Award-winning, bestselling, author of 27 novels in 25 years, all set in her beloved Venice, Donna Leon has no interest in fame or fortune, as Tina Jackson discovers

STAR INTERVIEW

The fashion photos in the glossy magazine in front of bestselling American crime writer Donna Leon show a mistily fanciful vision of a dreamy Venice populated by impossibly beautiful people in outrageously expensive clothes. And Donna, the author of 27 Venice-set crime novels, is making her feelings clear in no uncertain fashion.

‘I can’t look at this,’ she protests. ‘This is what has happened to Venice. Rather than being the quiet, modest place that I first went to in the 1960s, it has become the kind of place where things like this are done to it.’

Donna’s Venice is an altogether different kind of place: a murky city where her kindly hero Commissario Guido Brunetti comes up against crime and corruption in an inventive variety of guises. If there is such a thing as a philosophical crime novel, Donna writes it, and in her latest, The Temptation of Forgiveness, Brunetti investigates a crime that forces him to consider the real purpose of justice.

‘The title The Temptation of Forgiveness came to me when I was almost finished writing the book,’ says Donna. She’s a small, spare figure, vital and eloquent, who talks quickly and intently. ‘I was struck by how forgiving the Italians are. Both of my grandmothers were Irish, one grandfather Spanish and the other German, so I’m more inclined to be a hanger and a flogger than a forgiver. But the Italians are right. The desire to forgive people is better than the desire for punishment. Wanting to punish people is an unhealthy emotion.’

But a serious crime has been committed in the book – and Brunetti is a police officer whose job is to investigate criminals. ‘Perhaps the individual desire to punish criminals is not nice but the desire for society to punish criminals is a different thing,’ muses Donna. ‘I realised that Brunetti – a policeman whose job is not to forgive – is characterised by forgiveness. His job, his duty, is to see that the people who do bad things are stopped. But it isn’t his job to see about justice, only to see to the arrest and stopping of the actions of that person. There is a great distinction between a policeman’s duty and his involvement in punishment. And it’s not his job to forgive people. But he’s always tempted by the urge to forgive.’