Writer Donna Leon: ‘I don’t want a Lamborghini. I have an orchestra’

There are a lot of things that Donna Leon does not do. Mobile phones, social media, watching TV, making contactless payments, reading modern crime fiction and eating in fancy restaurants are all off the menu.

A few years ago, living in Venice joined her list of gripes. What she refers to as her “divorce” from her home of 30 years was quite a plot twist for the best-selling writer of detective fiction, whose 33rd novel set in La Serenissima will be published next week. 

The lack of serenity caused by overtourism “was making me so grumpy”, explains the 81-year-old author, likening the city’s 30mn annual visitors to “the migration of the wildebeest”. So she traded the crowds for a quieter existence in Switzerland, where she now has a home in the mountains and a place in Zurich.

We meet far away from the Swiss city’s tourist trail in the garden of a laid-back neighbourhood Italian. When I arrive, I spot Leon sitting in dappled sunlight under the shade of a tree, her tomato-red jacket blending in with the brightly coloured tables and chairs.

The fact that Leon has authored 33 books starring her protagonist Commissario Guido Brunetti is all the more remarkable given that she was aged 49 when the first one was published.

Raised in New Jersey, she strung out her academic studies for longer than anyone thought possible, teaching literature in places as far-flung as Iran, China and Saudi Arabia while working on a PhD she never submitted. She moved to Venice in the 1980s, where the start of her 8mn-book-selling career as a murder-mystery writer happened partly by accident. Inspired by a trip to the opera to write Death at La Fenice, she then left the novel in a drawer until a friend persuaded her to enter it into a writing competition — and she won. 

Nowadays, people get all of their information from their telephones, but they don’t know who the person is behind it

Her faithful detective is the third person at our table today. Where else but Venice would you find a policeman who reads Proust, appreciates the beautiful things in life and cannot work on an empty stomach?

“I thought there was only going to be one book, so I was lucky to make him somebody that I would like who has a sense of humour, who likes to read, likes to eat,” she says as she browses the menu, calling the waiter over to quiz him in impeccable Italian.

Food plays a central role in Leon’s novels (just as it does for that other great Italian detective, Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano). Brunetti goes home at lunchtime to eat with his wife Paola so frequently that I sometimes wonder when he’s going to get on with solving the crime.

Huge demand from fans who wanted to recreate the recipes Paola makes in their Venetian apartment led to the creation of a Brunetti cookbook, A Taste of Venice. Leon co-wrote it with her oldest friend, Roberta “Biba” Pianaro, who provided the recipes, and it is studded with her own wry observations, including: “Unless a person is born within half an hour’s drive of the city of Bari, they should not attempt to make orecchiette by hand.”

Today, she orders a large Caprese salad, which the German side of the menu promises is made with “wunderbaren Tomaten aus Süditalien”. I plump for the aubergine risotto with cacioricotta. I am tempted to order a bottle of the Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi but, sitting outside in the sun on a hot day, we fear it will knock us bandy. So we each have a huge flasche of water, mine chilled and hers at room temperature.

Leon’s success as an author has made her very wealthy, though she is anything but flashy. 

She is happy to close down my first line of inquiry — nope, she did not move to Switzerland for tax reasons: “In fact, it complicates and increases my tax spending. But somebody’s gotta pay taxes.”

She is a dual US-Swiss citizen “because I think if you live in a place, you should not only pay tax, but you should pay attention to what’s happening where you’re living”. She never achieved this distinction in Italy, because “the Italian system, if it can be called that, literally is a crapshoot”.

Leon is deeply concerned by the rise of political extremism, from the growing strength of the far right in France to rising numbers of Putin sympathisers in Germany. The plot of her latest novel, A Refiner’s Fire, concerns the escalation of senseless acts of violence committed by teenage “baby gangs” in Italy. Why is the world becoming a more dangerous place?

“I wonder if it is partially caused by the fact that people don’t read any more,” she says. “Nowadays, people get all of their information from their telephones, but they don’t know who the person is behind it.”

