“Life doesn’t have a narrator—it’s full of lies and half-truths—so we never know anything for sure, not really. I like that.”
“So fiction really is fiction,” Brunetti asked.
Paola looked across at him open-mouthed in surprise. Then she put her head back and laughed until the tears came.
–The Temptation of Forgiveness (2018)
Guido and Paola Brunetti know a great deal about lies and half-truths, and all the other human failings, he as a commissario (detective superintendent) in the Venice police, she as a professor of English literature beset by lazy students and self-important colleagues—but still, after more than twenty years of marriage, they make each other laugh. They disagree, of course, about matters big and small—they squabble, emote, banter, dissect, proclaim, and sigh. She is “a woman of leftist, if chaotic, politics” (Uniform Justice, 2003) sometimes leading to attacks of zeal, and trouble, and he is subject to fits of despair about his job, his city, and his country—and in the thirty books, and counting, that Donna Leon has written about Brunetti since 1992, there has been plenty to despair about. Together, however, they make one of the most wonderful and enviable marriages in all of detective fiction.
They come from very different backgrounds, “her father, a count, her mother the descendant of Florentine princes; Brunetti’s mother a woman who had left school at twelve, his father a hopeless dreamer ruined by years as a prisoner of war” (Unto Us a Son is Given, 2019) in Stalin’s gulags after World War II. Brunetti’s poverty as a child has influenced his thoughts and action ever since—he only got to go to college because his only brother, Sergio, stepped in to help, and it is there that he met Paola, crashing into her in an aisle of the library. They are now the parents of two teenagers, Chiara and Raffi, who age only slightly during the course of the books, and whom they love passionately, even through Raffi’s “Karl Marx period” and Chiara’s rabid environmentalism, which has led to household bans on air-conditioning and bottled mineral water, and her own semi-strict vegetarianism. Brunetti can hardly blame her for any of it, however, given the horrendous industrial pollution of the air, sea, and land all around Venice.
The four of them enjoy both lunch and dinner at home together every day—food is a constant, mouth-watering presence in all of the books—and at them the conversations are lively and the topics wide-ranging, from work, life, and school; to books (Guido prefers the ancient Greeks and Romans, Paola re-reads her favorite Henry James novels six or seven times); to any number of political and social issues. It also gives them all free rein to indulge in the sarcasm at which each of them is adept:
“It is a comfort and a joy to a man,” proclaims Brunetti, sitting down to the lunch table in the midst of a Raffi/Chiara spat, “to return, after a hard day’s work to the peaceful bosom of his loving family.” Chiara taps her watch and reminds him that it has been only half a day. “And know that he will never be contradicted,” Brunetti forges on, “and that every word will be considered a gem of knowledge, his every utterance respected for its wisdom.”
“Chiara moved her plate aside, laid her head on the table, and covered it with her hands. ‘I was kidnapped as a baby and forced to live with lunatics.’
“’Only one,’ Paola said.” (About Face, 2009)
Such comments notwithstanding, Guido and Paola work as a team. He keeps her informed about the progress of an investigation, gives his impressions of people he questioned and the answers they gave. She asks him her own questions, prodding him to explain things, though first he often has to explain them to himself.
Brunetti is a seeker. “I’m nosy by nature,” he says in Willful Behavior (2002), “and I always want to know how the story will end or how or why it got started. I want to know why people do things.” Paola amplifies that in the beginning of About Face, when asked why she finds Henry James so fascinating: “Because he understands things. And because he makes us understand those things. You’re really very much like Henry James. You want to understand things, Guido. It’s probably why you’re a policeman. But you also want other people to understand those things. Just as he did.”
He knows, however, that the law, especially Italian law, is not always adequate to the cause, that justice can be elusive. “Clearly, the [law] isn’t enough,” he says to Paola’s sister in Death at La Fenice (1992). “we need a more human—or perhaps humane—one….I try to see the point where they intersect, where they’re the same. “And when they’re not?” “Then I do what I have to do.”
Elsewhere, in A Noble Radiance (1998), he notes to Paola’s father, the Count, that the law takes care of public crimes, but not private crimes—“giving someone bad advice so that you can later profit from their error. Lying. Betraying a confidence.” The Count notes that those things aren’t necessarily illegal, and Brunetti nods wearily: “I get caught up in trying to find the people responsible for bad things, not just for illegal things.”
What does that mean? In Friends in High Places (2000), there is no way he can prove a case against a well-connected villain responsible for the death of others—but he also knows what a word to the press will do: “I’m going to feed him to the wolves.” In Death at La Fenice , the apparent murder of a much-despised conductor has a much more complicated story behind it, and Brunetti’s final report is carefully shaded to protect an innocent victim, and point to the true monster. In Death in a Strange Country (1993), the powerful man behind the deaths of three people cannot be held accountable for his own acts—except by the mother of one of his victims, armed with a shotgun.
Others get into the act, too. In Quietly in their Sleep (1998), a predatory priest at Ciara’s school can’t be defrocked, but Paola can see to it that he is reassigned—as the chaplain of a maximum security prison on a distant island. In The Temptation of Forgiveness, the Questura’s departmental assistant, Signorina Elletra Zorzi (about which much more to come) learns that a recently-released rapist has become deeply involved with someone she’s known since the girl was a baby. Three weeks later, he is beaten within an inch of his life. Some families don’t react well to hearing of such attachments….
