Bank holiday heatwave? Not here in Hay-on-Wye, where the wind is howling through the tent flaps and the creaking stanchion threatens to drown out genteel conversation.
More genteel than most is that of Alexander McCall Smith, a man whose professorial demeanour frequently collapses into mildly hysterical laughter over a deeply funny hour that ranges from German academic nomenclature to a one-legged sausage dog.
He is, he explains, suffering from a condition that he caught from Armistead Maupin at a San Francisco party. "This is a medical issue – serial novelism. There is no cure – you write serial novels and then you die."
McCall Smith currently has four different sets of stories on the go or under his belt. The most famous is his Botswanan-based series, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, a slow-burning success that reached the bestseller list largely through word of mouth.
The heroine, Mma Ramotswe, he tells today, was based on a formidable Setswanan woman who once gave him a chicken for lunch in 1980 – having chased it around the yard and wrung its neck in font of him. The character came first - "it could have been a drycleaning agency," he claims.
An audience member suggests a storyline from his own African experience, involving a skull. McCall considers… "A bit too strong… My readers don't actually want anything to happen."
And unusually we get a secret revealed: the first name of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, husband of Mma Ramotswe. This is, he tells the questioner, something that will never be revealed in the books. But it is in fact John Limpopo Basil – and Mr Matekoni sticks to initials because he's embarrassed by the Basil.
