Date Published: 8th March 2023

March 2023 Newsletter

Dear Readers,

44, Scotland Street is an address in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. It is partly fictitious: Scotland Street exists, although it stops just short on No.44. It is also the name of what the French call a roman-fleuve, a novel that goes on through various volumes but that deals with the same characters or place. The Enigma of Garlic is the latest addition to my particular roman-fleuve – a return to characters whom I have come to know rather well over the last couple of decades, who now seem so familiar to me that I feel I actually know them in real life.

So here we are once in the company of Angus Lordie, the portrait painter and owner of Cyril, the only dog in Scotland to have a gold tooth. Angus is married to Domenica Macdonald, an anthropologist and astute observer of the life that unfolds about her. They live in the same block as Stewart Pollock, long-suffering husband of the strident Irene, and father of one of my favourite characters, young Bertie, a seven-year-old boy who seems to have been taken to heart by rather a lot of readers all over the world.

Poor Bertie: it is not always easy being seven, particularly if you have a mother who obliges you to study yoga, Italian, and the saxophone, and to have psychotherapy on top of all that. Nor is life made any easier if one of the girls in your class at school, Olive, insists that you have promised to marry her when you turn twenty. Bertie glimpses freedom from time to time, but these glimpses are fleeting, and our hearts go out to him in his plight.

Where does garlic come into it? Well, that is encountered by Bruce Anderson, a handsome young man who is also a consummate narcissist. Bruce is struck by lightning, but survives, and ends up, in, of all places, in a monastery in the north of Scotland. Lightning can do that sort of thing apparently.

I relish the time I spend writing this particular series. For me the Scotland Street novels are rather like a box of chocolates. I savour each bite-sized morsel. I enjoy every moment I spend with these characters. But, unlike eating chocolates, there is no guilt involved – and so I invite you to join me. Let’s sit down together and eat the whole box.

 

Warmest wishes,

Alexander McCall Smith, March 2023