Published in 1993, this is by Donna Leon; I became aware of it via a Five Books recommendation; and I picked it up recently because it's set in Venice... I read -- courtesy of the Internet Archive -- the French translation by William Olivier Desmond, which came out in 1997. (Why French? No reason, really. Just 'cos.)

Donna Leon will be 81 at the end of this month. She has done a ton of things in her life (tourist guide in Rome, English teacher in Iran, university lecturer in Ryad and Suzhou...) But she is most famous for her series of novels (there are 32 so far) featuring Guido Brunetti, a commissario of police operating in Venice, his home city.

These are formidably successful books. The first came out in in 1992, while the latest was published just this year, and they've all been best-sellers. Curiously, although they're available in 35 languages, the language of Brunetti is not one of them, as Leon has famously stipulated that her work should not be translated into Italian. Various reasons have been given for that decision. She says she doesn't want to be too recognizable on her home turf (she lived for many years in Venice, and although she subsequently moved to Switzerland -- different accounts give different dates -- she still visits regularly). She also wants to safeguard her access to the little bits of gossip that often inspire her stories. There may be other considerations however. As Redmond explains, "[Leon's] novels are as much about the society and culture of Venice as they are about the crimes and corruption that are part of Guido Brunetti's working life... Too often Brunetti tracks down his man, or woman, only to lose him or her in a mire of corruption... This leitmotif of iniquity serves to qualify the glowing picture Leon presents of Venice, and may be the reason she chooses not to publish in Italy."

Death in a Strange Country -- the second in the Brunetti series -- certainly exemplifies that pattern of detection and frustration. It's Venice, so we open with a corpse in a canal... But we immediately have a complication because the body is that of a young American from the nearby US base in Vicenza. (This site, Leon tells us, then housed tens of thousands of American soldiers and their families. She would have known it quite well, as another of her professional endeavours saw her teaching literature there under the auspices of the University of Maryland. The base still exists.)

An American victim puts cats among pigeons. Brunetti's unimpressive boss, Patta, is worried about the effect of this news on tourism numbers; others speculate about terrorism; the whole business raises questions of jurisdiction. Patta is all too ready to dismiss the crime as an attempted mugging gone wrong (and so a one-off regrettable incident). But the much more conscientious Brunetti senses that there's much more afoot.

And he's right, of course. It's all linked with nefarious personages in very high -- the highest -- circles turning a blind eye to and/or profiting from the illegal dumping on Italian territory of toxic waste from US military sites in Germany. And indeed, as per the schema Redmond indicates, the ending (which I won't give away) is subdued, not triumphant. Impunity is the name of the game. Two well-intentioned innocents and one misguided pawn end up dead; one powerfully positioned rogue also ends up dead (but he's punished by a distraught and vengeful mother, an act we can't regret too much, as we know he would never have ended up in a court of law); and one of the good guys ends up with a terrible secondment as punishment for being too smart.

But that's what good endings are all about, in my opinion. The vast majority of crime novels end too neatly, with the right people behind bars. This one is much more akin to the truth of things, I'd say. (Each of Leon's novels features an epigraph, in the shape of an extract from the libretto of a Mozart opera, and the one in this novel, from Idomeneo, references the "terrible destruction" and "rivers of blood" brought about by a "cruel monster".)


Udaipur, 2011. The "Venice of the East" (one of them anyway)

Another plus is that you can't help liking Brunetti, even if he's annoying sometimes. He's a very rounded character. You follow him meticulously doing his work, but you also see him in his domestic setting, with his university lecturer wife Paola and his two children, Raffaele and Chiara. He's a foodie, so we get great descriptions of Italian meals. (Liver, onions, and polenta, followed by figs... I don't even like liver, but Leon makes it sound so appetizing... To say nothing of the pumpkin risotto and roast veal...)

And he loves his native Venice. Sometimes he plays the game of rewarding himself (with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine) for every new Venetian feature he spots (a mullioned window, perhaps, or the statue of a saint). There's always more to discover, even after decades of residence there. And when he needs to calm down, he walks. Leon's descriptions of his routes are very precise, and it's kind of nice to follow them on Google Maps.

His love of his city doesn't blind him to its problems, however. Far from it. Even in the early 1990s, tourists were a challenge. And everyone knows how much worse the situation has become. In 2020, Leon notes: "When I first went to Venice, in the late 60s, there were perhaps 150,000 inhabitants and a reasonable number of tourists, certainly nothing worth mentioning. Now there are about 54,000 residents and between 30 and 33 million tourists a year. The numbers explain everything."

We're due to change trains in Venice, and I'd insisted on factoring in a bit of a walk to stretch our legs after the night train, and indulge my nostalgia for my first trip to Venice. Now I'm starting to feel guilty that we're even thinking of emerging from the railway station...

In addition, we repeatedly hear in the novel about the filth of the canals. This is all the harder for Brunetti to stomach because he remembers a time when it wasn't like this. In his childhood, he had swum in the Grand Canal, he says, and because salt was taxed, the poor had used canal and lagoon water for cooking. This environmental awareness -- massively amplified, of course, in the book's major theme -- testifies to what has long been a passion for Leon, and ecological themes continue to resonate in many of her subsequent books.

