A Tale of Three Cities

"It was a chance encounter with Armistead Maupin (of Tales of the City fame) in San Francisco which inspired Alexander McCall Smith to write his daily novel about the residents of 44 Scotland Street, a fictitious building in a real street in the author's home town of Edinburgh. With its multiple-occupancy flats, Scotland Street is an interesting corner of the city, verging on the Bohemian, where haute bourgeoisie rub shoulders with students and the more colorful members of the intelligentsia.  The comings and goings at 44 Scotland Street first made their way into print in The Scotsman newspaper in the first half of 2004. Espresso Tales is vintage McCall Smith, tackling issues of trust and honesty, snobbery and hypocrisy, love and loss, but all with great lightness of touch. Clever, elegant and funny, this is a novel that provides huge entertainment but which is underpinned by the moral dilemmas of everyday life and the characters' struggles to resolve them."

I love it that McCall Smith was inspired by San Francisco's own Armistead Maupin to write something to celebrate his city.  And that it came out in serial form in The Scotsman.  I was living in San Francisco when Tales of the City was being published in the S.F. Chronicle and I remember what fun it was every time a new installment came out. It created such a cozy small-town atmosphere, kind of like the current "local food" movement, only with words instead of vegetables. Everyone gossiped about the characters and made comparisons to people they knew. A decade later, Sex and The City was conceived along those same lines. Of the three, Tales of the City is the funniest and the wickedest, as it satirizes political bigwigs and local celebrities plus introducing colorful gay and transsexual characters -- which in the late 70's and early 80's was quite a daring thing to do. I loved Sex and The City, but it does harp a bit too much on those annoying designer shoes. Espresso Tales is the mildest of the three. McCall Smith's satire is always gentle. I don't know if it's because he's essentially a gentle soul or because Edinburgh is a more repressed city than its American counterparts. I suspect both, but I love him for loving his city and honoring the form. Ahem, the form....  Though his books are shelved in the library's Mystery section, are they really mysteries?