Alexander McCall Smith is a pretty smart guy—and a great old-school after dinner speaker, if you're into that kind of thing. He grew up in Zimbabwe, worked in Botswana (among other places), and now lives mainly in Edinburgh, where he was quite high up in law (esp. legal medicine, medical ethics, etc.) before he turned full-time to writing. And yes, he is white, but the white writer/black protagonist dynamic is informed by his British (post-colonial) status, which seems to make him more sympathetic to his characters and more politically informed re: national/international/post-colonial issues than most white Americans who try to write fiction about Africa, Africans, or African Americans.

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency novels always struck me as pretty OK—good airplane or hotel reading, if you know what I mean—and the quality of the film, I'm guessing, is going to ride on 2 things: the actors' ability to give complexity to *very* simply drawn characters and Anthony Minghella's ability to make real—rather than caricaturish—the locations and situations in which the action takes place. If the lavish hand behind all those sumptuous scenes in The English Patient can also do stunning simplicity, the film should be good to look at, at the very least.

That said, in a lot of ways, I imagine the novels would translate better to the stage than the screen. I guess time will tell and we'll see.