HUTCHEON: Amid thorn trees and dust, Alexander McCall Smith is back in the place he once called home.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: Botswana is a very attractive country. It has a dry landscape. It’s an extraordinary place in a physical sense. It’s the sort of landscape that I suspect people who are familiar with parts of northern Queensland for example would appreciate and understand.

HUTCHEON: At the edge of the Kalahari Desert, Professor McCall Smith goes hunting, not for big game but for adventures to fill his next novel.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: It’s a remarkable country in so many respects and I rather admired many of the people whom I’d met in Botswana.

MAN: Is that OK?

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: [Putting on scholars hat] Yeah.

MAN: … take it from me you look lovely.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: Is that alright? Is that the right way round? I wouldn’t want to wear this backwards.

MAN: Yes it is. Yes it is.

HUTCHEON: A somewhat formal academic with a passion for writing, he was born in Zimbabwe when it was a British colony called Rhodesia. In the 1980’s he came back to Africa to establish a law school.

MAN: This looks like video harassment.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: Which section of the penal code is that?

HUTCHEON: It was on a visit like this some years ago that he invented the character of a polite, virtuous and solidly built African woman called Precious Ramotswe, founder of the Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency. Professor McCall Smith’s books about this unlikely heroine have now sold millions of copies around the world.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: [Reading from his book] Mma Ramotswe did not want Africa to change. She did not want her people to become like everybody else, soulless, selfish, forgetful of what it means to be an African or worse still, ashamed of Africa. She could not be anything but an African. Never. Even if somebody came up to her and said ‘here is a pill, the latest thing. Take it and it will make you into an American’. She would say no, never. No thankyou.

HUTCHEON: Botswana is one of Africa’s few success stories. After independence from Britain in 1966, some of the world’s richest diamond mines were discovered here. It’s given Botswana’s population of nearly two million, one of the highest standards of living on the African continent.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: [To crowd at bookshop] And then I’ll be very happy to sign books and to deal with any complaints that people have…

HUTCHEON: Now the prolific professor is writing his seventh novel in the series, a TV deal and possibly a film are on their way. He hasn’t looked back. Fifty-six year old Alexander McCall Smith or ‘Sandy’ as he’s known, had written more than forty books before his quaint African novels set the literary world alight three years ago. It’s not the typical perception of Africa but writing about Botswana was different because it was tied up with feelings of guilt.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: I was born into the tail end of the colonial period. I think the West in general took a great deal from Africa. They exploited it, but I do think that those who were brought up here in colonial days in Africa obviously have some sort of obligation to the place, so I’m trying to do as much as I can personally to address that.

HUTCHEON: It’s the Scottish capital Edinburgh that Alexander McCall Smith now describes as home and while this is a world away from Botswana, here too he continues to create the characters that somehow defy the bleakness often associated with modern day life, be it in Africa or Scotland.

SCOTSMAN: [To audience] And a very warm welcome to Alexander McCall Smith who agreed to write a wonderful little script for us.

HUTCHEON: Sandy McCall Smith’s reputation and repertoire expands by the day. One of this latest commissions was to write a story to accompany the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Australian Alex Briger. Apart from the runaway success of his Botswana novels, he’s just published a new series of fiction based on a real, upmarket Edinburgh address appropriately named 44 Scotland Street.

The tourist friendly face of Scotland isn’t usually how the Scots see themselves. In fact, most Scottish authors have painted their land as grey and dour. Some have even coined the genre ‘miserablism’.

SCOTTISH BARMAN: That is from Ireland which is an entirely separate kind of world of whiskeys at the time. The one you have you’ll find is very, very smooth and very, very peaty.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: Jane let me see that.

IAN RANKIN: That’s the ones I like.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: Oh my goodness me, that’s medicinal.

IAN RANKIN: Hits you over the head.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: Doesn’t it? That smells like disinfectant.

IAN RANKIN: The one that hits you over the head.

HUTCHEON: How better to explain Scotland’s obsession with this grimness then over a glass of aged whiskey at a centuries old Malt Whiskey Club. Joining us is one of the country’s top crime writers, Ian Rankin.

IAN RANKIN: Well I’ve always been attracted to the darker side of life anyway and I mean I started writing about Edinburgh to make sense of Edinburgh when I arrived here as a student and immediately because I was studying literature, got involved in the worlds of Miss Jean Brodie who is a descendant of Deacon Brodie, who was a template for Jekyll and Hyde so I became fascinated by the idea of Edinburgh as a Jekyll and Hyde City and I think, you know if you want to make a simple algebraic equation of it, you would say that I write about the Hyde and Sandy desperately tries to write about the Jekyll, the Jekyll [pronounces it a different way] as we should say it being good Scots, and these two cities do exist.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: There’s a nice cat over there. It’s always a good sign when you see cats prowling around the street. That suggests that it’s a good place to live.