Leon doesn’t own a mobile phone, nor does she use social media. Nevertheless, she is aware of the problem of fake news, and we discuss how algorithms can distort your view of the world, feeding you more content of the same type rather than anything that widens your gaze or challenges your opinions. “And so we have evolved into a culture where one can no longer be critical of anything.”

Her love of print newspapers and distrust and dislike of the invasiveness of modern technology is shared by Brunetti, who abhors his police-issue telefonino (many other modern crime writers also find that iPhones suck the joy out of old-fashioned literary methods of detection).

I confess to her that, some weeks, my average screen time on my phone can be more than six hours a day. “What do you do on it!” she squawks. I silently vow to put it in a drawer at night and read more books. Leon also refuses to have a television: “It’s like ice cream. I don’t want it in the house, because I’m going to eat it. If I had a TV, I might spend hours every day watching it.” She does, however, write her novels on a computer as her handwriting is illegible.

As a graduate student in the 1960s and 1970s, she read reams of crime fiction to decompress, but favours vintage authors over the cosy crime wave currently filling the shelves of modern bookstores. Her favourite crime writer is the late Ross Macdonald. Like Leon’s stories, his books do not revel in graphic descriptions of violence. The complex crimes his gumshoe Lew Archer unravels in Southern California often have links to the distant past, but here the parallels with Brunetti’s Venetian mysteries end.

She hates the cult of fine dining. ‘I don’t have patience with it. Brunetti doesn’t have patience with it. Most Italians don’t have patience with it!’

Leon’s books are not page-turning thrillers. Like many of her readers, while I came for the crime, I stayed for the characters and Italian culture. “Well, you have to kill somebody, because it has to be a serious crime,” she says with a smile. “But the real story is how could somebody do that?”

She strongly believes that discussing fiction is just as important as reading it. For 15 years, she and her friend Judith Flanders (a writer of Victorian history books) ran a group devoted to rediscovering classic novels with 40 elderly Swiss people “who didn’t have anyone to talk to about books”.

“We would assign an Edith Wharton novel, a Henry James novel, or Conrad, and then just talk about it,” she says. “They would get into heated discussions of why this worked, or why that didn’t work . . . it was heaven.”

As is often said of Italian food, the best meals start with the best ingredients. We begin with a shallow white bowl of salad leaves simply adorned with house dressing, and a board of freshly baked focaccia to mop up the juices.

Leon advocates organic food, noting how the Swiss press has been examining a potential link between the use of pesticides and Parkinson’s disease. Crimes against nature frequently seep into her fiction, and Leon says her “ecological books” are the ones she is most proud of. Her second novel saw Brunetti unravel a murderous tale of corruption linked to the dumping of toxic waste; another sees him investigate the untimely death of bees.

In a year when half the world will go to the polls, it depresses her that immigration is the hot topic people want to talk about, and not climate change.

“Immigration is because of climate!” she exclaims. “All this air pollution and the rise in heat, it’s going to kill us, kill our children and our grandchildren. Politicians are pushing net zero commitments even further forward into the future because it will cost money, but by then they really will have to tax people more. It’s such a manifestation of stupidity and greed to oppose a serious attempt to save us.”

As the waiter refills our empty glasses, Leon asks if I have noticed that restaurants in Switzerland charge for tap water. When it tastes this good, I feel they can get away with it. “People aren’t aware of how much they take for granted the fact that clean, safe, drinkable water is there for you to pour into your glass,” she says, referencing the droughts in Sicily. “There are more and more places where you turn on the tap and water doesn’t come out.”

My risotto and her Caprese salad finally arrive — the latter overflowing with tomatoes so deeply red in colour you’d think an Instagram filter had been applied. “Mangia, mangia, ti fa bene,” she says (“Eat, eat, it is good for you”). Fortunately for me, the portion is so gargantuan I get to enjoy some too.

We discover that our worship of the tomato is such that we both take pleasure in growing our own. Leon has a home in the mountains south-east of Zurich where tomato plants and blackcurrant bushes abound in the garden. She struck a deal with a local farmer last year, exchanging eight jars of her homemade jam for 10 Ikea bags of his “summer-baked organic cow shit”.

