Literary Birthday – 29 September – Donna Leon

Happy Birthday, Donna Leon, born 29 September 1942.

Five Quotes

1. I admire Dickens beyond words. He is one of the greatest plotters of all times. Didn’t have a clue about women, but he sure could plot.
2. So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can’t read that.
3. I have no memory for what happens in what books. I don’t know when I might remember a scene, but beats me what book it’s in because there are 14 of them now.
4. Italians know about human nature – they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it; to work around it.
5. The character I created, ‘Commissario Brunetti,’ who appears in all my books, shares similar reading, artistic, and musical tastes with me. Subconsciously, I knew that if I was to spend however long it would take to write this book with him, this man would have to be someone I’d like to have dinner with.

Donna Leon is the American author. Her series of crime novels set in Venice feature Commissario Guido Brunetti. Leon has lived in Venice for over 25 years. She won the CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction for Friends in High Places.

Source for image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Donna_Leon.jpg

Michiel Hendryckx, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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