There are other story arcs, as well, to Brunetti’s cases. Sometimes the narrative starts small, almost incidental, before taking a dark turn. In Friends in High Places, a dispute with a bureaucrat over the Brunettis’ apartment—apparently, officially, it doesn’t even exist!—leads to a tale of drugs, moneylending, and murder. In A Question of Belief (2010), Brunetti’s vain attempts to join his family for a mountain vacation unravels in and around a saga of abused trust and hideously warped desire. In The Golden Egg (2013), Paola’s curiosity about the death of a deaf-mute boy who worked in the local dry cleaner’s turns into a story of parental deceit, depravity, and greed that shakes them all.
And sometimes the novels start dark—and stay that way. In Doctored Evidence (2004), the boy of a “nasty, greedy, ill-tempered woman” is found brutally murdered in her apartment. In Uniform Justice, it’s the body of a cadet swinging by the neck in the bathroom of a military academy. In Dressed for Death (1994), it’s the body of a woman prostitute—who turns out to be a man—lying in the black slime in the fields outside a slaughterhouse. In Suffer the Little Children (2007), three men armed with machine guns burst into a couple’s home in the middle of the night and seize their eighteen-month-old son.
The shocks are many; the plots twisting first in one direction, then another; and the outcomes not always neat. At the end of Uniform Justice, Brunetti is forced to confirm that there is no justice likely, “frightened to realize that he meant not only for this man and his family, but for this city, and this country, and their lives.” At the end of Trace Elements (2020), “he had to decide which crime to punish, which to ignore, and choose the greater criminal. Or the better odds. It came to him then to consider the world in which he lived: who would be punished and to what degree? He closed his eyes and let the beast, justice, run free in his mind.”
Tough stuff, very unlike those idyllic family meals, but not surprising, given the range of the crimes depicted. Often they have to do with environmental despoliation—the dumping of toxic waste not only in Venice, but transported elsewhere in Italy and across the water to third-world nations, or just scuttled in the sea to spread its poison. Other times, it’s human trafficking, drugs, pedophiles, obsession, blackmail, the ghost of old crimes thought long dead and buried—and all too often, just pure human greed.
There are topical references, too—the Italian passing parade of politicians’ disgraces, governmental malfeasance, financial scandals, and Mafia depredations; the increasing crisis of climate change and mass immigration; the tragic costs of AIDS and, twenty-six years later, of another pandemic: “For years, the Venetians had wished the tourists to disappear and give us back our city. Well, we’d had our wish, and look at us now” (Transient Desires, 2021).
No wonder Brunetti has his bouts of despair!
He approaches the solving of these crimes with a few basic principles, but for the most part, it boils down to this: “Brunetti was, by disposition and then by training, a listener” (A Question of Belief). “In your work, much of what you hear is lies,” Paola tells him in Falling in Love (2015), “so you’ve learned to pay attention to everything that’s said to you.”
This is his interrogation technique: “Sit, look interested, ask the occasional question but say as little as possible, be sympathetic to what is said and to the person saying it; and few detainees or suspects can resist the instinct to fill the silence with their own words” (A Question of Belief).
This technique is enhanced by its corollary: “The secret of police success lay…not in brilliant deductions or the psychological manipulation of suspects, but in the simple fact that human beings tended to assume that their own level of intelligence was the norm, the standard, and to work on that assumption. Hence the stupid were quickly caught, for their idea of what was cunning was so lamentably impoverished” (Death in a Strange Country, 1993).
For them—and for those suspects who are unfortunately not at all stupid—Brunetti has another go-to, as well: his ability as a chameleon. He is adept at appearing dull-witted so as to be underestimated, as in Earthly Remains (2017), where he plays the role of the “bumbling commissario,” in awe of a rich family’s wealth and stature in the community, and in Suffer the Little Children, where a right-wing politician clearly needs to be handled by someone “gruff, a real man who took no nonsense from women or foreigners.” He can be sympathetic or threatening, hard as nails or dumbfounded by the effrontery of his fellow officers, and when it is needed, he is able to slip effortlessly into the city’s heavy Veneziano dialect, all the better to demonstrate the just-us camaraderie that non-Venetians are never able to master.
In all this, he is both helped and hindered by his colleagues at the Questura. In the latter category are two men in particular: his boss, Vice-Questore Patta, and Patta’s “universally despised” assistant, Lieutenant Scarpa.
You know how some people just look the part of their job? That’s Patta, a handsome man in his fifties, with a chiseled profile, piercing eyes, and the body of an athlete, his appearance “so suited to a position of responsibility and authenticity that his promotion can have been the result of natural law” (Willful Behavior). Alas, “the erect posture was solely physical, for the ethical Patta was an eel; the firm jaw bespoke a strength of character that was manifested only in stubbornness; and the clear dark eyes saw only what they chose to see” (Uniform Justice). Even after many years in the Venice Questura, Patta still has no idea how the place works, but has “never missed an opportunity to claim for himself any praise given to the organization for which he worked [and has] a black belt in shifting blame or responsibility for failure to shoulders other than his own” (The Temptation of Forgiveness). He is prone to bluster and buzzwords, and harbors a deep suspicion that his subordinates, especially Brunetti, are trying to put one over on him.
