
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies is the sixth in The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series of novels by Alexander McCall Smith, set in Gaborone, Botswana, and featuring the Motswana protagonist Precious Ramotswe.
Work and personal worries, and the reappearance of her cruel first husband, threaten the happiness of Mma Ramotswe and her new husband Mr JLB Matekoni. Her assistant, Mma Makutsi, and a new employee to whom Mma Ramotswe has been kind, are determined to repay their debt of gratitude by helping her in their turn. With diligent detective work, her problems are overcome. Mma Makutsi herself finds love at last.
The author received recognition for this series in 2004 with the Dagger in the Library from the Crime Writers Association and Author of the Year from British Book Awards. This novel received mixed reviews. One newspaper found the writing to create "an utter and truthful sense of place, of belonging" while another found the story lacking in interest. The first printing was 101,000, compared to 2,000 or fewer for the earlier novels, in response to the interest in the United States and in England. Sales of all books in the series, in English, exceeded five million.
Plot summary.
Mma Ramotswe and her new husband settle down to married life with their foster-children, but problems are piling up. The tenant of Mr JLB Matekoni's house is running an illegal drinking den. Then Charlie, the apprentice, gets entangled with a wealthy married woman. Mma Ramotswe accidentally knocks a man off his bicycle with her van, as she sees Charlie entering the expensive car driven by a wealthy woman. Mr Polopetsi was not injured, but Mma Ramotswe learns his story; he has been unemployed following a spell in prison after what appears to have been a miscarriage of justice. She gets his bike fixed by the apprentice and then Mma Ramotswe persuades her husband to employ him out of guilt and sympathy. He proves an asset to the garage and to the detective service. Mma Ramotswe's violent ex-husband Note Mokote reappears and demands money from her.
Mma Ramotswe is shaken deeply as she realizes she never got a divorce from Mokote years ago, threatening her new marriage. Check in hand, she drives to his mother's home to deliver it. Note is not there. His mother tells her that Note was married to another woman at the time of her marriage to Note, and had a child with that wife. This takes the weight off Mma Ramotswe, as she realizes he was the bigamist, and they were never legally married. When he appears at her office, she faces him herself, no longer shaking in fear at his violence, with two decent men in her life waiting in the background as the conversation proceeds.
Mma Makutsi's love prospects improve when she starts dancing lessons and is partnered with another student, Phuti Radiphuti. At first she tries to avoid him, as he is awkward and stammers, but he turns out to be a kind and gentle man and a romance begins. She removes some of Mma Ramotswe's burden of worry by solving an important fraud investigation on her own, and manoeuvring Charlie back to work. Mr Radiphuti's father knows Precious Ramotswe from the time when her father was still alive. He enlists the help of Mma Ramotswe to put a proposal of marriage from his shy son to Grace Makutsi, and the two become engaged.
Literary significance and reception.
The critical reception of this novel was mixed. "The Scotsman" stated that "McCall Smith’s beautiful evocation of life in Botswana offers sagacity, charm and a feeling of fable, combined with an utter and truthful sense of place, of belonging. "The Sunday Times" found the story "lacking in narrative drive" and concluded that "...some readers may wish to escape to somewhere a little more invigorating".
In 2004, the year of the novel's publication, Alexander McCall Smith won the Author of the Year award at the British Book Awards and the Crime Writers Association Dagger in the Library award, both for the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series.
Publication history.
This was the first of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels to be printed in hardback, with a very large initial print run of 101,000 copies to meet the anticipated demand, as sales in English of the series to date exceeded five million.