Blissful anonymity for crime writer Donna Leon in Venice

Best-selling American author Donna Leon says success is overrated as she cherishes her anonymity in Venice, the setting of her mystery series starring Commissario Guido Brunetti.

The award-winning writer’s 19 novels to date have been translated into more than 20 languages, but not into Italian, at her insistence.

“Nobody knows why I’m here, there’s no deference,” she says, before fine-tuning: “There’s deference to me because of my age and because of my politeness.”

The 67-year-old could not be less interested in fame.

“It’s not good for people to be famous or perceived as such, or at least I’ve never known anyone who’s been improved by the experience,” said Ms Leon.

“All of this success stuff is to a large degree very ridiculous,” she said. “Success is absolutely overrated.”

So while trusted advisers seal deals for televised series of Leon’s works in Germany, or for a cookbook of the exquisite meals she describes in passing without fail in every book, she prefers to be essentially anonymous in the city she has called home for nearly three decades.

“I’m like Louis XV, I’m in the hands of my advisers,” she joked.

Ms Leon and other expatriate writers have faced criticism for stereotyping Italy, Italians and in her case Venice.

“There’s the risk of falling into stereotypes, and Leon, despite the bonhomie of her Commissario Brunetti, is not exempt. It’s not for nothing that she doesn’t want her books translated into Italian,” wrote prominent Italian reviewer Ranieri Polese.

Ms Leon responded with a touch of sarcasm: “You have no reason to believe this, but the only time an Italian (reader) has criticised them, it was one woman who read them in German and said I used cliches. Imagine that, in a crime book, of all places!”

In Ms Leon’s novels, Mr Brunetti’s sleuthing takes the reader through Venice’s unique labyrinth of alleyways, aboard vaporetti or police launches navigating the waterways and, more often than not, into the seamy side of local politics and business.

Morality, even for someone who professes to have been brought up on “religion lite”, underpins Ms Leon’s plots.

“I’m interested in why people do things, and I’m fascinated by the way people justify things. I find that intriguing,” she said.

“I am of the mind that even (serial killer) Ted Bundy thought that what he did was right, somewhere in his psyche. It’s very difficult to have the courage to do bad things that you know are bad.”

Ms Leon, who formerly taught English literature – hence the literary references scattered through her pages – wrote her first Venice whodunnit “on a whim”, she says.

An opera enthusiast, she found herself one day in the dressing room at the city’s 18th-century opera house, La Fenice, “and I got the idea for a book”, said Ms Leon. “I just wanted to see if I could write a book. I really wasn’t interested in publication”.

Ms Leon, who won the Macallon Silver Dagger for Fiction for Friends in High Places in 2000, claims to have no particular design for her novels.

“I really don’t plan books at all,” she said, before launching into a story about how the central character in About Face was based on a woman she noticed at the opera who had clearly had multiple facelifts.

An advantage of Ms Leon’s work ethic is that it keeps her at her desk during the hours of the day when it is best not to go out amid throngs of tourists – a reality of the Renaissance city that is a recurrent lament by her novels’ characters.