He’s not wrong. Brunetti has long ago learned how to read his moods, and adapted his chameleon skills accordingly. He takes pains to appear dutiful, a bit bumbling, perhaps, with the “look of a beleaguered bureaucrat reluctantly pulled away from what he wanted to do by what he had to do” (Drawing Conclusions, 2011). He pretends disinterest in cases to spur Patta into insisting he take them on, and replies, “If you think it best, sir.” He has long ago learned one crucial fact: “Never let Patta know what you are thinking, and never ever let him know what you want” (Beastly Things, 2012).
There’s one thing that can be said for Patta, however. He may be vain and lazy and full of flatulent pomposity—but he is not corrupt, which as far as Brunetti is concerned, is really saying something in modern Italian officialdom. Nor does he harbor any deep malice. That is the province of Lt. Scarpa, brought up from Patta’s native Sicily to be his henchman. “The Lieutenant’s approach is announced by the smell of sulphur that precedes him,” says one of Brunetti’s colleagues in Unto Us a Son is Given, and Brunetti has to agree: “Most rooms had lights, but he feared there existed no way to illuminate the interior of Scarpa, nor any certainty that what lay inside, if it could be seen, would provoke anything other than fear” (Doctored Evidence).
You cross Scarpa at your peril. Fortunately, Brunetti does have allies. The most dependable of them is Sergeant Vianello, a large, sweet-tempered, reliable man imbued with honesty, and a cleverness belied by his bulk. Vianello has a knack for drawing people in and earning their trust, and over the years has acquired a huge mental archive of personal information about the citizens of Venice. He is an invaluable sounding board, a shrewd analyzer, and after a long campaign, Brunetti finally manages to get him promoted out of uniform and made an Inspector. He doesn’t know what he’d do without him.
Another welcome ally doesn’t arrive until the eighteenth book, in 2009, About Face. Donna Leon might have felt that Brunetti needed someone on his level, and who provided a dose of estrogen to the command ranks, and so in strode Commissario Claudia Griffoni, a tall, willowy blonde and upper-class Neapolitan, exiled from her own city “because she had been too active in her investigation of the business activities of one of the politicians of the party currently holding the majority in Parliament,” and was transferred to Venice, “a city not famed for active interference in the doings of either the members of the political class or the Mafia” (A Question of Belief).
Her introduction finds her six months in, sitting in Brunetti’s office (her own is too tiny for two people to occupy at the same time) and complaining about Lt. Scarpa’s refusal to turn over some files. “Is it because he wasn’t given the case, so he wants to slow us all down and make it even harder to find the killer? Or is it something personal between him and me that I don’t know about? Or does he just not like women? Or women police?”
“Or women police who outrank him?” Brunetti offers.
“’Oh, sweet Jesus,’ she exclaimed, tilting her head back, as if to address the ceiling. ‘It’s not enough that I have to put up with this from killers and rapists. Now I’ve got to deal with it from the people I work with.’”
She swiftly proves herself to be a very able partner for Brunetti in a number of cases: “She could suggest with a glance that she disagreed with Brunetti, could ask a question in such a way as to show solidarity with the person who was being questioned, and could, upon occasion, oppose Brunetti’s decisions or conclusions in such a way as to show the suspect that she was completely persuaded by the story he or she was telling.” (The Temptation of Forgiveness).
If there’s one thing that really gets her goat, though, it’s the ingrained attitudes and biases of all the Northerners in the Questura toward a Southerner like her: “Every cousin has to be a Camorrista, my brother-in-law has to be under house arrest, and every investigation I make has to be half-hearted, at best, since my only purpose is to be a spy and see that nothing is ever done to harm the Camorra” (The Golden Egg).
Brunetti has to admit to himself that she’s right: “How could he tell this woman she was imagining things when his own distrust of Southerners was as strongly rooted as his teeth?” It all comes to a head in Transient Desires, when Brunetti and Griffoni go together to interview a captain of the local Guardia Costiera. Sensing he is a fellow Neapolitan, she immediately starts transforming, laying on the accent, exclaiming on the beauties of Naples, how much she misses them. To Brunetti’s surprise, she sounds less bright, more vulgar, even, and as soon as they leave the office, she switches back to her normal voice and lets him have it: “The instant I started to speak with a Neapolitan accent, you might have fainted at the sound. At the mere sound of my accent, you began to assume that everything I’ve done in the last years is open to question, and at heart I might remain the ignorant terrona that many of our colleagues still suspect me of being.”
Brunetti cannot speak. The shame of it is that she is right again. Finally, his voice hoarse, he apologizes: “From the deepest place in me. Please forgive me.”
“We’re friends, Guido,” she replies. “And there’s more than enough good in you to make up for this.”
But he suspects that won’t be the last of it.
Similar complexities exist with his third ally, a monumental character who has been the fan favorite of a great many readers ever since she walked in the door of Brunetti’s office in the third book, Dressed for Death: “He looked up, saw large brown eyes in an appealing full face and an explosion of bright lipstick. ‘And you are?’ he asked with a smile. “Elettra Zorzi, sir. I started work last week as secretary to Vice-Questore Patta….I believe I’m to work for you, as well, Commissario.”
