Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

Alexander McCall Smith, is a Scottish legal scholar turned prolific author of fiction. He was born in present day Zimbabwe and grew up there, starting his education at Christian Brothers College, before moving to Scotland to study law at the University of Edinburgh where he earned a LLB and a PhD. He returned to Africa in 1981 to help co-found a law school in Botswana, where he taught and wrote legal the legal code for Botswana. McCall Smith has lived in Edinburgh for over 40 years with his wife who is a retired doctor. He counts J.K. Rowling, Ian Rankin, and Kate Atkinson as former or current neighbors.

To say that McCall Smith is a prolific writer is a gross understatement. Of his very popular series such as The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, The Sunday Philosophy Club, 44 Scotland Street, and Detective Varg, to name a few, I counted 86 novels. I’ve read the 2 books in the Paul Stuart series (and loved both of them), as well as the 3 books in the Perfect Passion Company series (and loved all three).

I’ve attempted books from his other series but for whatever reason they just weren’t for me. I decided to try one more of his series, the Professor Dr von Igelfeld Entertainments series, of which book one is the basis for this book review.

Portuguese Irregular Verbs (Maclean Dubois Publisher, 1997) was also a bit challenging for me at the beginning. McCall Smith’s sentence structure and vocabulary are elevated enough without throwing in three German professors of linguistics and philology. The main character, Professor Dr von Igelfeld, has written the seminal work on the irregular verbs of the Portuguese language, which comes in at an astonishing 1,200 pages! The irony of it all is that McCall Smith’s book one of this series is very short, at only 134 pages on my Kindle, but the storyline features a book that is 1,200 pages long!

Once I got used to McCall Smith’s writing style in this particular book, I enjoyed it. It is funny, albeit dry, but it is funny. I will say that it is not a traditional novel, though, to me it seemed like a collection of short stories sewn together into a novel of sorts.

There is one chapter where the three professors decide to try some athletic sport, while none of them has ever done any sort of sport before. They borrow tennis gear from the hotel front desk, along with a book about the rules of the game, and they go out to play a game of tennis on the hotel’s tennis court. The ensuing scene was reminiscent of an episode of the Big Bang Theory (Season 5, Episode 17) when Leonard referees a series of competitions between Sheldon and Barry, including basketball, fencing, and wrestling.

Minus Raj, Sheldon, Howard, and Leonard are quite suited as stand-ins for the three German linguistic professors of McCall Smith’s creation.

I must be honest, I decided to read book one in this series so I could jump ahead to the latest entry in the series, book six, The Lost Language of Oysters (Vintage Paperback, February 2026). I grew up in southeast Louisiana, near New Orleans (home of the oyster poboy), well known for its treasures from the bayous and Gulf of Mexico, including some of the finest oysters found anywhere! Book six brings visitors to the German professors, two ladies from New Orleans who are scholars in their own right. I just have to read that, and to do so, I needed to read book one!