Alexander McCall Smith is braving the icy morning air in the Canongate Kirkyard in the heart of Edinburgh's Old Town. At his feet are the bones of the 18th-century poet Robert Ferguson. A little beyond lies the tomb of Adam Smith, the great economist. Further round, hidden by the church, is the grave of Clarinda, Robert Burns's muse and, possibly, mistress. On the hillside beyond, stands a monument to the poet himself.

Should you be looking for evidence of Edinburgh's rich literary heritage, where better to start than in one of the city's most famous graveyards? McCall Smith has come here on the pretext of introducing a series of ten podcasts, produced by the Edinburgh City of Literature Trust and Edinburgh World Heritage Trust to lure book-

loving tourists to the city.

Written by the Edinburgh poet and author Stewart Conn, they present unusual views of the city, exploring landmarks, their architectural history and curiosities and their literary links.

To celebrate that “very good idea”, McCall Smith - who has lived in the city all his adult life - has agreed to offer The Times his personal tour of the city's literary sights.

Here in the Old Town, he reckons, is a good place to start. This dark side of the city inspired James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson to their most macabre works, but equally, from this spot you can see some of the great medieval and classical buildings which, according to the admiring G.K. Chesterton, “rush up like rockets”.

It is inevitable that such surroundings appeal to novelists and poets, because arriving here is like “walking on to an opera set”, says McCall Smith. “It is the sort of city which is hospitable to writers, because it is a romantic city. Look about and one can see how a writer can be inspired.

“Inspiration is not necessarily transferred into fiction which is set in Edinburgh. But you can see that spikiness of the buildings, the ornaments, the spires that puncture the air. And classical Edinburgh is important. In a sense, you rise to your surroundings. If you find yourself in exhilarating surroundings, you work accordingly.”

Connections with the city are shot through his own fiction. McCall Smith has virtually pioneered “the New Town novel”, with his social comedies set in 44 Scotland Street, a nonexistent tenement building in a very real Georgian street.

More recently, Isabel Dalhousie has come to the fore, an Edinburgh lady with a philosopher's inquiring mind. She flits around a very carefully realised landscape in the Bruntsfield and Merchiston districts of the city, where McCall Smith has made his home, within doors of two other world-

renowned authors, J.K. Rowling and Ian Rankin.

Even Precious Ramotswe, the redoubtable founder of the No1 Ladies' Detective Agency - and the original source of McCall Smith's reputation as a writer - bears the mark of the city. McCall Smith spent part of his childhood in Zimbabwe, but something in his heroine's unshakeable moral core reminds many readers of a certain type of Edinburgh lady, most likely to be found living in Morningside, the city's most respectable area.

“Perhaps that's the subtle influence of the place on a writer,” he muses. “People say to me that my Precious Ramotswe novels are about Morningside. I see what they mean, because many of her attitudes would be perfectly resonant with the attitudes of Morningside.”

McCall Smith is one of scores of writers who have flourished in Edinburgh over the past five decades, but he believes that its poets were the key figures in the city's modern literary revival. Norman MacCaig was a “towering figure”; Sydney Goodsir Smith captured the atmosphere of the city, while his personal favourite, Ruthven Todd, was the Scottish Auden.

By now, we are scuttling past the Balmoral Hotel, brilliantly captured in Robert Garioch's Glisk of the Great, a poem that turns a humorous eye on one of Edinburgh's city fathers in his pomp, emerging from the old N.B. Grill (the hotel was formerly called the North British). McCall Smith chuckles as he quotes the lines: “Nou that's the kinna thing I like to see ... it gies our toun some tone, ye'll aa agree”.

He loves these bits and pieces of local colour and they invade his own work, to good effect. This is a novelist who receives letters from all over the world from readers who say, “I know that bar, I've been to that café”, or because they had an aunt who lived in a certain street he has mentioned. “It is the little bits of peoples' lives, their observations, their reactions to their surrounds in the city where they live that is so important,” he says.

“In this city, where there is a certain permanence to the architecture, there are very powerful associations for people, including visitors. People in America who have visited and formed a sort of association with the city have responded to it, and are delighted to read about it. Like many before them, they want to return.”

Some critics say that he is too inclined to see his world through rose-tinted spectacles, and that the light comedy of his novels is built on an overly optimistic view of the city. There's nothing of Irvine Welsh about his work, none of the drugs and booze and death of Trainspotting and its successors.

“I'd say I was a social realist; but actually the underbelly of Edinburgh is much smaller than people assume, in terms of the demography,” he says, nettled by the thought that he writes only about the middle class.

“If you look at the employment statistics, to arrive at what people's real situation is, throughout the whole of the city, people are predominantly skilled. That is not to say that we don't have areas of deprivation, but it is actually smaller than one might imagine. If people judge Edinburgh from some 20th-century literature they might say, ‘Gosh, this is a gritty place'. It's got gritty bits, but is not really gritty.”

As if to prove the point, we have arrived at Glass and Thompson. This smart new café features in his Scotland Street books, as do its staff, the local gallery owner, as well as the very real newspaper editors, lawyers and bankers, who live nearby in the salubrious surroundings of the New Town.

Those “real” people, however, are only the extras in the novels. Like many of the other authors who have lived and worked in the city, McCall Smith's fictional creations, the characters he comes to love as he leads them through their literary lives, are drawn more from a mixture of the people who wander in and out of this typically Edinburgh scene, of crossaints and cappuccinos.

“You're drawing on a life's experience, all the human types you've met. Every so often you meet someone who is egregiously striking and they make a bit more of an impression. In a city like Edinburgh you have all possible types, all sort of unlikely characters. And they make anything possible.”

And with that McCall orders up a nice light lunchtime salad and an espresso, in a very Scotland Street sort of way.

The podcasts can be downloaded from www.cityofliterature.com

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