Signorina Elletra is radiant and quick-witted; impeccably dressed (Leon delights in describing her ever-changing outfits); the keeper of a mysterious personal life, the details of which she doles out very sparingly; and, as Brunetti soon finds out, the possessor of two extraordinary things—a remarkable ability to ferret out pretty much any information Brunetti needs to know, through a vast network of contacts and a surpassing array of computer skills, and “a natural inclination toward the duplicitous” (Death and Judgment, 1995). It pleases her to put those contacts and skills at his disposal.
When asked just how she’s managed to come up with certain facts and data, she might smile blandly at him and say, “I have access to a wide variety of information, Signore” (The Temptation of Forgiveness) or she might reply more pointedly, “I think I’d rather not say, Commissario. That is, I could easily invent an answer so technically complex you’d never understand it, but I think it would be more honest simply to say that I’d rather not tell you” (Doctored Evidence). He’s seen her “view a piece of information much in the way a shark viewed a leg dangling from a surfboard” (Transient Desires); he knows he should inquire more deeply into her cyberpiracy, that there is “a line somewhere between what she could and could not be permitted to do” (Drawing Conclusions) However, he is never able to quite pin it down—the lines he draws are never straight and never drawn in the same place twice.
He has nightmares sometimes about being caught and residing in one of his own cells, but he cherishes her. He is also constantly being surprised—by the people she knows, the lockpicks in her drawer, his discovery that her mask of wry amusement is just that, a mask. He finds as well that that “inclination toward the duplicitous” makes her a natural at field work, although he tries to use her sparingly. In Friends in High Places, he sends her out to a usurious moneylender to help her with a fictional debt. In Suffer the Little Children, he and Elettra pose at a shady fertility center as a childless couple desperate for a baby. It is in A Sea of Troubles (2001) that he goes too far when he discovers that she has relatives on a tight-knit island, the site of two murders. Against his better judgment, he agrees to let her take some time off and nose around, the result being one of the most hair-raising chase scenes you’ll ever read, in which Brunetti nearly drowns, someone close to Elletra dies, and Elletra herself comes very close to death.
Brunetti’s guilt afterwards is enormous, complicated by feelings about Elettra he has never expressed, even to himself. Paola, though, understands. Asked by Guido if she thinks Elettra will be all right after those terrible events, Paola puts her hand on his arm: “She’ll be all right so long as she’s still sure her friends love her.”
“It did not occur to Brunetti to question her use of the word ‘love.’”
There are other regular characters that stand out in the series, too—a bright young spark of a policeman named Pucetti; two amiable dullards named Alvise and Riverre; the formidable figures of Paola’s parents, who figure in more than a few books and with whom Guido has a very…complicated relationship—but there is one more character that fills every page of every book with quirks and foibles, beauty and despair, and that is Venice herself, La Serenissima.
Brunetti is in love with the city: “Often, when he least expected it, a window he had never noticed before would swim into his ken, or the sun would gleam in an archway, and he would actually feel his head tighten in response to something infinitely more complex than beauty….He missed this city when he was away from it, much in the same way he missed Paola, and he felt complete and whole only while he was here….He had never spoken of this to anyone. No foreigner would understand; any Venetian would find it redundant” (Death in a Strange Country).
He has no illusions about the place—“Non-Venetians thought of it as a city; residents knew it was just a sleepy little country town with an impulse towards gossip, curiosity, and small-mindedness” (Acqua Alta, 1996), but in many ways it’s that provincial village aspect that he most enjoys. He likes that it’s a walking town, because you recognize everybody just by passing them on the street; you may not know who they are, but one day you’ll discover that gray-haired man you nod to owns the best butcher shop in town or is the brother of that contralto you admire so much. He likes that everybody’s connected; Vianello knows a victim because “my sister-in-law’s next door neighbor is her maid” (Acqua Alta); if a drug dealer frequents a neighborhood, “someone would have a cousin or a boyfriend or a mother-in-law who would make a phone call to a friend who just happened to have a cousin or a boyfriend or a mother-in-law who worked for the police” (Death in a Strange Country). He likes that only true Venetians know where they’re going, because they all have detailed maps of the city in their heads, and street addresses are “virtually meaningless in a city with only six different names for street addresses and a numbering system without plan or reason” (Death at La Fenice); in Dressed for Death, he is directed to a house in this fashion:
“’Do you know the Ramo dietro gl’Incurabili?’
“It was a small campo with a running fountain, just back from the Zattere. ‘Yes, I do.’
“’Get the fountain in back of you, looking at the small canal, and it’s first door on the right.’
“This would get any Venetian to the house with no difficulty.”
He is all too aware, though, that that smallness has its downside. It is an intense, incestuous world; the city government is useless; the only way to deal with problems is through “acquaintances, friendships, contacts and debts built up over a lifetime of dealing with a system generally agreed, even by those in its employ, perhaps especially by those in its employ, to be inefficient to the point of uselessness, prone to the abuse resultant from centuries of bribery, and encumbered by a Byzantine instinct for secrecy and lethargy” (Friends in High Places).
Tourists have overwhelmed the city, crowding out residents and businesses in favor of souvenir shops selling plastic gondolas from Taiwan and papier-mache masks from Hong Kong, but heaven forbid anyone should even try to think about imposing any kinds of curbs: “Sacrifice small children, round up the local population and sell them as slaves, slaughter all men of voting age, rape virgins on the altars of the gods: do all this and more, but do not lay a hand upon a tourist or upon tourism” (A Question of Belief).
