While crime fiction has gained some respect over the past twenty years, it’s still usually pigeon-holed as “genre fiction,” or some other label that signifies “not literature.”
If “literature” is whatever certified English Professors think it is, then I’m qualified to disagree with the pigeon-holers. I don’t often use the term “literature,” but if I did, I’d mean “good writing about people as they are and the forces that make them that way.” Or I’d mean that today, anyhow.
Given that definition, I can list quite a number of crime fiction writers who qualify as perpetrators of literature. (Off the top of my head: G. K. Chesterton, K.C. Constantine, Arne Dahl, Tana French, John Harvey, Peter Hoeg, Stuart Kaminsky, Donna Leon, Thomas Perry, Spencer Quinn, Martin Cruz Smith, JanWillem van de Wetering – to name a few.) I’d probably get arguments from some former colleagues about some of those choices. The fewest, I’d guess, would be made against Donna Leon.
For one thing, Leon writes an English prose that is elegant, rhythmic, often very funny, precise and concrete, and that yet manages to demonstrate all those qualities while sounding completely effortless. I suspect she can do this because it’s never occurred to her to try to sound like anyone but herself, and because she devotes herself to representing her scenes and characters precisely as they live in her imagination. Here she is in her very first book, Death at La Fenice, rendering the city of Venice at night:
“But these were the hours when, for Brunetti, the city became most beautiful . . . . The darkness of the night hid the moss that crept up the steps of the palazzi lining the Grand Canal, obscured the cracks in the walls of churches, and covered the patches of plaster missing from the facades of public buildings. Like many women of a certain age, the city needed the help of deceptive light to recapture her vanished beauty. A boat that, during the day, was making a delivery of soap powder or cabbages, at night became a numinous form, floating toward some mysterious destination. The fogs that were common in these winter days could transform people and objects, even turn long-haired teenagers, hanging around a street corner and sharing a cigarette, into mysterious phantoms from the past.”
That moss could have just gone ahead and obscured the cracks and covered the patches. It didn’t have to creep. But that’s what living moss does, and that small verb choice contributes to the overall impression of mysterious transformation. So does that highly specific, quotidian cargo of “soap powder and cabbages” made “a numinous form,” and so do those long-haired teenagers with their lone cigarette, turned into “mysterious shadows from the past.”
Commissario Guido Brunetti serves as more or less a chief of detectives, working out of the Venice police headquarters. He conscientiously tries to solve the crimes he encounters, though not because he believes in the righteousness of the society he defends by doing so.
“‘It’s not important what either of us thinks about the law,'” he remarks to a professoressa who forms part of an investigation.
“‘Then what is important?'”
“‘That innocent people be protected. That’s what laws are meant to do,’ he said. Brunetti, in his heart, didn’t believe this: laws, passed by people in power, were meant to keep them in power. If they also protected innocent people, well and good, but that was nothing more than a welcome side effect” (The Temptation of Forgiveness).
Like most of his fellow Venetians, he accepts, if sometimes reluctantly, the ways of the world. Long married to a professoressa himself, he shares her love for reading. (Though not her enthusiasm for Henry James; he seems content to read and re-read the classical Roman and Greek writers.) In an early book in the series, Dressed for Death, . . . “he went back inside and picked up his copy of Tacitus’s Annals of Imperial Rome. Brunetti picked up where he had left off, with the account of the myriad horrors of the reign of Tiberius, an emperor for whom Tacitus seemed to have an especial distaste. These Romans murdered, betrayed, and did violence to honor and to one another; how like us they were, Brunetti reflected.” The panoply of human weaknesses has long been known, and does not change over centuries or millennia.
But his is not the world-weary, despairing cynicism of the noir gumshoe. Brunetti has come to expect that any human being he encounters, even the least prepossessing, will be a mixed bag of traits, like his politically-appointed superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, a preening, self-serving shell of a man: “As so often happened when Brunetti dealt with Patta, he was forced to admire the skill with which his superior could transmute his own worst failings – in this case blind ambition and an absolute refusal to perform any action that did not benefit him directly – into the appearance of probity” (A Question of Belief).
