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Donna Leon first launched herself as a crime writer in 1991 with Death at La Fenice, which saw a
conductor poisoned in mid-performance at the Venice opera house. ‘It was an
idea that kind of grew,’ she says. ‘I had a friend at the opera house. One
day we were backstage, complaining about the tyrannical conductor – and we
thought it would be a laugh to make him the victim in a crime novel, which
I duly went off and wrote. But that’s all it was meant to be. I was lucky
to be born without ambition, and I had none for this book. Then I sent it
off to a competition, and six months later they wrote back to say I’d won.
I got a contract, and suddenly I had a purpose in life, a mission.’
To hear her talk, you’d think that until Death at La Fenice she’d been living in obscurity. Not so. She
was a well-known academic teaching English literature at universities in
the USA and Europe. But she found that she wasn’t really cut out for
university life, and finally decided to walk out on it. ‘I’m a former
academic,’ she says now through slightly gritted teeth. And it’s interesting
that her literary reputation has been made through a medium so remote from
the one she used to teach.
‘You’d be surprised how many academics do read murder mystery though,’
she adds. ‘It makes no intellectual demands, and it’s what you want after a
day of literary debate.’ That said, Ms Leon is big business. She sells in bulk,
her books are translated into nineteen languages and she’s a household name
in German-speaking countries. ‘All of which is gratifying for me personally,
and I don’t mean to rubbish my own work, but murder mystery is a craft, not
an art. Some people go to crime conventions and deliver learned papers on
the way Agatha Christie presents her characters, but they’re out of their
minds. I stay away from such events.’
Leon also stays away from most of the other expected haunts of crime
writers, like courtrooms and police stations – ‘I’ve only known two policemen,
neither of them well,’ – which accounts for the absence of technical legal
detail in the books. What’s more, the few points of police procedure that
appear are usually invented – as, she admits, they’re bound to be when you
set a murder series in a place where murders never happen. ‘Venice is
small, compact, protected by its geography – there’s really not much
crime.’ Clearly the key thing about her murder stories isn’t credibility. Predictability
comes closer to the mark: setting a series in a fixed location that the
reader finds attractive, with a constant cast of characters.
And that’s what Donna Leon does. Her unique selling point is Venice
which, as the reviewers always say, comes through with such vitality and forcefulness
in Leon’s writing that you can smell it. There’s a set cast of characters,
led by a middle-aged detective, Commissario
Brunetti, and his wife (a disillusioned academic). Then there are her
standard jokes – often to do with food. Indeed, Leon lingers so ecstatically
over the details of lunch, the pursuit of justice frequently gets diverted.
The eating is a literary device – part of the pattern of each novel, into which
she slots the plot. ‘That’s how you hook your readers, who like a kind of
certainty. And the most attractive certainty of crime fiction is that it
gives them what real life doesn’t. The bad guy gets it in the end.’
Indeed, when the conversation switches to Donna Leon’s other life, Il Complesso Barocco, the opera company
she helps run, she talks about baroque opera as though it were murder-mystery:
fuelled by ‘power, jealousy and rage, despair, menace’ which are her own words
for the sleeve notes of a new CD of Handel arias by the company, packaged
under the title The Abandoned Sorceress. Designed to tour rare works in concert
format, Il Complesso was set up
in 2001 in collaboration with another US exile in Italy, the musicologist
Alan Curtis. ‘It started as a one-off. There was a rare Handel opera, Arminio, that Alan thought should be
performed, and it became an obsession for him until eventually I said, ‘Do
you want to talk about this or do you want to do it?’ So we did it. I rang
a friend who runs a Swiss opera festival. We offered him a production. Then
had eight months to get it together.’
Somehow it came together, and Il
Complesso is now an on-going venture. Curtis does the hands-on artistic
and administrative work. Leon lends her name which ‘opens doors in all
those German-speaking places’ and, crucially, underwrites the costs. In addition,
her publishing commitments take her all over Europe – where she keeps a lookout
for potential singers, and sometimes even features in the productions
herself: not singing (‘I don’t’) but reading the odd snatch from her books.
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