Saturday, April 7, 2012

The Sunday Philosophy Club: Soothing Scottish Mystery Solving

After making my way through Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, I decided to branch out from solving mysteries in Botswana to solving mysteries in Edinburgh. So I picked up a copy of The Sunday Philosophy Club, another series by McCall Smith featuring a marvelous protagonist named Isabel Dalhousie.

Much like the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, this book isn't really a mystery novel. It isn't gritty and nail-bitingly suspenseful. Instead, it concerns itself more with its characters and their lives in Edinburgh with a murder mystery casually thrown in for good measure. It's well-plotted and wonderful to read, but solving the mystery of an apparent suicide/accidental death of a young man who falls from the balcony at the theater almost becomes an afterthought as you find yourself far more invested in learning about Isabel's niece's tangled love-life, or what Isabel thinks about the various people she meets while she tentatively investigates.

Isabel Dalhousie, like her Botswanian counterpart Precious Ramotswe, is a sensible and remarkable woman. She is a philosopher who edits the Review of Applied Ethics and is fairly well-off owing to a family inheritance. Her philosophy background means that she spends a great deal of time debating whether she has a moral duty to pursue this investigation, whether it is right for her to meddle in her niece's romantic life, and so on. There is a lot of discussion about the papers she has to edit and it is astonishing how much you could learn about applied ethics and the mindset of a philosopher just by reading this book. What saves Isabel from becoming a pretentious or tedious character is that all of these debates about morality are in her head. She doesn't go around Edinburgh attempting to subject everyone she meets to some meandering philosophical discussion. Instead, her musings on morality are gentle and humorous, the kind of internal debates that people have with themselves everyday, except phrased much more articulately and intelligently.

I have already picked up the next book in this series and fully intend to enjoy it as much as the other McCall Smith books I have read in the past. His talent lies in making the ordinary business of day-to-day life seem rich and vibrant. Of course, the addition of a mystery does raise the stakes a bit, but frankly, I could read an entire novel about Isabel Dalhousie if all she did was chat with her housekeeper and analyze the murky moral waters of whether or not she can tell her niece who to date. The Sunday Philosophy Club is a perfect book to read on a weekend - just curl up with a blanket and a pot of tea and let yourself indulge.

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