Brunetti cannot despair for a number of reasons. Raised in a happy family, he learned the ways of being that led to its happiness: “Brunetti thought then of his mother and of the basic principles she had taught him when he was a child. Don’t lie, say please and thank you, be polite to old people and help them if you can, never tease a cripple, eat everything on your plate and do not ask for more, never borrow money, keep your promises” (Earthly Remains). “His family, it seemed to him in retrospect, had combined poverty with generosity, but perhaps memory was adorning his parents’ behaviour. He remembered a succession of men described as friends of his father who had often eaten with them, and recalled that his own clothing, after he’d worn it for two or three years, often disappeared from his wardrobe after a visit from a cousin of his mother who lived in Castello with her six children and perpetually unemployed husband. Brunetti’s had been a family that had nothing but could always find something amidst that nothing to give to someone who had more nothing” (The Temptation of Forgiveness).
Though his wife, Paola, comes from a family of great wealth, the two have lived happily and brought up two children on their joint salaries. And it is that family which allows Brunetti to endure “all the misery of his work, and the disgusting things he has to do in his job.”
After many years of marriage, Brunetti and Paola still view each other with love and admiration – and with fatalistic exasperation. After he has nearly persuaded Paola to procure an invitation to dine with her parents, so that he can pump them for some information necessary to an investigation, Paola says,
‘”You’ll have to wear a suit.’
“‘I always wear a suit when I go to see your parents.’
“‘Well, you never look like you’re happy to be wearing a suit.’
“‘All right,’ he said, smiling. ‘I promise to wear a suit and to look happy that I’m wearing it. So will you call your mother?’
“‘All right,’ she conceded. ‘But I meant it about the suit.’
“‘Yes, my treasure,’ he fawned. He let go of the cup and pushed it toward her. When she had taken another sip, he extracted a biscuit from the bag and dipped it into the coffee.
“‘You are disgusting,’ she said, then smiled.
“‘Simple peasant,’ he agreed, shoving the biscuit into his mouth.
“Paola never talked very much about what it had been like to be raised in the palazzo, with an English nanny and a flock of servants, but if he knew anything about all those years, he knew that she had never been permitted to dunk. He saw it as a great lapse in her upbringing and insisted that their children be allowed to do it. She had agreed, but with great reluctance. Neither child, he never failed to point out to her, showed grave signs of moral or physical decline as a result” (The Temptation of Forgiveness).
Those children – who grow into young adulthood over the thirty books in the series – have distinct personalities, which their parents allow them to express, though not without occasional ironic amusement. Of Raffaele in his early teens, Leon observes “He had discovered, by himself, that the world is corrupt and the system unjust, and that men in power were interested in that and that alone. Because he was the first person ever to have made this discovery with such force and purity, he insisted upon showing his ample contempt for all those not yet graced with the clarity of his vision” (Death at La Fenice). Raffi’s younger sister, Chiara, is obsessively concerned with the manifold threats to the environment that will likely mean the eventual end of Venice, at the least (and in this speaks for Leon, who shares her concerns), and serves as the family “water police,” making sure that Brunetti gets in and out of his showers expeditiously. When a mildly quizzical remark about environmentalists moves Chiara to indignant response, Brunetti answers her seriously:
“‘I’m worried about any group that assumes its own superiority, in any way, to other people . . . . I always think of Savonarola . . . . He started by wanting to make things better, but the only way he could think of to do that was to destroy anything he disapproved of. In the end, I suspect zealots are all like him, even the ecologisti and the feministi. They start out wanting a better world, but they end up wanting to get it by removing anything in the world around them that doesn’t correspond to their idea of what the world should be'” (Dressed for Death).
Brunetti’s sense of history informs even his dealings with his wife and children, and it is this sense of history that most distinctly sets Leon’s books apart from most crime fiction.
While neither Brunetti nor his creator find human evil acceptable, they rarely find it shocking or unprecedented. The subjects of Brunetti’s investigations are, often as not, quite normal human beings who have succumbed to some regrettably normal temptation, some one of the seven deadly sins – most often Greed.
