Our book today is Death at La Fenice from way back in 1992, the very first of Donna Leon’s wildly popular murder mysteries set in Venice and featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti, her steadfast and nondescript working-stiff sleuth. Now, in 2015, Leon has been writing Venice-based novels for a quarter of a century; they’ve sold millions of copies, spawned half a dozen imitators, and given rise to their own mini cottage industry in Venice itself, where the locals, bless their black, watery hearts, have long since realized that while the hordes of fat American tourists who clump down off their cruise ships every spring and summer might never have heard of Veronese, a great many of them have read Donna Leon (including on the voyage over, since she’s featured in the onboard library of virtually every cruise ship in Christendom).

Even in this first novel, it’s fairly easy to see the appeal. From the start, the city and people of Venice are portrayed with a warmth and immediacy that had been missing from most Venetian fiction, let alone most Venetian crime fiction, in the decades running up to Leon’s debut. She hit upon the great idea of making Venice both the fantasy land usually portrayed in fiction and a very real place, almost a run-of-the-mill crime scene, although with certain key differences, as Brunetti reflects at one point:

Brunetti often mused that the crime rate in Venice was low – one of the lowest in Europe and certainly the lowest in Italy – because the criminals, and they were almost always thieves, simply didn’t know how to get away. Only a resident could navigate the spiderweb of narrow calles, could know in advance that this one was a dead end or that one ended in a canal. And the Venetians, the native population, tended to be law-abiding, if only because their tradition and history had given them an excessive respect for the rights of private property and the imperative need to see to its safekeeping. So there was very little crime, and when there was an act of violence or, much more rarely, a murder, the criminal was quickly and easily found: the husband, the neighbor, the business partner. Usually all they had to do was round up the usual suspects.

In Death at La Fenice, world-renowned conductor Helmut Wellauer is found dead backstage,

obviously the victim of cyanide-laced coffee. And when Brunetti reaches the crime scene, we get another important element in the success of this series: the canny vagueness with which its sleuth is conceived. Brunetti is tough but not very tough, shrewd but not very shrewd, and, in this case, cultured by not very cultured – perfect, in other words, for giving an intelligent but not intrusive viewpoint through which readers can watch the action unfold:

The dead man was as familiar to Brunetti as he was to most people in the Western world, if not because they had actually seen him on the podium, then because they had, for more than four decades, seen his face, with its chiseled Germanic jaw, its too-long hair that had remained raven black well into his sixties, on the covers of magazines and the front pages of newspapers. Brunetti had seen him conduct twice, years before, and he had, during the performance, found himself watching the conductor, not the orchestra. As if in the grip of a demon, or a deity, Wellauer’s body had swept back and forth above the podium, left hand clutched half open, as if he wanted to rip the sound from the violins. In his right hand, the baton was a weapon, flashing now here, now there, a thunderbolt that summoned up waves of sound. But now, in death, all signs of the deity had fled, and there remained only the leering demon’s mask.

As even these two examples make clear, Leon still had a thing or two to learn about smooth-reading prose back in the early 1990s. And the encouraging thing is that she did learn; with only two bumps that I can recall, the Brunetti mysteries got noticeably better as they appeared, giving loyal readers – and frequent cruise ship passengers – greater pleasure with every outing. The only losers? The poor inhabitants of Donna Leon’s fictional Venice! The moment Brunetti started solving crimes, the “Jessica Fletcher Syndrome” firmly took root: suddenly, bizarre and violent murders started happening all the time.