Alexander McCall Smith

Thank you very much for the invitation.

Well, I'm a very keen reader.

Like everybody, I suppose these days I have to battle for reading time because the modern world seems full of distractions.

But I do like to read every day.

I'm one of these people who tends to have quite a number of books on the pile.

I think it's a wonderful retreat from the frenzy of the world.

Well, it does to an extent.

I suppose you could say it comes from an attachment to the fiction of that period.

Its actual origin was a little bit different in that I had been in San Francisco and I was at a party at Amy Tan's house.

Amy had invited Armistead Maupin, who wrote The Tales of the City,

which was a serial novel published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

And I had a conversation with Armistead.

He said, don't ever write a serial novel in a newspaper.

And I went back to Scotland and did precisely that.

And so it really was inspired by his example because he, it was, who brought back the serial novel to be published in newspapers, as you say today.

Dickens had done that.

He'd published a chapter a month or whatever it was.

And in fact, if you look at Dickens, you'll see that the chapters tend to be about 12,000 words in length.

They follow a structure which I think actually speaks to their serial origins in that you have something rather exciting happening towards the end.

In fact, if you look at Dickens, you'll see that in many chapters you have all the action and then the chapter ends with people going to bed and falling asleep.