Smash hit

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Does he ever feel patronised because he writes in a popular genre? “Yes, I think people have been dismissive of me and I don’t think it’s entirely fair. My readers come from a whole range. I get letters from professors of English at one end and from people who may not have much formal education on the other. I am happy about that.” But are his real sympathies not with those respectable, educated Edinburgh readers who take tea at Jenner’s in Princes Street?

“I do have sympathy for them and I’ve got sympathy for people who are having a good time in the pub round the corner. I don’t have sympathy for crude and aggressive behaviour but I don’t just identify with the bourgeoisie, I really don’t.”

His refusal to glory in the stylishly unpleasant led him, in his salad days as an interviewee, to call Irvine Welsh’s black, heroin-spiked novels “travesties”. He later apologised and still cringes at having caused offence. Welsh’s books are simply not for him. Yet, I point out, some of his own earlier fiction could be dark — certainly as dark as Roald Dahl’s. In one 1995 story, Far North, a young man who irritates his date is eaten by a crocodile, a Freudian vagina dentata image if there ever was.

“I hadn’t thought of that but, yes, those stories are darker and I don’t think I would write them now. Some are not all that sympathetic, are they? I don’t think now I would write about people being eaten by crocodiles.” A severe punishment for being a bore, I say, liberating from him more laughter.

In fact the first Mma Ramotswe novel does contain one death by crocodile. It was published in 1998 with a 2,500 print run. The later success of the series — “a great joy”, he says, after years reconciled to a small following for his work — seems to have coincided with his becoming less bold. The only death in Blue Shoes and Happiness is a cobra’s.

“Your disposition changes a bit, I think, and my readers would have strong views if I suddenly started to write something that was disturbing. I’ve got many millions of readers and they really don’t want me to do that. You feel a sense of responsibility towards them. To write something shocking would cause tremendous distress.”

So no crocodile will ever devour Mma Ramotswe? “Oh, no. Nothing unpleasant could happen to Mma Ramotswe.” To explain their popularity it is useful to note what else, apart from violence, his books leave out. The most obvious omission in the Botswana novels is Aids. That is not entirely true, he says: a bishop’s sermon touched on Aids in volume six and Mma Ramotswe’s assistant’s brother died of “that cruel disease”.

“But the reason why I don’t talk about it a great deal is because, first, I don’t want the books to be tragedies. There are plenty of people writing tragic novels about Africa and I very specifically don’t want to do that.

“Secondly, the impact of Aids on Botswana is just so awful. There’s not a person who isn’t touched by it, hasn’t lost somebody. If you’re in a room with 30 people, ten are ill. But they don’t want the world to see them as ill. Understandably. I mean, who would?”

Why, though, is there so little sex in his books? I blush to ask, but is Mma Ramotswe’s marriage even sexual? “Yes, but I don’t stray into the bedroom. In the society I’m writing about you wouldn’t talk about sex. They are quite reticent about these things.”

And what of Isabel Dalhousie? Divorced and in her forties, she seems to have withdrawn from the sexual fray in order to reorder the love lives of others. “Well, can I tell you something off the record?” he asks and confides an astonishing development in the Sunday Philosophy Club series that renders my theory about his heroine’s abstinence redundant.