Donna Leon never planned to write crime fiction. And yet this year she published her 32nd mystery novel featuring Venetian police detective Guido Brunetti. The series is an international bestseller that’s sold millions of copies and been translated into three dozen languages. Her newest book, “Wandering Through Life,” is something new — a memoir. Here she confesses, among other things, that she sees her whole life as a series of unplanned events, including her career as a novelist.
Born and raised in New Jersey, Leon, 81, taught English in Iran, China and Saudi Arabia before settling in Venice several decades ago. While there, the longtime detective-fiction reader decided to write her own and created the thoughtful, compassionate Brunetti, who battles the corruption that has seeped into Venetian life. Leon’s books are considered models of the well-written, literate mystery where character plays as much of a role as plot.
Leon moved to Switzerland several years ago to escape the tourist crowds in Venice, but she continues to regularly visit friends in that city, which she steadfastly considers the most beautiful in the world. Leon, a passionate opera lover, also works with a noted Italian orchestra, Il Pomo d’Oro. During a recent video interview, she talked about growing up in the United States, the adventures she had as an overseas English teacher and her plans for continuing the Brunetti books. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
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Q: When did your love of mystery books begin?
A: I’ve never had a television, I still don’t. When I got home from being a teaching assistant at the University of Massachusetts, I did the closest thing to watching TV: I read murder mysteries. They’re relaxing, they don’t make demands on you. I must have read hundreds of them when I was there. More importantly, when I went to Italy, I discovered a series — published by Mondadori in Italian — of American crime stories. They had yellow covers — “un giallo” is one yellow, which is a yellow-covered book, a crime book. I was learning Italian by reading “giallo.” Many, many people have done this.
Q: Why did you decide to try writing crime fiction?
A: I had this conversation with a conductor, in the dressing room at La Fenice [the Venetian Opera House]. We talked about how someone could kill a conductor, and I thought: “That would be a good idea for a book. Could I write a murder mystery?” So I tried — and I succeeded.
Q: Your mysteries stand out because they are so thoughtful and literate. Did you set out to write a different kind of mystery?
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A: I don’t like violence, and I don’t like violence in books. So I knew from the beginning that there would not be a lot of violence. And not a lot of sex because people who read murder mysteries don’t want a lot of sex in their books. I was wise enough when I started the first book to create Brunetti as an intelligent man in whose company I would happily spend time. I wanted him to be someone who would be simpatico to me. So he had to be a reader, he had to be a family person, he probably would have kids — he’d be a decent person.
Q: He is all that, and as I’ve read your books, he’s grown and changed, and become even more of an in-depth character as he continues to wrestle with the ethical dimensions of his police job.
A: Readers like to hear somebody trying to figure out what the right thing to do is. That’s what novels are for. It seems to me that crime novels — the good ones — do deal with that question of right and wrong, good and bad. The trashy books — the shoot ’em bang, bang — they never have to consider anything. It’s just action, action, action.
Q: Do you have a sense of where you’ll go next in the Brunetti books?
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A: I think they will follow me into more ecological concerns. Climate change is the push button, it’s the detonator, it’s madness.
Q: In the introduction of your latest book, the memoir “Wandering Through Life,” you write that you are “feckless and unthinking by nature and have never planned more than the first step in anything I’ve done.” You also say that you lack ambition. Have those qualities hindered you?
A: Oh, no, they’ve worked to my advantage. I think that our generation was corrupted by ambition. Luckily, for some reason, my parents overlooked that one. I was never faced with this brainwashing that you must be a success. They said, “Go out and have a decent life and get a decent education and do something you like with your life.”
Q: It sounds like you had a happy childhood. Your mother was a larger-than-life figure who seems to have played an especially key role in your life. Can you talk more about her?
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A: My mother was very, very smart. She didn’t go to university, but she was a reader. I was following her model when I first started to read, going to the library to get library books and reading all the time. And then I became an addict, as she was. And she didn’t read junk. She read Dickens; so did my father. They were readers. The idea of sitting in a chair in the living room and reading all evening seemed a perfectly sane thing to do. It was a lot of fun.
Q: For years, you taught English overseas. You had thought of going into academia and had written a rough draft of your doctoral dissertation about Jane Austen, but that draft was lost when you evacuated from Iran at the start of the 1979 revolution.
A: It was in my suitcase. Six months after I left the country, when my suitcase showed up, my dissertation was gone. I said to myself, “Do I want to go back to graduate school?” I realized, “No.” I had tasted a different kind of life. It was far more fun.
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Q: You had discovered Italy and developed a passion for the people and their culture.
A: I was a junkie for Italy. My family is not Italian; they are Irish, German and Spanish. But when I went for the first time, I went with a classmate of mine, who wanted to go and study painting. I said, “Yeah, okay, why not?” So I quit my job. And we went to Rome together, she to study painting. I don’t know why I went. I guess to get away from writing advertising copy in New York. I was shattered by how wonderful Italy was and how wonderful Italians were. I was like Saint Paul on the way to Damascus. And that remains; I still think it’s a fabulous place.
Q: You’re 81, and in the last essay in your book you write about aging, about being called an “anziana” (old woman) in a Venetian shop and being stunned, and then trying to figure why you were so stunned.
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A: I think the fact that we get older and weaker with age, we know it but we don’t know it. … But to have someone — an absolutely neutral observer — say what no one else has the courage to say: “You’re an old lady.” We deny it. But I think it’s better to accept it and do what you can to keep it at bay. … You’re likely to be healthier longer.
Karen MacPherson, former children’s and youth services coordinator at Takoma Park Maryland Library, is a lifelong mysteries aficionado.
Wandering Through Life
By Donna Leon
Atlantic Monthly. 208 pp. $26
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