Creating memorable characters is essential for crime writers to attract readers to their work. Think Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple. Among contemporary authors, few have been more successful than Donna Leon with her Venetian Commissario Guido Brunetti. The twenty-seventh novel in the series, The Temptation of Forgiveness, was released March 20.
| Donna Leon |
Readers have flocked to the Brunetti series as much to spend time with the wise and warm-hearted Commissario as to follow his investigations of crime and corruption in the city of Venice.
Venice, where Leon has lived since 1981, is itself a central character in the stories but we see the city with all its splendor and squalor through Brunetti's perceptive eyes.
What is it about Brunetti that continues to draw readers over decades?
I would suggest Brunetti stands out because he is 360 degrees from the anti-hero, tortured loners of so many contemporary crime novels.
Brunetti is a family man, whose wife and two teenaged children are central to his life. He is a veteran investigator adept at managing and circumventing his dim-witted superiors, and patient with human frailties even among criminals. He is a tenacious investigator who also goes home for lunch, allowing readers to experience the culinary brilliance of Paola, his wife and a professor of American literature.
While the crimes in this series involve the usual suspects, murder, theft, corruption, and the mafia, Leon avoids extreme violence and brutality, again in contrast to other crime and thriller novels. In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald in 2016, Leon said she prefers the ancient Greek approach to drama, showing the results of a crime, rather than depicting the crime itself.
Her deft choices have created the indelible world of Guido Brunetti, which continues to delight readers in thirty-five countries.
Fun Facts
Among the fans of Leon’s Brunetti series are UK Prime Minister Theresa May and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
The idea for the first Brunetti novel resulted from a joking discussion Leon had with friends about how to kill a world-renowned conductor. The conversation took place during a performance at the opera house La Fenice. Result: the novel, Death at La Fenice, published in 1992.
The Brunetti series has not been translated into Italian at Leon’s insistence so that she can maintain privacy where she lives.
Complete List of the Commissario Brunetti series
Death at La Fenice, 1992
Death in a Strange Country, 1993
The Anonymous Venetian, 1994
A Venetian Reckoning, 1995
Acqua Alta, 1996
The Death of Faith, 1997
A Noble Radiance, 1997
Fatal Remedies, 1999
Friends in High Places, 2000
A Sea of Troubles, 2001
Willful Behavior, 2002
Uniform Justice, 2003
Doctored Evidence, 2004
Blood from a Stone, 2005
Through a Glass Darkly, 2006
Suffer the Little Children, 2007
The Girl of His Dreams, 2008
About Face, 2009
A Question of Belief, 2010
Drawing Conclusions, 2011
Beastly Things, 2012
The Golden Egg, 2013
By Its Cover, 2014
Falling in Love, 2015
The Waters of Eternal Youth, 2016
Earthly Remains, 2017
The Temptation of Forgiveness, 2018
No comments:
Post a Comment