Brunetti has largely rejected Catholic teachings, which has left him a man of conscience but little or no certainty. His trusted subordinate, Sergeant Vianello, another ecologisti, tends to make sharp moral distinctions of the sort Brunetti can’t help but question:
“Brunetti stood there, watching the boat approach the far turn and thinking about Vianello’s use of the word ‘right.’ It was a smallish boat, and there was no appearance of cargo in it, so the man might well be going down to Castello to meet his friends for a drink and a game of cards. Like all motors, however small, this one would leave a slick of oil on the water, adding to the pollution and thus to the eventual death of the laguna. So, under Vianello’s system of judgement, would the man’s trip be condemned as not ‘right’, or was there a factor of quantity to be considered? Or, as Vianello had stated, necessity? How much could we do before it became wrong?
“The priests, he remembered, had taught him and his friends that gluttony was one of the cardinal sins, but Brunetti had never known what gluttony was. More accurately, though he had grasped that it meant eating too much, he had never understood where ‘too much’ began. How could wanting a second helping of his mother’s sarde in saor be wrong? Which sardine would push him over the edge from pleasure to sin? It was this perplexity that had led the young Brunetti to the realization of how strongly the priests associated pleasure with sin, and that had put an end to that” (The Golden Egg).
Despite all the human corruption and downright evil it houses, Venice serves as another source of perpetual delight to Brunetti, an observant man who prefers to walk to where he needs to go, if possible, so that he can observe more:
“It was a campo he walked through often, and he had come to know not only the people who worked there, in the bars and shops, but even the dogs that walked or played there. Lazing in the pale sunlight was a pink-and-white bulldog whose lack of a muzzle always made Brunetti uneasy. Then there was the Chinese thing that had grown from what looked like a pile of furred tripe into a creature of surpassing ugliness. Last, lolling in front of the ceramics store, he saw the black mongrel that remained so motionless all day that many people had come to believe he was part of the merchandise” (Death at La Fenice).
That passage includes another characteristic of Leon’s writing throughout the series. However dire the crimes Brunetti is called upon to deal with, his sense of humor almost never deserts him – or Leon’s never deserts her. Often, as with all great humorous writing, the laughs erupt from the accuracy of observation: that “pile of furred tripe” that turns into “a creature of surpassing ugliness” is more often described, without comment, as a Sharpei. That lazy old black mongrel is made vivid and funny by Leon’s addition of the hyperbolic “that remained so motionless all day that many people had come to believe he was part of the merchandise.”
All the books in the series are full of these moments of delighted surprise at the variety of humanity, of Venice, of the physical world, and full of sometimes acid asides to keep treacle at bay. Here is Signorina Elettra, ostensibly Patta’s secretary, who serves Brunetti as his link to the new digital world, which he doesn’t care to engage with, explaining why one of her accomplices may not be able to immediately pirate some proprietary information:
“‘No, he’ll try it from Newfoundland, but he’s not sure he can get it to me today: he said it might be complicated to patch into the Telecom system from there.’
‘”‘I see,’ said Brunetti, who didn’t” (A Question of Belief).
Leon is perhaps the greatest master of the aside since Shakespeare, and if that doesn’t qualify her for the “literature” shelf, then an awful lot of august members – say, for instance, Aristophanes, Sterne, Dickens and Twain – would have to be expelled from it. Leon once told an interviewer who’d asked how she came to start writing her series, and how she’d kept motivated to turn out a book a year, “It was nothing I ever agonized over . . . . If it weren’t fun, I wouldn’t do it. Because if it weren’t fun for me, it could never be fun for anybody else.” She went on to say, “I feel that I almost have to apologize for being genetically disposed toward happiness. I come of happy people, particularly my mother. And so my default mechanism really is to be cheerful. I wake up at six o’clock in the morning in this terrible world that we inhabit, and I’m cheerful.”
I am in debt to a dear old friend for my introduction to Donna Leon’s work. You will be, too, if you take my advice and introduce yourself to it.
