Backstage Stories of a writing life

Leon continues to treat loyal fans and recent readers alike to personal insights about her background and creative pursuits in a follow-up to her 2023 memoir, Wandering through Life. While that previous work shared appealing episodes from the author's childhood and early professional assignments, Leon's latest narrative concentrates on her career as a writer. Here, she considers multiple sources of inspiration, everything from treasured operas to much-admired fellow mystery authors. Short essays offer expressive critiques and revelatory anecdotes: Dickens captured her heart as a young reader; Ruth Rendell and Ross Macdonald provided a road map as she was crafting her signature "Guido Brunetti" detective novels. That series, which currently numbers 33 installments, owes its success in no small measure to the painstaking attention to detail Leon incorporates. No subject is too arcane, whether blood diamonds or sex work. As always, location is as much a character as Brunetti himself, and Leon brings Venice and its colorful, and sometimes annoying, citizenry to life through vibrant vignettes. Delightful, breezy, and illuminating.

Crime novelist Leon (the Guido Brunetti series) serves up a wide-ranging collection of poignant and amusing essays about her writing process and artistic influences. Some entries are wonderfully breezy: in "With a View of San Marco," Leon spars with a noisy neighbor in Venice; in "Jack and Jill," she imagines various literary analyses of the eponymous nursery rhyme ("The Marxists would no doubt point to the inevitability of historical processes that lead to the auto-destruction of crowned heads"). Elsewhere, Leon reflects on authors and episodes that have shaped her own writing. She recounts a formative trip to Iran, waxes poetic about the virtues of Ruth Rendell's murder mysteries ("Rendell understands most things better than most other writers; the one thing she understands best is evil"), and paints pointillist portraits of an eccentric diamond dealer, whose insights informed a handful of Leon's novels. The essays are succinct and narrowly focused, with little in the way of formal advice for aspiring writers, but Leon's humor and narrative economy offer their own rewards. Even readers unfamiliar with Leon's fiction will be delighted by these dispatches. (Aug.)

Ever since novelist Leon published her first Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery in 1992, her growing group of admiring readers have eagerly looked forward to her next mystery (there are now over 30) as a chance to revisit Venice, follow in Brunetti's footsteps, and relish his wit and keen mind. Fans especially enjoyed seeing Guido and his English-lit professor wife meet for dinner and deep conversation. While readers of the series have learned much about Venice, the commissario, his family, and detection, they previously knew little about the brilliantly observant and skilled Leon. These 32 essays give readers a welcome behind-the-scenes look at the prolific novelist, who loves Venice, adores books and authors, and has her favorite fictional detectives. Leon shares about doing research for her books and about her taste for classical music, primarily Baroque and opera; she even works with a Baroque orchestra in Switzerland. Two brief essays at the end of the collection are particularly moving: a discussion of addios (farewells) in operas and a touching tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. VERDICT At last, readers can join Leon on the canals of Venice as she tells them about some of her favorite things.--Marcia Welsh

Adventures on and off the page. Crime writer Leon gathers 32 short essays on reading and writing, people (students, fellow writers, her mother), and places (Venice, in particular) that coalesce into a candid memoir. Several essays reflect on her experience teaching: in New Jersey, where she taught third grade in an inner city school; in Iran, before the Iranian Revolution, where she was employed by Bell Helicopter to teach English to young helicopter pilots; in Switzerland, where her teenage students convinced her to take them to a Frank Zappa concert; and at an arts festival in Ernen, Switzerland, where she has led weeklong courses in how to write a crime novel. Many essays expand on the challenges of writing: the search for reliable sources, the importance of movement in structuring a plot, the elements involved in creating characters. For a book about blood diamonds, she sought out the help of a diamond expert in Venice; to fill out the character of a prostitute, she interviewed a sex worker, who related a terrifying encounter with a serial killer. Leon exults over opera, especially Baroque opera. "It's not enough to read the story, know the plot, know what happens in the end," she writes. "We need the rush of blood to the head; we need the heart to go boom boom boom as those bewigged and crinolined women are either thrilled or disgusted by the declaration of love from the tenor or the baritone." Writers, of course, do create thrills, and Leon expresses huge admiration for many, among them Dickens, Tolstoy, and Ruth Rendell, whose talent she envies; Ross Macdonald, masterful creator of detective Lew Archer; Patricia Highsmith, especially for her villains; Raymond Chandler, whose Philip Marlowe navigates a dark world; and Patrick O'Brian (whom, she confesses, she adores). A delightful miscellany of musings on work and pleasure. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.