The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is a novel by the Scottish writer Alexander McCall Smith, first published in 1998 by Polygon in Edinburgh. It is the first of the series about Mma Precious Ramotswe.

Precious Ramotswe tells the story herself, from her birth, and her father tells part of it as well. When he dies she leaves the town of Mochudi and moves to Gaborone with the money from the family property, and she uses it to set up a business that nobody there has thought of before: an agency that takes on the private troubles her clients bring her. She hires a secretary, Grace Makutsi, and takes the cases that come in, which are domestic and human rather than sensational, and the book follows her through several of them while it establishes the people around her, including her friend Mr JLB Matekoni, who runs a garage and repairs her small white van.

The novel was published first in Scotland, where it found a following; after two further books in the series appeared they were published in the United States, and the series only became popular in England with the fifth.