“When I drove home, I felt as if I had shot the last Burmese tiger,” she says. “This is why I want to live in the country. We get excited about stuff like this.” News had escaped her that Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, launched her own Californian jam-making enterprise on Instagram earlier this year. A wicked smile plays across Leon’s lips: “Harry had better watch out, she’s going to sell him some day.”

It feels wonderful to be enjoying Italian food out of doors, even if we are in Switzerland. Leon loves the simplicity of our meal, confessing she hates the cult of fine dining. “I don’t have patience with it,” she says. “Brunetti doesn’t have patience with it. Most Italians don’t have patience with it!” 

Another thing they’re losing patience with is suffocating levels of tourism, a recurring theme in her novels. Leon’s murder mysteries are set in a city where everyday life is in danger of dying out. Since the 1970s, the population of Venice’s historic quarter is said to have dropped from 150,000 to below 50,000 as hotels, cruise ships and Airbnbs take over the city. 

I find it very dangerous when I hear people saying, ‘Well, if we had a better class of tourist . . . ’ Why should the snobs get to decide who goes to Venice?

Leon decries recent tourist management measures as “bogus”, adding that the city administration still encourages tourism by giving licences for yet more new hotels, and — unlike Barcelona — is not clamping down on holiday lets. Nevertheless, she thinks that restricting tourism to the wealthiest is the wrong approach.

“I find it very dangerous when I hear people saying, “Well, if we had a better class of tourist, if people are coming to look at the Madonna dell’Orto and the museums, have them come, but if they’re just going to go shopping . . . No!' Why did the snobs get to decide who goes to Venice? We don’t know what these people feel,” she says, questioning how any visitor could fail to be “assaulted, whammed to your knees by the beauty of the place”.

Leon returns frequently to Venice. As our plates are cleared and our espressos arrive, she confesses to being “very Italian” in her love of cash. In Sweden on a recent book tour, she was shocked to find she couldn’t buy a coffee unless she paid by contactless. Why does this worry her?

“Look at it this way: 20 years from now, you’re not going to have the health systems you have now because the money’s going to run out, and governments are going to try to be more restrictive. And what information are they going to have? You told your insurer you didn’t drink, so why do you have these bar bills? And what if abortion becomes illegal, and there’s evidence you’ve paid for one?”

When it comes to spending money, she says her biggest extravagance is her patronage of Il Pomo d’Oro, an ensemble that specialises in performing Baroque music, which she became involved with through her late, great friend Alan Curtis, the conductor and musicologist.

“I don’t want a Lamborghini. I have an orchestra,” she says, delighting in sending herself up. “It doesn’t walk in front of me with trumpets, but that’s coming.”

Describing herself as “a camp follower”, Leon finances the recordings and will come to London for the Late Night Italian Prom in July, then Naples later this summer for the first recording with Samoan tenor Pene Pati (“He’s young, he’s big and he has a fabulous voice”).

“I might not look like one, but I am the owner of a monastery,” she reveals with a flourish. She bought and is restoring a monastery in Monte San Savino in Tuscany “because the orchestra needs a base where we can do rehearsals, small concerns and recordings”. Isolated and quiet, it is the perfect place.

She says she would very much like to finance the recording of three or four more Handel operas or oratorios, and is already planning the 34th Brunetti book. So there’s no danger of him retiring to the Swiss Alps and exchanging Paola’s jam for organic cow shit? “No, no, no.”

Her faithful detective will also die with her. There is a lucrative market for crime writers’ estates to sell the rights for posthumous “continuation novels”, such as Anthony Horowitz’s reprise of Sherlock Holmes, but Leon says she would consider this a betrayal. “It’s like hearing someone who tries to sing like Cecilia Bartoli. It’s not the same.”

Like Brunetti, I would have greedily attempted to stuff in a dessert, but the bill is presented before I ask for it. By now, we are the last diners remaining in the garden, and it’s time for the staff to have their own lunch. 

Leon thanks them for our meal in Italian, much gesticulation and laughter follow as she obtains directions to get me back to the train station, and we bid each other goodbye. For someone who makes her living out of murder, she certainly knows how to live.

Claer Barrett is the FT’s consumer editor

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