Unusual Sleuth, Unusual Setting
http://tv.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/arts/television/27ladi.html
More than a decade ago, in the midst of a career as a distinguished bioethicist, Alexander McCall Smith held himself to a promise to write, as he has since put it, “a book about a cheerful woman of traditional build.”
Set in Botswana, where he used to teach law, his tribute to feminine amplitude became “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” a book that has spawned nine others, resulting in a series translated into more than 40 languages, with more than 15 million copies sold in English. Since his mysteries first appeared, three unrelated series have followed, as well as six children’s books, a short-story collection, an academic text (“A Draft Criminal Code for Scotland”) and Mr. McCall Smith’s continuing involvement with the Really Terrible Orchestra, an Edinburgh band in which he plays the bassoon.
His diffuse curiosity is palpable in the Precious Ramotswe novels, and happily so too in “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” HBO’s serial adaptation of those books, which begins on Sunday with a two-hour premiere that Anthony Minghella wrote with Richard Curtis and directed.
The appeal of the books is not in Chandleresque plotting; it relies on the spirit of inquisitive travelogue that Mr. McCall Smith has cultivated and that HBO faithfully maintains. There is a slow-growth, artisanal quality to the franchise, and the series, which stars an excellent Jill Scott as Precious, remains true to it. Anyone impatient with languorous pacing on television is at orange-alert risk of feeling fidgety.
Place is paramount in detective fiction and, in due respect, the series was filmed on location in Botswana, imagined in accordance with Mr. McCall Smith’s detailed, exuberant vision. Precious Ramotswe, a wounded but evolving divorced woman of 35 who leaves her rural home to set up shop as a private investigator in the capital city, Gaborone, is an avatar of her culture’s tenuous hold on urbanity.
She has longed for the independence of city life, but she loves her printed caftans and bush tea (the equivalent of coffee in a Greek cup on “Law & Order”), contentedly resisting the newly cosmopolitan pressures to remodel her body closer to a Western dictate.
The tension between tradition and modernity is rendered as broad subject and passing detail: in an early scene three young women right out of “Sex and the City: Manolos Below the Sahara” walk by the newly opened No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency to ask how a woman could be a detective, and how anyone at all might go undercover who is “the size of a small elephant.”
Feminism is encroaching with the staying power of the Spartans at Attica, a reality that seems to be felt most intensely by Grace Makutsi, who serves as a secretary to Precious in a makeshift office with a manual typewriter. (Recording an outgoing answering-machine message, she plugs the agency’s areas of specialty: “Did your husband go missing? Did someone steal your cow?”)
Makutsi, played with an endearing, ramrod rigidity by Anika Noni Rose, scored 97 percent on her secretarial exam, a fact she keeps repeating, baffled as she is that all the best-paying jobs are still going to the short skirts.
Ms. Scott, the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter, approaches Precious balancing the innocence of a newborn with the gentle weariness of a woman who has already borne the burdens of an insidiously discriminatory world. The first episode refers to a past, destructive marriage, obscuring the grimmer details of abuse, outlined in the first book, that seemed to have caused Precious to lose her first and only child.
Quietly animating the television adaptation is her wish to find the love of a good and decent man in a place where infidelity comes to seem like ritual. As she demurely explains to a prospective client who can’t fathom her husband’s vanishing: “Sometimes when a man is missing, he has found interest in another woman.”
Precious takes on the cases of those fearing that they’re going to be poisoned, those believing that their dentists are practicing barbarism. This is not the stuff of “The Mentalist,” but in the sense that professional ambition is driven by private loss, Precious is bound to a vast and growing population of contemporary fictionalized detectives haunted by their own dead. The case she cannot shake, in the initial episode, is the disappearance of a young boy, a teacher’s son, who seems to have been kidnapped by practitioners of witchcraft after blood and bone.
Such depictions of primitivism are not meant to impede a view of Botswana as an amusing place, a country whimsically combating its own benightedness. Botswana, so voluptuously shot in the opening moments of the show, is one of the most prosperous countries in Africa, which, to a great extent, shields the whole “No. 1 Ladies’ “ enterprise from serious accusations of embarking on a colonialist fantasia. The series might seem too sweet for HBO, too NPR, too pledge-week PBS, but it doesn’t feel like a walk through Busch Gardens either.
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
HBO, Sunday nights at 8, Eastern time.
Premiere directed by Anthony Minghella; Richard Curtis and Mr. Minghella, writers; Sydney Pollack, Mr. Curtis, Bob Weinstein and Harvey Weinstein, executive producers; Mr. Minghella, Timothy Bricknell and Amy J. Moore, producers.
WITH: Jill Scott (Precious Ramotswe), Anika Noni Rose (Grace Makutsi), Lucian Msamati (J. L. B.Matekoni) and Desmond Dube (B K).