The nearby petrochemical complex at Marghera is poisoning them all. The city’s “thousand-year-old heritage of venality” (Quietly in their Sleep) means that greed and the acquisition of wealth is a constant factor in everyday life, as witness the billions of lire and euros sucked out of public projects into politicians’ pockets, and the tax fraud perpetrated by virtually everybody: “To go by their tax returns, no one in Italy made enough to live on; they were a nation of paupers, scraping by only by turning collars, wearing shoes until they could be worn no more and, for all he knew, surviving on chaff and nettles” (Fatal Remedies, 1999).
Oh, yes, it isn’t just Venice, but all of Italy that sometimes drives Brunetti to despair. Corruption and bribery are everywhere, conspiracy theories are sucked in with mother’s milk, and governments come and go, promising change but desiring only power. “All the old rules have been broken,” he says to Paola in Death and Judgment. “For fifty years, ever since the end of the war, all we’ve ever been is lied to. By the government, the church, the political parties, by industry and business and the military.”
“’And the police,’ she asked.
“’Yes,’ he agreed with no hesitation whatsoever, ‘and the police.’
“’But you want to stay with them?’ she asked.
“He shrugged and poured more grappa. She waited. Finally he said, ‘Someone’s got to try.’”
And that’s what drives every one of these books: a good man, torn between his ideals and the insults to mind, body, and spirit that he witnesses every day, because someone’s got to try. That, and because he draws constant balm from his family, his friends, a perfect risotto, a glass of fine wine, and always, outside his door, that breathtaking city:
“Brunetti was content to stand and watch the buildings and the light, entranced, as he so often was, by the casual, unending beauty of it. Stone, sky, gold, marble, space, proportion, chaos, disorder, glory” (The Golden Egg).
***
How did Donna Leon come to adopt Venice as her own? In a very roundabout way.
Leon was born in 1942 to an Irish/German/Spanish family in New Jersey, and, after college, she wrote advertising copy and hated it. Then in 1967, an Italian-American friend invited her on a trip to Italy, and she walked around “speechless in wonder. I quickly realized that these were people I wanted to listen to and wanted to talk to. And as time passed, wanted to live among.”
It took fifteen years for that to happen, however. “I kept taking jobs in odd places”: writing ad copy in London, teaching in an American school in Switzerland, teaching English in Iran, which she loved, and Saudi Arabia, which she definitely did not. “I saw an ad in the New York Times for English teachers to go to Iran. And I said, oh, I’ve never been there. I had to get a map. I didn’t know where it was.” That was during the last years of the Shah, and as she was busy teaching and trying to finish a PhD thesis on Jane Austen, the revolution of 1978-1979 erupted around her, and she was evacuated on a bus, at gunpoint. It wasn’t until months later that she got her trunks back, only to find out her papers were gone.
A year in China followed, and then she saw another ad, for a lucrative teaching job at King Saud University in Riyadh. “I knew I shouldn’t even apply. I had heard enough stories about the place to warn me off. But in need of work and allowing myself to be lured by my memories of four pleasant years in Iran, I applied. How different, my willed ignorance asked me, could one Muslim country be from another?”
It was “the worst time in my life,” she reports in My Venice and Other Essays (2013). Saudi men, she says, were obnoxious, aggressive, treated women like second-class citizens, and masturbated in front of her on public buses (“it happened so often that first I stopped counting and then I stopped taking the bus”). She fled the country as soon as she was able.
The place she fled to was Venice. Over the course of the years, she had visited there many times, made very close friends, and was gradually absorbed into the families. “When I finally decided to settle down, I decided to come to the one place where I knew most people and felt most at home.”
She found a job teaching English literature for the University of Maryland, which had the contract for university education for the U.S. Armed Forces in Europe: “I whiled away fifteen years talking to our boys in blue about the changing moral order in the universe of Jane Austen’s novels or the unreliable narrator in twentieth-century fiction. They might perhaps have resisted Jane Austen, my students, but they knew a lot about changing moral orders, and they’d certainly encountered a large number of unreliable narrators.”
She eventually quit it, having had enough of academia, but by then something life-changing had happened. A passionate opera fan—every one of her books begin with a brief snippet of libretto—she was backstage with a friend and his wife at La Fenice, the Venice opera house, when they began “vilifying a recently deceased tyrant of the podium in the way you do” (it was Herbert von Karajan) and “soon we were talking about how he would die in his dressing room and what would kill him.”
That’s when an idea hit her, and she went home “with no plan” and wrote a novel about the backstage murder of a despised conductor. She needed a policeman for it, and “he just came out of my head. When I wrote the scene where Brunetti came out of the boat, it’s as if he sprang full-blown from my head at that moment. I knew everything about him.”
This is our first glimpse of him in Murder at La Fenice, and pay attention, because he will never be described physically again in any of the books: “He was a surprisingly neat man. Tie carefully knotted. Hair shorter than was the fashion. Even his ears lay close to his head as if reluctant to call attention to themselves. His clothing marked him as Italian. The cadence of his speech announced that he was Venetian. His eyes were all policeman.”
The book was only meant to be for fun, she said—“I was lucky to be born without ambition, and I had none for the book”— and so she stuck it in a drawer, and there it sat until she heard of a competition called the Suntory Mystery Fiction Grand Prize. She sent it off, and six months later, they wrote back to say she’d won, along with a request for two more, “and suddenly I had a purpose in life, a mission.”
