevitable pains, inconvenience and indignities and rejoicing in its few compensations."
Today, James still emanates an aura of contentment and a zest for life.
"I should have, shouldn't I, my dear? I've had a very happy life. There have been bad moments in it. Some very bad moments. But one comes through the bad moments. Every night I say a prayer of gratitude for the day that has passed and for still being here."
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