Who is "Donna Leon"?

"Donna Leon" is the name used by an award-winning American novelist living in Italy who has received widespread international acclaim for her series of detective stories featuring her main character, Commissario Guido Brunetti, a mid-level detective in the police department of the beautiful and romantic city of Venice, Italy

Beginning with her first novel published in 1992 (Death at La Fenice , in English), "Donna Leon" has had nineteen of her Commissario Guido Brunetti novels, almost all of them published at the rate of one novel a year.

So why are there quote marks around her name?

Because so little is known about the life, times, and background of "Donna Leon" before her first book, Death at La Fenice, was published in 1992.

That first novel in the series, Death at La Fenice (1991, in Japanese) was published after she had entered and won the 1991 annual suspense novel competition sponsored by the Japanese liquor distiller Suntory. The award for winning the competition was a two-book publishing contract with a Japanese publishing company. Death at La Fenice was published in English in 1992, followed by publication of Death in a Strange Country in 1993, which was also printed in Japanese.

Virtually everything about the author's life before Death at La Fenice is a closed book. She doesn't talk about it, doesn't like to talk about it, doesn't want to talk about it. When and where did she go to college? To university? Did she or didn't she get a Ph.D in English literature? If she did, where and when did she get it? Where did she grow up, where did she go to high school? Who are her parents, and what did they do? Who did she work for, and where, after she left home? Did she do any writing, fiction or otherwise, and if so, did she submit any of her manuscripts to publishers before Death at La Fenice?

All of those questions are standard biography questions. Publishers and book sellers print brief bios of their authors, but the only thing that her publishers and booksellers can print about her life is what she tells them.

And that isn't very much.

So, the early life of mystery writer "Donna Leon" is in itself a mystery, an enigma. If, as it is said, people have three lives -- their public life, their private life, and their secret life, then "Donna Leon"'s public life really begins a little before Death at La Fenice (1991-1992). Her private life before that, between 1942 to 1991, is virtually unknown.

It is with the author's secret life, the strange and utter secrecy about when and where she received her education, the accompanying secrecy about her qualifications to teach English courses at an American university overseas, that's most puzzling.

But why such bizarre secrecy?

Why is it so important to her not to reveal where and when she went to college? How could any secret be so embarassing, so personally humiliating, so liable to subject her to ridicule as telling people where and when you went to college, to university? Perhaps something had happened to the author in the process of obtaining an undergraduate and graduate degrees, some kind of rejection, some lack of acceptance or whatever by those institutions, that caused her to want to repudiate, to 'erase' from her memory as it were, any reminder whatsoever of the institutions she attended?

And what else is she hiding?

Well, for one thing, why her absolute insistance that none of her Brunetti-series novels are to be translated and published in Italian?

Why??

Could it be that she's given some of her novels' less likeable characters features and characteristices that are a bit too much like real-life people in Venice, or are composites of real-life people in Venice? I mean, she admits to gleefully 'killing off' a central character, one believed to be drawn from real life, in her first novel, Death at La Fenice, the real life character being at one time in his musical career a member of WWII Germany's Nazi party, by doing in her novel what is commonly called "character assassination" in literary circles. So, if it was done in her very successful first novel, then what would prevent her from doing the same thing in her subsequent novels?

And if so, a good way to prevent Donna Leon's Venetian targets of character assassination from identifying themselves (or be identified by those that perhaps think they know who those characters are) is to forbid translation and publication of her novels in a language that her Venetian targets speak, read, and thoroughly understand -- Italian.

Well, these kinds of questions are what this blog is all about. I'm seriously considering rewriting an existing Wikipedia biography of Donna Leon; no revised biography can be complete without answers to these (and other) questions about Donna Leon's life.

And that's why I've chosen this Google blogspot's address to be "aboutdonnaleon".


Ken Kellogg-Smith