She’s written one a year ever since, getting her ideas sometimes from the newspapers, but mostly from listening to Venetians’ conversations in their homes and restaurants and bars, and out on the streets. She never prepares an outline—“I have to wait until I have an opening. And once I have that, it leads ineluctably to chapter two and so on. That’s the way it has worked in all the books, so I don’t tamper with it. It has never really happened that I knew the ending when I started writing.”
Signorina Elletra happened exactly the same way as Brunetti did: “I was writing and someone knocked on Brunetti’s door and I didn’t have a clue who it could be or what it could be. It was a beautiful spring day, so I went for a long walk, and I came back and turned on the computer, and by God, Signorina Elletra walked in, and thank God for the day that she did.”
Once she knows what she’s doing, Leon does her research as needed: six months reading about art forgery for Acqua Alta, many visits to the Murano glass factories for Through a Glass, Darkly (2006), deep dives into the Rom population for The Girl of his Dreams (2008) and Senegalese street vendors for Blood From a Stone (2005). One bit that needed no research: the character of the “nasty, greedy, ill-tempered” woman who is killed in Doctored Evidence after keeping her television on LOUD every single night, despite many, many complaints. This was based on Leon’s own neighbor. The moral of this story: Never get a crime novelist angry at you.
Today, the books appear all over the world, in over thirty languages—except in Italian, which Leon doesn’t permit. The reason? “I don’t want to be famous where I live,” she said in 2003. “I just don’t like it. I am spotted on the street by the Germans, the Austrians, the French, the Danish, everyone, at least three or four times a day, and it’s always been nice and always very respectful, but I don’t like it.”
She meant it. In 2015, she moved to Switzerland, where she now has a house in Zurich and another in the mountains. She still spends a week each month in Venice, but in Switzerland, “I am invisible. Everyone is invisible in Switzerland. I can work all day for two or three weeks at a time and do nothing else. There is no phone, no people asking me to go out for coffee.”
Fortunately for us, we still have the books, and they are much loved. Over the years, they have won many international awards, including the CWA Silver Dagger; the Times of London has named her one of our Fifty Greatest Crime Writers; and the Washington Post has called her work “one of the most exquisite and subtle detective series ever.”
The best news? There is still more to come—wherever she writes them.
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The Essential Leon
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Acqua Alta (1996)
Flavia went up the steps two at a time and back into the apartment. She looked down and saw that a small pool of blood now spread out under Brett’s face, a strand of her hair floating on the surface….She wiped Brett’s hair back from her face, feeling the blood trail across her fingers. “It’s going to be all right. Everything’s going to be all right, darling. Don’t worry.”
The eye closed, opened, drifted into long focus, then came back. “Hurt,” she whispered.
“It’s all right, Brett. It’s going to be all right.”
“Hurt.”
In the very first book, Death at La Fenice, Leon introduced us to opera diva Flavia Petrelli and her wry woman lover, archaeologist Brett Lynch—characters so distinctive she had to bring them back again in this dramatic adventure. In the opening scene, while I Puritani soars in the background, Lynch opens the door to two men who beat her savagely, and leave her with the grim warning, “Don’t keep your meeting with Doctor Semenzato.”
It’s a puzzling threat, because Semenzato is one of the most respected men in Venice, charming, intelligent, the director of a famous museum. What could these men possibly have to do with him? She does indeed have an appointment to discuss an exhibition of Chinese art, but why would she be so violently warned away? As Commissario Brunetti is about to discover, there is much, much more to all this than meets the eye, a story of blackmail, art forgery, obsession, and deception that ends in a truly spectacular climax in the palazzo of a Mafia strongman, as outside, the storm rages, the acqua alta rises, and Brunetti finds himself fighting not only for Brett’s life, but his own. Strong stuff, with a tableau at the end of the climax that will stick with you.
Willful Behavior (2002)
World War II may have been long ago, but for many Italians, it could have been yesterday.
When one of Paola’s students comes to see Brunetti, hoping to get his help obtaining a pardon for an unnamed crime once committed by her now-dead grandfather, he really doesn’t see the point, but pokes about a bit. And then she is stabbed to death. Investigating with increasing urgency, he finds all roads leading back to the crimes of the Fascist era, to those who committed them, and to those who still believe in their necessity. After visiting one of them, a ninety-year-old who radiates malice, he and Vianello cannot wait to get back outside: “God, you think they’re all dead and then you turn over a rock and you find one’s still under there.”
There’s a lot more than that under that rock. Soon, another corpse is found, and as the long-buried secrets of Nazi collaborators and the exploitation of Italian Jews begin to emerge, the forces that want those secrets interred again emerge as well.
“I’ve always been afraid of people in possession of what they believe is the truth,” says Brunetti. “They’ll do anything to see that the facts are changed and whipped into shape to agree with it.”
He has no idea how right he is.
Beastly Things (2012)
It was cold in the room, the only sound the heavy wheeze of the air conditioning. The man’s thick chest did not move up and down, nor did he stir uncomfortably in the cold. He lay there, naked under his sheet, eyes closed. He did not wait, for he was beyond waiting, just as he was beyond being late or being on time. One might be tempted to say that the man simply was. But that would be untrue, for he was no more.
