Interview: Alexander McCall Smith, author

A LITTLE over a year has passed since we last visited that sunnier, happier and generally better-behaved Edinburgh that Alexander McCall Smith conjures into existence in his 44 Scotland Street daily novel on these pages.

In that time, the rest of the world has been catching up with us. Sales of the books in the series – which runs exclusively in The Scotsman ahead of publication – now top a million copies worldwide. In Scotland, they are often the year's most-borrowed books in the libraries.

The idea for The Scotsman's "daily novel" began almost exactly six years ago at a lunch in Edinburgh restaurant The Witchery to which McCall Smith turned up thinking that he was only going to be asked to write an episode once a week. By the time he left, he had been persuaded to write something that no-one else had ever attempted – not only a serialised novel (these had, after all, been around since Dickens's day), but one that would be published every day.

Back then, McCall Smith already had 133 different editions, audiobooks and translations of his novels, children's short stories and legal books on the market (in the intervening six years, that figure has shot up to 629). They included the first four volumes of the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency series, which had already become mass-market best-sellers, first in the US then in the UK.

But although McCall Smith had already shown himself a master of series fiction, a daily serialised novel was something else altogether. With hindsight, what we were asking him to do was something that could have shattered the reputation of a lesser writer: to start writing a novel – and putting it into print – without knowing how it was going to end. No wonder his London agent was aghast when he told her.

Think about it. Suppose you had started to create a fictional world and, two chapters in, realise that you've hit a dead end. The characters are dead on the page. The plot is spiralling out of control.

Normally, you'd have the safety net of being able to tear up that false start, to rewrite the characters, to iron out inconsistencies. But with the 44 Scotland Street series, he started a new literary genre – and one which he still has entirely to himself. In it, there are no second chances, no opportunity to revise anything; writing against the clock means that every day's deadline eats away at his room for manoeuvre.

At least tightrope walkers have a fixed point to aim towards when they step out on the rope. McCall Smith didn't even have that.

"Right at the start, I didn't have much of an idea how I was going to make it work," he admits. "With 44 Scotland Street I found myself having to work out how a daily novel works, and it is completely different to a conventional novel.

"Early on, however, I hit on a structure which I think works. It's rather like drifting around a room with a lot of different groups of people talking. One would approach one group of characters for about three or four episodes. In each episode there would be one main idea, one thing that would move the plot onwards. There's room for being discursive and veering away from that, but you have to work out how far you can indulge that before readers start thinking, 'Let's get back to the action'."

If you're going to be discursive, it helps to have a well-stocked mind, and McCall Smith's is capacious enough to cater for a fair-sized city. Wonderfully – and, in my experience, uniquely – that vast intelligence is matched by an equally enormous kindness, thoughtfulness and sense of sheer fun.

Put all of that together – and add an abiding love of Edinburgh – and you get a hint of why 44 Scotland Street works so well. There will be sometimes surreal digressions on such topics as Moroccan psychiatry, the extent of canine consciousness, or what a married politically correct feminist might want to call her "maiden" name. There will be musings – sometimes oddly precise, sometimes gentle caricatures – on what it means to be an Edinburgher, and a keen eye for those small comedies of New Town snobbishness.

But there's a moral grace even in McCall Smith's comedy. It can be – and often is – absurd, but it's never hurtful. He might prick pretentiousness, as in those scenes in which Antonia and Domenica each try to establish some kind of superiority over each other, but it's always with the subtlety that you'd find in a Barbara Pym novel. We may laugh at the po-faced Irene Pollock, so set on hot-housing her young son, Bertie, to within an inch of his sanity, but she's such a PC battleaxe that it's cruel not to.

"The great thing about writing 44 Scotland Street," McCall Smith says, "is the feedback you get from readers by e-mail. You probably get a stronger reader response with serialised fiction than a conventional novel, because they are staying with the character each morning.

"As a writer, you have to realise that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved. You have to watch how they behave. If they start behaving like ordinary people in real life, always showing their faults, readers can very easily get fed up of them. You have to make the characters good people that readers might want to spend some time with.

"Irene is fine, because everyone knows exactly where they stand in relation to her. They dislike her intensely, and the more intensely they dislike her, the more they like Bertie."

Ah, Bertie. Wherever McCall Smith goes in the world to talk about the 44 Scotland Street series – Australia, India, South Africa, America – audiences always have a soft spot for that much-put-upon fluent Italian speaker and musical prodigy who is forever six years old. "There are legions of Bertie fans," he says. "People are very keen that he enjoys the normal boyhood that Irene is so determined to see he doesn't. Suggestions as to what should happen to him come in from all over the world."

As an example, he cites the latest plot twist in store for Bertie's baby brother, Ulysses, who is going to suffer from an unfortunate vomiting reflex whenever he sees his mother. "That came from a recent stay in Melbourne with a great friend who is a retired infant psychiatrist. He gave a dinner party at which there were other infant psychiatrists who were all very fond of Bertie and who came up with what should happen to Ulysses – that's a direct example of a reader coming up with ideas for the plot."

