Precious Ramotswe is Christie's method moved to Botswana. McCall Smith has described writing a detective who solves things by knowing people rather than by forensics, and the comparison with Miss Marple has followed the books since the first one. Shared: an older woman nobody takes seriously as an investigator, a small community where everyone's history is known and that knowledge is the evidence, crimes that are often domestic rather than violent, and a solution reached by analogy with something the detective has seen before. Filed MEDIUM. The lineage is a tradition rather than a borrowing, and the books are doing something Christie never did with the setting.