The body on the mortuary slab is of a veterinarian named Nava, who moonlighted at the slaughterhouse certifying cattle that were fit to be sold as safe for human consumption. Brunetti knows what’s coming next—money changed hands. What he doesn’t know is the scale of it, Nava’s unwillingness to cooperate, and the blackmail and finally murder that ended him up on that slab.
“You don’t want to see what we do here,” a woman at the slaughterhouse tells Brunetti. “No one does. Believe me.”
He is about to find out just how true that is.
You don’t want to miss the final scene, the solemn and extraordinary funeral held for the veterinarian, attended not only by his personal clients, but by his patients—a heart-stirring congregation of parrots, dogs, rabbits, and cats. Not a dry eye in the house.
Earthly Remains (2017)
Footsteps, noise, Pucetti gone, different hands, mask over the nose and mouth, hands under his ankles and shoulders, stretcher, ambulance, siren, the calming up and down of motion on the water, slow slide into the dock, bumbling about, transfer to a harder surface, the sound of wheels on marble floors as he was rolled into the hospital.
Brunetti and Pucetti have been interviewing a man of such entitled obnoxiousness that Brunetti, convinced that Pucetti is about to get himself in deep trouble by physically attacking the man, does the only thing he can think of—he fakes a heart attack. But now he’s committed to it, so he lets the medical process proceed until he thinks it’s safe to get up and go home.
He hasn’t reckoned with the doctor, who tells him quite seriously that though he did not in fact have a heart attack, his stress level is through the roof and he’d better do something about before it he ends up back in her hospital for real.
He takes some weeks off, heads out to a remote island where Paola’s aunt keeps a villa, and it is paradise: trees, nature, flowers, water, beehives, birds; rowing and hiking by day, the sleep of the just at night. And then, in the middle of a thunderstorm, the villa’s custodian disappears, his body found the next day in the water, his foot tangled in an anchor rope.
A tragic accident—but is it? What were the lab samples the man kept sending back to the mainland? What was the history of the terrible scars on his body? Why was he always blaming himself for the rare cancer that carried off his wife? The answers will lead Brunetti to a heartbreaking story of loyalty, greed, corruption, and environmental disaster to which everybody has turned a blind eye for the sake of politics, accommodation, and profit.
In the end: “They sat in silence, three Venetians, relatives at the wake of a city that had been an empire and was now selling off the coffee spoons to try to pay the heating bill.”
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Book Bonus
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Donna Leon has been involved in a great variety of book projects in one form or another, so let’s take a deep breath and dive in.
Her only additional fiction has been a standalone called The Jewels of Paradise (2012), but it combines a lot of the ingredients—Venice, music, mystery, investigation, wit, style—that have made her books notable. Two locked trunks, believed to contain the papers of a once-famous Italian composer, have been uncovered after nearly three centuries. There are rumors of a treasure, there are inheritance issues, and the protagonist is hired as a neutral party to examine the contents and make recommendations. Matters get very complicated—and dangerous—after that. If you like her Brunetti books, you’ll happily read this, too.
The pick of the nonfiction for me is My Venice and Other Essays (2013), a collection of pieces gathered together about a wide range of topics, all strongly opinionated and engaging. It was there that I encountered her scorching views on Saudi Arabia, and I especially recommend to you the piece called “With Barbara Vine,” a hilarious recounting of two crime queens meeting for dinner and comparing notes on various ways to kill a person. I’ll even include an excerpt from it below.
Other nonfiction:
Brunetti’s Cookbook (2010). Not surprisingly, with so much delicious food in the books, Leon teamed up with friend and cook Roberta Pianaro to present the recipes for many of the dishes she wrote about, and contributed several food essays herself. If the aubergine and prosciutto roulades and penne rigate made you hungry, here’s where you can do something about it.
Brunetti’s Venice: Walking with the City’s Best-Loved Detective (2009): With travel guide Dr. Toni Sepeda, this is exactly what it sounds like.
And this leads us to one of Leon’s greatest passions. When not writing, she indulges in her love of music. For many years, she sponsored an opera company, Il Complesso Barocco, to tour and record Handel operas, and then did the same with Il Pomo d’Oro orchestra, not only sponsoring them, but writing program notes, scouting singers, even appearing on stage as a narrator. Her involvement with these companies also led to three book-and-music celebrations:
Handel’s Bestiary: In Search of Animals in Handel’s Operas (2010), which explores twelve of Handel’s aria preoccupied with animals, those arias presented on an accompanying CD;
Venetian Curiosities (2011), legendary tales of Venice, plus a CD of Vivaldi concertos performed by Il Complesso Barocco; and
Gondola (2013), a picture-and-text celebration of the gondola, which also includes a CD of some of the popular songs sung by the gondoliers, and backed by Il Pomo d’Oro.
Phew!
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Television Bonus
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No theatrical movies have been made of the Brunetti series, but German television has produced 26 feature-length episodes from the books, beginning in 2000 and going through 2019. Leon has said she’s only seen two of them—she owns no television and so it was at a friend’s—and she thought they were fine. She’s opted to have no involvement at all, but in one interview, she proclaims that she intends to say she’s seen them all and they’re all wonderful, because the producer has become a friend, “and I believe we should lie for our friends.”
Supposedly, if you rummage around hard enough, you can find the episodes in German on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and something called MHz Choice.
