28th June 2023
Death at La Fenice is the first of the 32 detective novels written by Donna Leon and featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. The most recent – So Shall You Reap – was published earlier this year.
The location for the novels is Venice, where the American-born Leon lived for over 30 years before moving to Switzerland, where she now resides.
The mystery facing Brunetti concerns the death through poison of the celebrated German conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer, in his dressing room during an interval of a performance of La Traviata at La Fenice Opera House. It soon becomes clear that there are several possible suspects, including the Maestro’s (much) younger wife, the lead soprano, the soprano’s lesbian lover and the Opera House Director. Nor is there a shortage of motives, both from the recent past and stretching back to the years leading up to and of the Second World War, when Wellauer was an enthusiastic Nazi sympathiser.
Brunetti’s approach is methodical and painstaking, as he conducts a series of interviews with the principal characters and with those – a music critic, a gossip columnist, the deceased’s doctors and others – on the margin of events. The most chilling of these – literally – are with an elderly and impoverished former operatic diva living on the island of Giudecca, a short boat ride across the Canale Della Giudecca; “the popular consciousness [was] of a sinister, backward place, where nasty things happened”.
The Commissario conducts the investigation at his own pace, which – apart from a couple of boat trips and a return train journey to Padova – is a walking pace to his various assignments around the city. (In the Penguin 2022 edition, we are aided on these journeys by the map at the front of the book). He receives little effective support from his two immediate subordinates or from his vain, self-serving boss, Giuseppe Patta, the station’s Vice-Questore.
It is through the eyes of the lead character that we get a real sense of Venice. “It seemed to him that all the shops that served the native population – pharmacies, shoe-makers, groceries – were slowly and inexorably disappearing, replaced by slick boutiques and souvenir shops that catered to the tourists, filled with luminescent plastic gondolas from Taiwan and paper-mache masks from Hong Kong”. As for the principal interests of its inhabitants, this was “a provincial town where gossip was the real cult and, where, had it not been at least a nominally Christian city, the reigning deity would surely have been Rumour”.
Leon extends this portrayal to relay how life is conducted, perhaps not just in Venice, but across Italy as a whole. Early on, Brunetti commands two medical attendants to take the victim’s body from the Opera House to the Civil Hospital. Their sullen response is that it is late at night and they would be breaking union rules about the length of a shift. Later Brunetti muses on how one of the wealthy characters had obtained permission from the planning authorities to insert large skylights in the roof of an (unlawful) additional floor of an apartment complex: “the bribes would be ruinous”.
The author’s wry humour comes across nicely at regular intervals. There is a revealing review of how each of the daily newspapers – from political broadsheet to tabloid scandal-sheet – report the murder. (This was before the plethora of online news sources, of course). Later, we learn that the aristocratic heritage in the family tree of Brunetti’s wife, Paola, incorporates two doges, a cardinal or two, a composer of secondary importance, the former Italian ambassador to the court of King Zog of Albania, a pope, Garibaldi’s banker and “a famous castrato (from whom, sadly, no issue)”.
Although I solved the case – in the sense of “who” – some time before the final chapters, I did not anticipate the twists associated with the “why” or the post-solution next steps that were to follow. Commissario Guido Brunetti was on top of all these aspects, however, and firmly on the path that has – to date – taken him through 30-plus years of solving Venetian mysteries.
JR Alexander 