Date
and Place of birth:
b. Sept. 29, 1942, New Jersey, U.S.
Life and Works:
A New Yorker of Irish/Spanish descent, Donna Leon first went to Italy in 1965, returning regularly over the next decade or so while pursuing a career as an academic in the States and then later in Iran, China and finally Saudi Arabia.
It was after a period in Saudi Arabia, which she found ‘damaging physically and spiritually’ that Donna decided to move to Venice, where she has now lived for over twenty years.
She is now a professor of English Literature at a university near Venice. She loves operas and she is an expert on Händel. Her mysteries feature Commissario Brunetti, the very sympathetical Commissario from Venice.
Her debut as a crime fiction writer began as a joke: talking in a dressing room in Venice’s opera-house La Fenice after a performance, Donna and a singer friend were vilifying a particular German conductor. From the thought ‘why don’t we kill him?’ and discussion of when, where and how, the idea for Death at La Fenice took shape, and was completed over the next four months. In 1991 Donna Leon was honored with the Japanese Suntory-Price for Death at la Fenice.
She is the crime reviewer for the Sunday Times and is an opera expert. She has written the libretto for a comic opera, entitled Dona Gallina. Set in a chicken coop, and making use of existing baroque music, Donna Galliana was premiered in Innsbruck in December.
In Leon’s novels Venice provides not only the background for Commissario Guido Brunett’s cases, but also a metaphor for the society that she depicts with graceful economy. Both are immensely stylish, but their ravishing surfaces hide insidious corruption. The series started off with Death at La Fenice, which also introduced the opera singer Flavia Patrelli and her lover, Brett Lynch, who also features in Acqua Alta.
Murder is usually only the most obvious of the crimes Brunetti investigates: Acqua Alta revealed some of the iniquities of the international art trade; The Death of Faith, sexual and financial corruption within the Roman Catholic Church; A Noble Radiance, the lethal sales of nuclear material from the former Eastern bloc. The greed and cruelty of the criminals is counterpointed in each novel by the decency of Brunetti, a man for whom justice is a passion, and the domestic delights he enjoys with his academic wife , Paola, and their children.
Selected works:
Death at la Fenice (1992)
During a performance of La Traviata at the celebrated opera house La Fenice the world famous conductor Maestro Helmut Wellauer is poisoned.
A Venetian Reckoning (1995)
When a lorry crashes on one of the treacherous bends in the Dolomite Alps, rescue workers find a cargo of dead women. A mystery featuring Commissario Brunetti.
Acqua Alta (1996)
The siren at San Marco is calling out to the sleeping city of Venice that the waters are rising, and while the storm clouds are gathering, a man's body is found.
Fatal Remedies (1999)
In this eighth Donna Leon police procedural set in Venice, honest cop Brunetti finds himself, for once, bending the rules severely. His wife, Paola, has been arrested for vandalism and malicious damage. She has, of course, acted out of the highest of motives--the tourist agency whose windows she smashed
specialises in trips for unaccompanied men to the Far East.
Friends in High Places (2000) This is the ninth book in Donna Leon' s series about sweetly cynical Venetian commissario Brunetti. When bureaucrat Rossi starts to investigate whether
his apartment in a historic building has any right to exist, he and his wife start to look for leverage. When Rossi rings him at his office, seeking help, and is found dead under some scaffolding, Brunetti feels a particular obligation to find out whether he fell, or was thrown. His investigations take him to the heart of corruption, to money lenders and officials and drug dealers and petty thugs, and to solutions and resolutions that are only ever going to be partial.
A Sea of Troubles (2001) This novel sees police secretary Signorina Elettra drawn into danger, as she volunteers to go undercover among the clam fishermen of the Venetian Lagoon. And Commissario Brunetti finds himself torn between duty and his feelings for her.
Wilful Behaviour (2002) When one of his wife's Paola's students comes to visit him, with a strange and vague interest in investigating the possibility of a pardon for a crime committed by her grandfather many years ago, Commissario Brunetti thinks little of it, beyond being intrigued and attracted by the girl's intelligence and moral seriousness. But when the girl is found dead, clearly stabbed to death, Claudia Leonardo suddenly becomes Brunetti's case, no longer Paola's student. Claudia seems to have no discernible...
Uniform Justice (2003) Neither Commissario Brunetti nor his wife Paola have ever had much sympathy for the Italian armed forces, so when a young cadet is found hanged, a presumed suicide, in Venice's elite military academy, Brunetti's emotions are complex: pity and sorrow for the death of a boy, close in age to his own son, and contempt and irritation for the arrogance and high-handedness of the boy's teachers and fellow-students. The young man is the son of a doctor and former politician, a man of an impeccable integrity all too rare in Italian politics. Dr Moro is clearly and understandably devastated by his son's death; but while both he and his apparently estranged wife seem convinced that the boy's death could not have been suicide, neither appears at all keen to talk to the police nor to involve Brunetti in any investigation of the circumstances in which he died. As Brunetti - and the indispensable Signorina Elettra - investigates the doctor's political career and the circumstances of his estrangement from his wife, they are faced by a wall of silence, as the military protects its own and civilians are unwilling to talk. Is this the natural reluctance of Italians to involve themselves with the authorities, or is Brunetti facing a conspiracy of silence?
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