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Dialogue Bonus
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The second section of Il Gazettino lay open on the table where Brunetti had set it down, and Paola inquired, with a nod in its direction, “What revelations does it bring us today?”
“Two city administrators are under investigation for corruption,” Brunetti said and sipped his coffee.
“They’ve chosen to ignore the rest of them, then?” she asked. “I wonder why.”
“The prisons are full.”
“Ah.”
—About Face
[Elletra] “I suppose I shouldn’t say this, but it is good to be back.”
[Brunetti] “Rome too busy?”
“Too crowded”….
“In comparison with?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Commissario. I didn’t mean the city itself, but the Questura. There are hundreds of people there.”
“There must be more crime in Rome,” Brunetti ventured.
“Well,” she said, and gave a long, obviously thoughtful, pause, “the government and the Vatican are there.”
—Transient Desires
[Elletra] “Shall I look for the lawyer?”
[Brunetti] “Yes.”
“I love to hunt for lawyers. They think they’re so clever at hiding things, but it’s so easy to flush them out of the undergrowth. Almost too easy.”
“Would you prefer to give them a sporting chance?” Vianello asked.
The question brought her back to her senses. “Give a lawyer a sporting chance? Do you think I’m mad?”
—Doctored Evidence
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Language Bonus
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“If the Brunettis had a religion,” Leon writes in The Golden Egg, “it was language. Puns and jokes, crossword puzzles and teasers, were to them what communion and confirmation were to Catholics. Bad grammar was a venial sin; deliberate corruption of meaning was mortal.”
As you’ve no doubt seen by now, language is important to Leon, too, and if you read the books carefully, you’ll get a real education in regional quirks and accents: the “exaggerated aspirants of Florence;” the “occasional French phrases lingering in Sicilian dialect;” the “elisions of the letter R in Milanese speech.”
The “easy sibilance” of Veneziano, of course, gets center stage, since it’s often a plot or character element in the books and a real point of pride to any native Venetian. “The Veneziano stretto was sure to defeat any ear not born within a hundred kilometers of the laguna. Yet how sweet it was to hear the dialect, so much like the one his grandmother had spoken all his life, never bothering to have anything to do with Italian, which she had always dismissed as a foreign language and not worthy of her attention” (Through a Glass, Darkly).
The most specific dissection, though, is the one Leon makes of Patta’s speech: “His Palermitano accent thickened in direct proportion to the diminishing importance of the person with whom he spoke. Odd vowel sounds began to appear, ‘i’ landed on the end of feminine nouns; double ‘ll’s’ were transmuted into double ‘dd’s’; the ‘Madonna’ became the ‘Maronna,’ and ‘bello’ became ‘beddu.’ Sometimes the initial ‘i’ in words disappeared, only to scamper back into place at the sight of a person of higher status” (The Temptation of Forgiveness).
It makes you want to hear her on American regional accents, doesn’t it? Speaking of which…
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America Bonus
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[Returning with Signorina Elletra from a buzzword-filled Patta meeting]
“Accessed?”…
“It’s computer speak, sir,’ she said.
“To access?” he asked. “It’s a verb now?”
“Yes, sir, I believe it is.”
“But it didn’t used to be,” Brunetti said, remembering when it had been a noun.
“I think Americans are allowed to do that to their words, sir.”
“Make them verbs? Or nouns? If they feel like it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ah.”
—Fatal Remedies
He came around the bottom of the bed to Brunetti and held out his hand. “Alex Watson,” he said. His grip was firm but quick, the sort of handshake Americans often gave: eager to establish friendship but reluctant to give any indication they wanted it to continue.
—Transient Desires
[Brunetti to Paola, in connection to a visit he paid to an officers’ club on an American base]
“I wonder why it is, that they always smile so much.” He had noticed the same thing each time he was in America.
She turned away from the risotto and stared at him. “Why shouldn’t they smile, Guido? Think about it. They’re the richest people in the world. Everyone has to defer to them in politics, and they have convinced themselves, somehow, that everything they have ever done in their very brief history has been done for no purpose other than to further the general good of mankind. Why shouldn’t they smile?” She turned back to the pan and muttered darkly….
“Is this going to turn into a cell meeting?” he asked blandly.
—Death in a Strange Country
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Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell Bonus
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She put her fork in the center of the spaghetti and twirled it round. “What are you using now?” she asked.
Looking at my plate but speaking to her, I answered, “Last time I beat a man’s head in with a brick. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, ever since I was a kid. In fact, I always used to threaten people: ‘If you don’t stop doing that, I’ll beat your head in with a brick.’ But now I’ve finally done it, and it’s wonderfully invigorating.” A bit too much garlic in the sauce but still very good.
“Yes, bricks and stones are lovely, aren’t they? They feel so solid in the hand.” She ate another forkful of pasta. “What else?”
“Just this week, I was about to stab a man when I remembered I’d already done it, so I decided to use a garrote.”
“Hmm,” my companion responded. “Delicious pasta, isn’t it?” She raised her eyes to the middle distance. “I’ve always longed to use the garrote.”
I ate a bit more pasta. “You should try it, you know.”
She nodded. “I once used a long silk scarf. Same thing, really, isn’t it?”
I nodded. I’m sure it was.
—“With Barbara Vine,” My Venice and Other Essays