HUTCHEON: Really?

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: Oh yes they can tell.

HUTCHEON: As in his writings about Africa, Professor McCall Smith recreates optimism through his characters and their dramas.

SCOTTISH FAN: I’ve enjoyed, I’ve read the book.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: Oh well thanks very much indeed.

SCOTTISH FAN: It’s funny. It’s got humour and…

HUTCHEON: What sets Scotland Street apart is that he wrote it as a serialised novel, published daily in a newspaper. He’s determined to make his mark through creating hopefulness.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: Most people who come and visit Scotland, will tend to see that. They’ll tend to see the positive and the beautiful and the attractive rather than the grim. The grim is there but there’s grim in any country. Everybody has their grim side. Everybody has a negative side but it’s not the, it shouldn’t be necessarily the dominant one.

HUTCHEON: In the African townships not everyone would agree. Professor McCall Smith refers to it as the disease, which is stalking through Africa, but in the ghettos around Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, they call it AIDS. Here adults don’t expect to survive past the age of forty. It’s afflicted nearly one third of the population.

DEREK JAMES: Botswana might be in many people’s eyes a rich country but there’s great differences between the rich at the top and the poor at the bottom and in some of these villages there is malnutrition and there is poverty but I couldn’t tell you who’s an AIDS orphan or who’s the result of a wandering father who’s disappeared leaving a mother with six kids and the mother’s died.

HUTCHEON: At an orphanage run by the international charity S.O.S. and written about in Professor McCall Smith’s novels, one in five children has full blown AIDS, yet he maintains drawing too much attention to HIV AIDS detracts from his upbeat overall message.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: There’s so much written about it and there’s so many people looking at that issue in a very hard nosed and clear way that I would not have anything in particular to add to what is already said, but I did feel more that it was important to maintain the positive side of these books. Not to make them into tragedies.

HUTCHEON: Director Derek James points out HIV AIDS is hardly the only sad story in these children’s short lives.

DEREK JAMES: I’ve just got a child who’s won a scholarship to a posh private school and started life in a pit latrine. She was found by a policeman in a pit latrine so obviously some girl had abandoned the child. She didn’t realise this child’s got brains.

HUTCHEON: He believes Sandy McCall Smith’s books attract the right kind of attention to Africa. The author used some of the stories of the children here after Derek James showed him around four or five years ago.

DEREK JAMES: Definitely Sandy owes me big. He owes SOS big because the two first books, the Number One Ladies Detective Agency and I think the Tears of the Giraffe were both based on this village and his main female character was based on my previous matron here, so Sandy in a sense got a lot of his ideas here but he’s put it over in such a gentle way, during time of Iraq wars, I think people just want to read something very different.

HUTCHEON: For his next instalment Professor McCall Smith takes to the bush to find a new adventure for his lady detective character, Precious Ramotswe. He’s joined by the Operations Manager of the Mikolodi Nature Reserve, Neil Whitson, who’s worked with Botswana’s people and wildlife for more than a decade.

The Reserve has the country’s only station for the treatment of cheetahs. These two are as tame as cheetahs can get but still present a risk.

NEIL WHITSON: Never approach them fast and you know you never know. If they are grumpy today or whether they are not willing to be sociable…

HUTCHEON: If Sandy McCall Smith has his way, these cheetahs may soon find themselves in a future episode.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: That’s a nice cheetah there.

NEIL WHITSON: Now being a wild animal, a tame wild animal, you must always be vigilant.

SANDY: Yeah.

NEIL WHITSON: And just appreciate the beauty of…

SANDY: Yes.

NEIL WHITSON: Of looking at one of the fastest in the land…

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: [accepting bouquet] Thank you very much indeed. That’s lovely. Thank you very much indeed.

HUTCHEON: Across town Professor McCall Smith has a final task before leaving.

WOMAN: For the 2005, Alexander McCall Smith and British Council short story competition and this one goes to the story entitled “Who do you tell?”

HUTCHEON: He’s set up a literary prize to encourage writers in the art of the short story.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH: [Presenting cheque to winner] If you take this to the bank, they will say this cheque is too big and they will send you away, so what we have here is one that works. This is the one that works and this is the cheque that doesn’t work but this is the cheque that you might like to remember and keep as a memento. Congratulations. That was a very, very fine story. It was beautifully written and I’m delighted to be able to present you with the first prize in the competition. Well done.

HUTCHEON: Each time he departs, he hopes to leave behind something positive. He wrote that there was so much suffering in Africa it’s tempting just to shrug your shoulders and walk away - but you can’t do that he says, you just can’t.