Surprising literary ventures | 8 October 2008

Alexander McCall Smith is best known for his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series of novels (Tears of the Giraffe, Morality for Beautiful Girls, The Kalahari Typing School for Men etc.) as well as the Isabel Dalhousie mysteries and the 44 Scotland Street series. But McCall Smith has a number of other strings to his bow. He is, for example, an Emeritus Professor of Medical Law at Edinburgh University, and has written or co-written several books in the field of law and medicine, among them The Forensic Aspects of Sleep, The Duty to Rescue and The Criminal Law of Botswana, all of which could serve as titles for No.1 Ladies’ Detective novels. Among the most obscure in this category, often unlisted in bibliographies, is the title at hand, an early-Eighties primer for children and teenagers on drugs such as ‘pot’, ‘pep pills’ and ‘zen’ (apparently LSD), which contains the perhaps outdated advice that ‘alcohol and tobacco .