Her strong focus on a locality is also -- according to Erdmann -- representative of a wider trend in crime fiction: The way their background is evoked is "so detailed that many detective novels can also be considered milieu studies and social novels".



Another interesting feature of Death in a Strange Country is its evocation of life on an American military base. Though American herself, Leon is not wild about Americans: "I could never live in America," she said in 2001. "It's cheap and vulgar. Its politics disgust me. Its role in the world disgusts me. They are people obsessed with the acquisition of increasingly meaningless objects." Redmond also notes that both her novels and the interviews she gives testify to a distaste for the the American way of life.

Brunetti is a mouthpiece for some of this. He notes that his encounters with Americans have often laid bare a national sentiment of moral superiority. It's not arrogance exactly, but rather a sense of appropriation, as though everything belongs to them; as though, convinced they are guaranteeing Italy's security, they feel they have rights over it. And he is amazed that the Americans import -- to Italy, of all places -- ice cream, frozen pizza, and spaghetti sauce...

Brunetti's colleague at the base, Major Ambrogiani, is not a fan either: "It's America here," he says. "It's what we are all going to become, I'm afraid: America."

There's plenty of room for humour here, though. It's a communist union that runs the restaurant on the base, and during one of Brunetti's visits, they're on strike... And I'm sure Leon enjoyed telling us about Saint Barbara, patron saint of artillerymen... Yes, really... I checked...



So that's all good, and you can definitely see why she has been so successful. But I had a couple of reservations.

The first is that old stone that so often causes me to stumble, to baulk, to come up short in my suspension of disbelief: The fact that she is writing through the eyes of a very different person. Different gender, different nationality, different cultural background.

Now, Leon would no doubt argue that she is sufficiently steeped in Italian ways to know how to do this. As Kingston reports: "Her recreations are Italian: strolling about the city and chatting. And that, she says, has been the extent of her research, talking and listening to Italian friends for 35 years. Most of her characters' 'unexamined prejudices' are typical Italian views -- 'The government is corrupt, the police is corrupt, the Mafia runs everything; these filter over the dinner table to me or across the chink of the cappuccino. Most of my friends in Italy believe this is true, they just can't prove it.'"

Furthermore: "She has asked Italians who have read the books in German or English if she has got things right. 'They say: "It's not only right but it's very creepy that somebody who isn't Italian can know so much."'"

And that's all very credible. But my nagging reservation remains. The same is true of her depiction of Venice, although I have no reason to doubt it is accurate.

I think Erdmann puts her finger on the problem: The key to making a narrowly circumscribed place interesting to an international audience is to play to their expectations through the use of cultural stereotypes and cliches. She continues: "Brunetti’s cases take place against the backdrop of an italianita in which the Mafia, the opera, the palazzi, art and patrician history reappear in the narrower context of a venezianita in which the canals, the bridges, the carnival and even the tourists (the readers) come into play. There is method in the author’s recourse to national stereotypes, which is not confined to the italianita of the Italian protagonists but also extends to many minor characters of foreign extraction... The novels of Leon do not supply the only examples of national stereotyping [among the ones she examines], but they certainly provide the clearest. These stereotypes often help to solve the cases." Which is true in our case, to a degree. Americans, portrayed as considering themselves entitled and all-powerful, form ready partners for venal Italians. Germans, on the other hand, are too organized to permit or remain unaware of illegal dumping on their territory...

O'Sullivan points out that Leon (along with Michael Dibdin and others) has acquired a reputation as an authority on Italy. Nothing wrong with that. But there IS something wrong when you start to get patronizing endorsements such as the one she quotes as appearing on Andrea Camilleri's The Terracotta Dog (a translated work): "Camilleri writes with such vigour and wit that he deserves a place alongside Michael Dibdin and Donna Leon, with the additional advantage of conveying an insider’s sense of authenticity."



I know I'm in danger of problematizing something that is just supposed to be entertainment, but there are definitely question marks here, I think.

Maybe the last word should go to Gulddal and King, who offer a very fair analysis. Having listed some examples of crime series set in foreign locales (they include Leon's Brunetti novels), they argue: "In their approach to the foreign setting, these novels perform a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, choosing a foreign setting can be an act of cultural appropriation, and in cases where a local crime literature is only just developing, it may result in crowding out local authors from the global crime fiction marketplace. On the other hand, the foreign setting also involves an act of transcultural mediation, introducing Anglophone readers to the foreign location in a way that is often both sympathetic and nuanced. In this sense, the foreignized crime novel is a genuine, albeit not unproblematic form of world crime fiction emerging from within the Anglophone tradition."

So would I read more? Initially, I thought no. But then I read this about Leon's writing career: "A bestseller in German before she was widely known elsewhere, she credits her Swiss publisher, the family-owned Diogenes, with having 'made my career'." So maybe I'll just try another, in German, just to pay homage to Diogenes...