So what's in store for Bertie himself? McCall Smith doesn't want to give everything away, but he hints that the poor lad's mother is going to heap further indignities on him. "Suppose you were a Cub Scout going away for a camping weekend with the troop. What's the most embarrassing thing your mother could do?" Come with you, I suggest. McCall Smith gives a non-committal giggle.

Apart from the sorrows of Bertie, however, everything seems to be working out for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. That's the way that series five ended – Marital bliss for Matthew and Elspeth after their dramatic honeymoon, a Raeburn portrait of Burns rescued for the nation after adventures in the Glasgow underworld, even a remarkable change of heart from the one-time über-narcissist, Bruce Anderson.

It's not exactly EastEnders, I point out. "Er no, perhaps it isn't," says McCall Smith. "Though to tell the truth, I've never watched it."

I'm glad he hasn't. I'd much rather that he dream up plots such as the one he has in store for Angus Lordie, who will soon be whisked off to Tuscany, along with his gold-toothed dog, Cyril ("I think this may just be the first canine Grand Tour of Italy", muses McCall Smith), and his friends Antonia and Domenica.

One of the great joys of my job is that whenever 44 Scotland Street is running in The Scotsman, I have to proof-read it before it goes into the paper. As McCall Smith's copy is invariably error-free, this is just about the most enjoyable and least onerous task imaginable.

I've just read the opening chapters, and already two things are immediately apparent. First, that McCall Smith's gentle social comedy of bourgeois Edinburgh is even more finely tuned, perceptive and enjoyable than ever.

And second, that, starting from Monday, you're in for a real treat.

MEET THE CHARACTERS:

DOMENICA MACDONALD

Anthropologist DOMENICA MACDONALD, a widow, was born in 44 Scotland Street and is its oldest resident. Having safely returned from a field study of the domestic life of the pirates of the Malacca Straits (to whom she sends Scotsman calendars each year) she is now at a loose end. Though briefly tempted by the idea of staying in the New Town and analysing social networking among Watsonians, she is much more drawn to the notion of visiting Italy to study peer group relations among art-loving tourists.

ANTONIA COLLIE

Domenica's neighbour, ANTONIA COLLIE, a would-be historical novelist, has just finished a brief but passionate affair with a Polish builder who had only one word of English. A cousin has just offered her the loan of a villa in the Sienese hills. But which of her friends should she invite to accompany her?

ANGUS LORDIE

ANGUS LORDIE, Domenica's friend and an accomplished portrait painter, continues to paint in his studio in Drummond Place, where he lives with his dog, CYRIL, who is distinguished by his gold tooth and tendency to wink at people. He has never been back to Italy since he visited the country on a travelling scholarship and would dearly love to return – especially now that the introduction of pet passports mean that he could take Cyril there too.

THE POLLOCK FAMILY

The Pollocks live in 44 Scotland Street on the floor beneath Domenica and Antonia. The most sympathetic member of the family is surely six-year-old BERTIE, who has learnt to play the saxophone and speak Italian but yearns to have a normal childhood playing with his friends rather than attending psychotherapy lessons and yoga classes. Unfortunately, his mother, IRENE, has other ideas – and (even worse) most of them are drawn from the child-rearing manuals of Melanie Klein. Baby ULYSSES is the latest addition to the family. Bertie has noticed the curious fact that Ulysses looks more like Dr Hugo Fairburn, the psychiatrist to whom his mother used to take him, than his own rather ineffectual father Stuart, who is a statistician in the Scottish Government. However, when Bertie pointed this fact out to his mother, she actually slapped him.

MATTHEW

MATTHEW, the well-heeled but unflamboyant owner of a Dundas Street gallery, has just returned from a dramatic honeymoon in Australia with his wife Elspeth, whom he married after a desultory relationship with his former gallery assistant. Elspeth used to be Bertie's teacher at the Rudolf Steiner School, but was suspended for pinching Olive, a classmate of Bertie's and his chief tormentor (apart from his mother, of course). Matthew's devotion to his new wife is absolute. Surely nothing could change this blissful state of affairs?

BIG LOU

BIG LOU, a sympathetic autodidact from Arbroath, has even more disastrous taste in men than Antonia, yet for all that remains a fount of commonsensical advice which she dispenses from behind her New Town coffee bar, The Morning After.

PAT MACGREGOR

Matthew's former assistant at the Something Special Gallery, PAT is now studying art history at Edinburgh University. A former resident at 44 Scotland Street, where she shared a flat with – and competed with a string of other girls for the affections of – the narcissistic surveyor Bruce Anderson. She has now moved to a flat in Warrender Park Terrace, which she shares with three other students, including Anton, a young Dutchman with (as it will shortly transpire) a Very Big Secret.

BRUCE ANDERSON

Last seen making an impulsive marriage proposal to Lizzie Todd, only daughter of his boss Raeburn Todd, the well-known Edinburgh surveyor, BRUCE appears to be a reformed character. Once a preening egotist, he seems to have been humbled by his experience of having been dumped – the first time this has happened to him, naturally – by his last girlfriend. But can a leopard change its spots? Exactly. And that's what Raeburn Todd thinks too…