Sword headier than the pen for crime diva

It's one week after the latest Commissario Brunetti novel landed in bookstores across Britain and crime novelist Donna Leon seems a bit more excited than usual. The short and tidy 62-year-old American with steel-grey hair and lively eyes rides what appears to be a triple-shot espresso buzz into the lobby of Durrant's Hotel in London and keeps it galloping for more than an hour. Martin Scorsese needs a bit of pep in his step by comparison.

"The situation is odd," Leon says, pausing briefly in her whirlwind conversation, "because in interviews I talk a lot. But in Italy I don't. I never know when I am going to find something potentially glorious for me."

It's not books that has her feeling talkative today, or even crime writing in general — which she has been following for many years — but a passion nearer and dearer to her heart: opera.

"I write a lot of liner notes for CDs," says Leon, on the edge of her seat again. "But on this one I am getting an attribution in the cast. At the bottom, it says, Sword: Donna Leon."

Apparently, the opera company she set up with fellow American exile Alan Curtis was recording an opera — Handel's La Maga Abbandonata — in which a sword had to be dropped into a prison and fall to the earth. "Hey Donna," she recalls the sound technician saying, "you wanna drop the sword?"

She is published in 19 languages and has won crime writing's highest awards, but nothing could have made Donna Leon as happy.

This little sword cameo was probably the closest Leon has come to doing in real life what she has been up to in fiction. Over the past 13 years, the New Jersey-born opera buff and crime novelist has dispatched lives often and democratically. Fishermen, a transvestite, American soldiers and even a flamboyant Austrian composer have all died in her wake.

The job of sorting out who did what and to whom always falls to Leon's retiringly suave hero, Commissario Brunetti. A Venetian policeman and father of two, Brunetti has investigated international corruption, sex trafficking, even the Catholic Church. At the same time, he always manages to squeeze in two sumptuous sitdown meals a day with his wry and political wife, Paola.

Blood from a Stone is Leon's 14th book in the series and though it may not disturb Brunetti's eating patterns, it does draw our hero into some of the murkiest waters yet. At the beginning of the novel, just before Christmas, a Senegalese man selling knock-off handbags on a street in Venice is shot and killed in broad daylight.

In spite of the witnesses, Brunetti has trouble finding a killer or even a motive, and is soon warned off the case by someone high up in the police force. Is this because the man killed was an illegal alien? Or is there something larger at stake?

Leon, who has lived in Venice for more than two decades, stumbled on the story recently and felt, like Brunetti, slightly embarrassed at how long it had been before she paid attention to it.

"I had my St Paul moment," she says. "I was walking across the Campo Stefano going to someone's house for dinner three years ago and I stopped in my tracks because there were about 20 of these guys on either side of the street. And I just said to myself, these guys are here but they are invisible. I knew I had to write a book."

As she has done with the past 13 books, Leon didn't exactly research Blood from a Stone, but then again she didn't make it up either. Rather, her novels seem to come together through a confluence of conversation and listening — as if Leon is simply recording what the city is thinking.

To give an example of how this happens, Leon tells me about a neighbour who responded to Leon's comment that her next book would be about trafficking in babies.

"She says to me, 'Oh, yeah, like last month. I just happen to notice a pregnant girl in that apartment that gets rented by the week.' Oh, really? What follows from here sounds suspiciously like a woman having a baby and not wanting anyone to notice — and then leaving town."

Leon pauses at the story's conclusion and rewinds through the facts, much as Brunetti would. "So this woman obviously was brought here, had her baby — not in the hospital, not registered — and then the baby somehow got filtered into the baby market." She shakes her head. "So that's my next book."

By combining such glimpses into Venice's underbelly with scenes of its elegantly unhurried domestic life, the Brunetti series has become a worldwide bestseller.

However, like her unflappable hero, Leon won't get too ruffled by it all. "I'm a carpenter, not a violin maker," she has said. She refuses to allow her books to be translated into Italian, and few of her friends in Venice read them.

More than anybody, Leon knows her life could have gone in another direction and seems eager not to take her newfangled celebrity too seriously. "I wrote my first book as a joke to see if I could," she says. "I've become successful, but never because I wanted to be — it just fell on my head."

This might sound a little disingenuous if a quick tour of Leon's past didn't reveal so many dead-ends and one-year jobs. She bounced around Iran, China, Switzerland for years and had a stint as a English teacher in Saudi Arabia. She eventually wound up in Venice in the early 1980s. It was where friends lived, where she knew the language, "a place I could love people again and people could love me", Leon says now.

For a while, she taught on the American military base there for six hours a week. Then one night she was backstage at the opera with a friend, expressing a wicked glee at the recent death of a conductor. They thought it would be fun to write him into a crime novel and kill him again. Leon did, and the rest, as they say, is history.

* John Freeman is a writer in New York.
* Blood From a Stone is out now, $36.95