page two and six: Donna Leon

Talking about Donna Leon, she is another one I should have put on the list.

I would like to capture half - no, all - of the simple elegance with which she writes.

Donna Leon writes novels, set in Venice, featuring the Italian detective Commissario Guido Brunetti. The novels are, in my experience, consistently good and by 'good' I mean they are readable, accessible, valuable and, in short, worth reading. Other people seem to agree. Here are some snippets from the review-blurb on a back cover:

she tells a good story ~ Scotsman
clever, vivid and wholly absorbing ~ Observer
an emotionally complex, intellectually and morally satisfying narrative ~ Scotland on Sunday

How does she do it?

Like Maeve Binchy, she builds her story through conversations between friends and this is the key to the whole tenor of her books. Commissario Brunetti has friends. In fact, he's a friend by nature and quickly becomes a firm favourite of the reader.

I am reading Wilful behaviour. Let's look, chapter by chapter, at some of these conversations.

1. The explosion came at breakfast ... Guido Brunetti's wife Paola is enraged by the treatment of women as displayed in the morning papers. The conversation progresses naturally to a mention of Paola's students at the university where she teaches and later that day one of her students, Claudia, approaches her with a question.
2.'There's someone to see you, sir' ... The same day, at the Questura were he works, Guido has a visitor. It is his old friend Marco Erizzo. They adjourn to a bar and, over a small glass of wine, Marco spills out his problems.
3. At dinner that evening, Guido and Paola tell each other about their day. Their conversation eddies around the earlier conversations with Marco and Claudia.
4. A week or so later Claudia and Paola speak again.
5. The next day, Claudia goes to speak to Guido at the Questura.
6. As a result of his conversation with Claudia, Guido goes to talk to his father-in-law, Count Orazio Falier.
7. At home for lunch, Guido briefly relates the morning's conversations to Paola, amidst all the banter of a family meal.
8. Back at the office, Guido phones another old friend, Lele Bortoluzzi.
9. At home, Paola and Guido talk about her father and his father. The next day, Claudia is found murdered. Guido phones Paola to tell her. He assesses the crime scene with his colleague Vianello. Conversations follow with the landlady and the flatmate.
10. Conversations continue with the landlady and the flatmate and with the pathologist at the scene of crime; and with Vianello.
11. Guido and Vianello work together in the dead girl's flat and then Guido goes to talk with a contact of Claudia's, an old woman whom she looked upon as a grandmother; Hedi Jacobs.
12. Guido walks back to the Questura and goes in to talk to Signorina Elettra, 'the woman who does', his secret weapon. Signorina Elettra is the chief's personal assistant and, while there, Guido is summoned into Vice-Questore Patta's office. They speak and later in the afternoon, Guido receives a call from the pathologist and then goes down to the lab to look at some of the evidence collected from the scene of the crime. The conversations are fragmentary but they are connected.
13. We are on page 110, the story is well under way and further conversations with Paola and Signorina Elettra continue to move the story forward.

That's all you need to know. The story builds conversation by conversation.

Now you can go and do it.

Wilful behaviour, Donna Leon. Arrow, 2009

Paperback, 368 pages

ISBN-10: 0099536625; ISBN-13: 978-0099536628
Originally published in hardback by William Heinemann, 2002
ISBN: 0434009946

The book: