Morality for Beautiful Girls (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series #3)
Alexander McCall Smith, 2001
Knopf Doubleday
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400031368
Summary
The quick-witted, good-natured detective Mma "Precious" Ramotswe shines in this irresistible bestseller. Between intriguing new cases and troubling personal developments, Precious' hands are full.
The four Miss Beauty and Integrity pageant finalists may have questionable moral fiber, and the brother of an important government worker has allegedly been poisoned. On top of all that, Precious' reliable fiance might be hiding something. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 24, 1948
• Where—Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)
• Education—Christian Brothers College; Ph.D., University
Edinburgh
• Honors—Commandre of the Order of the British Empire
(CBE); Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE)
• Currently—lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Alexander (R.A.A.) "Sandy" McCall Smith, CBE, FRSE, is a Rhodesian-born Scottish writer and Emeritus Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. In the late 20th century, McCall Smith became a respected expert on medical law and bioethics and served on British and international committees concerned with these issues. He has since become internationally known as a writer of fiction. He is most widely known as the creator of the The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series.
Alexander McCall Smith was born in Bulawayo, in what was then Southern Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. His father worked as a public prosecutor in what was then a British colony. He was educated at the Christian Brothers College before moving to Scotland to study law at the University of Edinburgh, where he received his Ph.D. in law.
He soon taught at Queen's University Belfast, and while teaching there he entered a literary competition: one a children's book and the other a novel for adults. He won in the children's category, and published thirty books in the 1980s and 1990s.
He returned to southern Africa in 1981 to help co-found and teach law at the University of Botswana. While there, he cowrote what remains the only book on the country's legal system, The Criminal Law of Botswana (1992).
He returned in 1984 to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he lives today with his wife, Elizabeth, a physician, and their two daughters Lucy and Emily. He was Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh at one time and is now Emeritus Professor at its School of Law. He retains a further involvement with the University in relation to the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
He is the former chairman of the British Medical Journal Ethics Committee (until 2002), the former vice-chairman of the Human Genetics Commission of the United Kingdom, and a former member of the International Bioethics Commission of UNESCO. After achieving success as a writer, he gave up these commitments.
He was appointed a CBE in the December 2006 New Year's Honours List for services to literature. In June 2007, he was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws at a ceremony celebrating the tercentenary of the University of Edinburgh School of Law.
He is an amateur bassoonist, and co-founder of The Really Terrible Orchestra. He has helped to found Botswana's first centre for opera training, the Number 1 Ladies' Opera House, for whom he wrote the libretto of their first production, a version of Macbeth set among a troop of baboons in the Okavango Delta.
In 2009, he donated the short story "Still Life" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project—four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. McCall Smith's story was published in the Air collection. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
There's a good deal of bustle in the series' first volume, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, but hardly any suspense. And by the time you've made your way through the second, Tears of the Giraffe, and landed in the third, Morality for Beautiful Girls, you've realized that all this activity is much less about whodunit than why. It's also very much about the variety and resilience of a nation to which Smith (who grew up in what is now Zimbabwe and taught law at the University of Botswana) seems utterly devoted. As, of course, is Mma Ramotswe, who recognizes the difficulties her country faces—poverty, disease and drought, to name just a few—but would never choose to live anywhere else. Not even America.
Alida Becker - New York Times Book Review
In Morality for Beautiful Girls, Ramotswe tangles with a feral child, the finalists in a beauty pageant and a suspicious cook.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. The values of courtesy, respect, and politeness—proper forms of greeting and speech, in particular—are stressed throughout the Precious Ramotswe novels. Which characters in Morality for Beautiful Girls adhere to these traditional courtesies? Which characters violate them? What are the moral implications of upholding or ignoring such traditions?
2. How surprising is it that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni suffers from depression in Morality for Beautiful Girls? What might be the causes of that depression? What seems to bring him out of it?
3. Clovis Anderson, author of The Principles of Private Detection, writes that there is 'very little drama' in being a detective and that 'those who are looking for romance should lay down this manual...and do something else' [p. 59]. Most detective novels do, however, rely on adventure and 'drama' to sustain their readers' interest. What makes the Precious Ramotswe novels so engaging even in the absence of such drama?
4. In considering a friend who treated her maid badly, Mma Ramotswe thinks that 'such behaviour was no more than ignorance; an inability to understand the hopes and aspirations of others. That understanding...was the beginning of all morality. If you knew how a person was feeling, if you could imagine yourself in her position, then surely it would be impossible to inflict further pain. Inflicting pain insuch circumstances would be like hurting oneself' [p. 77]. Which characters in the novel demonstrate this ability to empathize with others? Which characters fail to do so? Why, ultimately, is this kind of compassion so important?
5. Clovis Anderson also warns against making 'prior assumptions' and deciding 'in advance what's what and who's who' [p. 125]. In what instance does Mma Ramotswe make this mistake? Where else in the novel do assumptions turn out to be false? In what ways are being a reader and being a detective similar, in terms of this matter of making assumptions?
6. How is Mma Makutsi able to transform Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's lazy, irresponsible apprentices into hard-working mechanics? What qualities of character does she display in her management of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors? Why do these boys respond to her so well?
7. Early in the novel, Mma Makutsi relates an article she has read about the anthropologist, Richard Leaky, which shows that the human species originated in East Africa. Mma Ramotswe asks, 'so we are all brothers and sisters, in a sense?' To which Mma Makutsi replies, 'We are.... We are all the same people. Eskimos, Russians, Nigerians. They are the same as us. Same blood. Same DNA' [p. 12]. What are the implications, for the moral questions that the novel raises, of this statement? What does it suggest about distinctions based on race?
8. In trying to find a morally suitable girl to win the beauty contest, Mma Makutsi believes, 'the difficulty was that good girls were unlikely to enter a beauty competition in the first place. It was, in general, not the sort of thing that good girls thought of doing' [p. 204]. What does this passage suggest about the relationship between beauty and morality, or between appearance and essence? Is Mma Makutsi right about all this?
9. The later chapters of Morality for Beautiful Girls alternate between Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi and their respective investigations. What does this parallel narrative structure add to the novel?
10. What enables Mma Ramotswe to discover what is really happening with the Government Man's brother and his farm? In what ways do her intelligence, intuition, experience, and keen observation serve her in arriving at the truth of the situation?
11. The plot of Morality for Beautiful Girls revolves not around the unraveling of a crime, or the intent to commit a crime, but around discovering the absence of such intent. In most detective novels, this outcome would be a disappointment, at the very least. Why is it a satisfying and appropriate ending for this story?
12. One reviewer observed that 'for all their apparent simplicity, the Precious Ramotswe books are highly sophisticated' [The Spectator]. In what ways do these books appear simple? What accounts for their underlying sophistication? What do they teach us about ourselves?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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