Mano success grows from the weirdest ideas. When a friend got angry about the conductor at an opera evening in Venice (“He’s so bad, I should kill him”), Donna Leon said reassuringly: “Let me do it, but with words.” From this conversation, the writer related later, the idea for her first detective novel “Venetian Finale” came up. There’s a body lying around in the Teatro La Fenice, and an inspector named Brunetti goes on the hunt for a murderer for the first time.
Leon’s detective character is one of the few in the crime genre not to be distinguished by dysfunctional relationships or depressed moods. Brunetti loves his family, his wife Paola is a university lecturer from a wealthy family, the upbringing of their two children is characterized by the forbearance of the 1968 generation. There are no problems at home, but enough of them as soon as the inspector steps out of his front door and roams the small streets of Venice. This mixture did not go down particularly well with the American audience, for whom the author, who was born in New Jersey in 1942, initially wrote. In the US, Brunetti’s first case flopped. Leon suspected the investigator was “too intellectual” for this audience – a harsh judgment of her former home, which she left at the age of 23. After studying literature and teaching in London, Switzerland, Iran, China and Saudi Arabia, she settled in Venice in the early 1980s.