User:K. Kellogg-Smith/Guido Brunetti series

Commissario Guido Brunetti series
The Commissario Guido Brunetti series of detective mysteries (also called crime novels), nineteen in all, were written between 1991 and 2010 by award-winning expatriate American author Donna Leon. The series revolves around the criminal investigations and family life of a mid-level investigating officer (commissario) in the Venice branch of the Questura, Italy's state police.

Each novel in the series -- all of which are set in Venice -- works within the framework of a specific social theme, such as bribery and corruption (Friends in High Places), black market babies (Suffer the Little Children), industrial pollution (Through a Glass Darkly), exploitation of the aging (Quietly in Their Sleep), and racial prejudice (Blood From a Stone), among others.

The author uses her characters to engage in extensive social commentary, mostly centering around each novel's central theme, but also manages to have her characters engage in commentary on other social issues as well. In interviews the author has stated that she considers her character Paola Brunetti (the commissario's wife) as her alter ego whom she uses to express many of her own likes, dislikes, and social points of view. Additionally, the author also says that uses her novels' primary character, the commissario, as another character through which she expresses many of those same likes, dislikes, and social points of view, but as seen through, in her estimation, male instead of female eyes.

Narrative style
The author's style is literary; she uses a third person narrative style, acting as an observer to relay to the reader personalities of her characters, the environment they live and work in, their actions, their personal thoughts, and their behaviors in the plots and sub-plots she has created for them to react to, endure, and in most cases overcome the various problems that arise in police work and social situations. The third person narrative style gives the author the opportunity to engage in social commentary, projecting her own social points of view into the interpersonal workplace and at-home dialogues and Brunetti's thoughts pro and con on the subjects the author puts into his mind.

Books in the series
The author's first novel in the series, Death at La Fenice (1991 in Japan, 1992 elsewhere) was, by her accounts, written for the amusement of herself and her opera-loving friends who disliked a particular aging Austrian opera conductor who had offended them by his poorly conducted performance of an opera they attended at Venice's Teatro La Fenice concert hall. The author eventually submitted her manuscript as her entry in the "Suspense Fiction" category of the Suntory (Japan) corporation's annual arts and sciences literary competition, placing in the top three places in that category that year. All the books in the series carry the identifying phrase "A Commissario Guido Brunneti Mystery" prominently displayed on their dust covers, or on their front covers in the case of paperback editions. The books have been published at the rate of approximately one book per year beginning in 1991, the first one as a Japanese translation in Japan, and then from 1992 and on until the present time, have been published primarily in the United States and the United Kingdom. The series has also been highly popular in Germany, with not only the translated print versions of the novels, but also television adaptions and even a board game. The series has also been popular in Spain and other European countries. So far the books in the series have been translated and published, with one significant exception, in twenty-three languages.

Series content
The author follows the literary maxim of "write what you know about" to the letter. A resident of Venice since about 1981 on and until about her fifteenth novel in the series, the author writes about the city she knows best -- Venice, Italy. Her novels are therefore part travelogue, presented as a Venetian-lover's view of Venice, a travelogue with a detective story wrapper that explores Venice and the Veneto [note 8], the sights, sounds, people, canals, the bridges, the churches, boat travel up and down the canals and out on the lagoon of Venice by launch and vaporetti (bus boats), as well as the vagaries, variations, the impact on residents of the flood of tourists crowding the city as well as the impact on residents of seasonal weather, such as the aqua alta, the seasonal flooding of Venices plazas (campos) and calli (streets).

The author even has something to say about the smells of Venice: the smell of dog urine and feces in small, enclosed calli (streets), the stink of fetid, tidal water in dead-end, dead water canali (canals), the damp and musty smell of enclosed spaces in buildings where the ground floors are at water level, and more pleasantly, the fragrance of flowers and flower vendors offerings.

While Brunetti walks from one place to another through back streets and byways, the author gives to her readers descriptions of the Venice that the average tourist either never bothers to look at, or never has the time to stop, look, and see.

Plots in the series
Set in Venice, Italy, the plots of the series center on the investigative duties and responsibilities of a middle-aged, upper mid-level investigating officer -- a commissario -- in the Venice branch of the Questura, the state police of Italy. As one of several commissario's in the Venice branch, the series main character, Commissario Brunetti, reports to the branch's second in command, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, one of the ten primary characters that are introduced early in the series, and remain throughout the rest of the nineteen novels in the series.

Each of the series' ten primary characters play an integral part in the development of the author's plots and sub-plots. Brunetti, of course, plays a significant role in all of each novel's plots. In each novel the author uses five of the ten primary characters in the Questura's to create office interactions between Vice-Questore Patta, Lieutenant Scarpa (Patta's Sicilian friend, obsequious confidant, and Brunetti's nemisis), Commissario Brunetti, Signorina Elletra Zorzi (Patta's secretary and Brunetti helpmate), Sergeant Lorenzo Vianello (Brunetti's first choice of officers in the Questura's detective pool when he needs a back-up and assistant on the cases he has been assigned), and Dottore Ettore Rizzardi (the civil hospital pathologist Brunetti prefers to be called as medical examiner on his cases). For the social interactions the author uses her five remaining primary characters; Brunetti's university professor wife Paola, their two teenaged children Rafael ("Raffi") and Chiara, and Paola's wealthy parents, Conte Orazio and Contessa Donatella Falier.

Central themes
Each of the author's novels in her Brunetti series has an underlying social issue which is the rationale behind her plots, and in almost all of her novels the discovery and investigation of one or more dead bodies reveals, in stages, what that novel's social issue is.

Social commentary
The author's Brunetti series of novels is the vehicle which the author uses to present her own view of life, her social commentary, her point of view on a wide range of contemporary social subjects such as femininism, homosexuality, transsexuality, child prostitution, sex tours to Asia for child sex, the effects of aging, and drug counterfeiting and drug dealing.

Much of the author's social commentary is also presented in thoughts Brunetti has when his mind drifts away from conversations with others or during interviews with witnesses, with his return to the present indicated by the ellipsis in dialogues to indicate that Brunetti's distraction and mind-wandering has ended.

A practice the author seems to frequently engage in is character assassination. Her first novel, Death at La Fenice was written, she openly states in interviews, was to "kill off" an internationally known and recognized opera conductor that she and an opera conductor friend of hers had grown to dislike. The practice of character assassination is common among writers and filmmakers [note 11], and the success of Death at La Fenice may have influenced the author to engage more frequently in character assassination in her novels.[note 12]

Literary influences
The author has stated in interviews that she had been greatly influenced conceptually and in writing style by the novels of Jane Austen, the 18th century English author which one online biographies state she wrote her Ph.D dissertation about. The high sentence and paragraph word counts, the extensive use of punctuation marks, and the artful characterizations the author uses in her novels is very similar to the writing style of Jane Austen [note 7]. The author has also said that late-Victorian period expatriate American author Henry James has also been a significant influence in her writing style. The author also lists contemporary English mystery writer Ruth Rendell as having an influence on her writing style.

A contemporary but well less-noted influence on the themes and content of the author's novels is her interest in the quarterly German femminist magazine EMMA, whose lists of topics of interest to the femminist community mirror many of the central themes and the focus of social commentary in the author's mystery novels.

Chronology of the series
There is no specific chronology of the novels in the series. They can be read in any order; there are no events in one novel that are recalled or referred to in any subsequent novel in the series. All but one of the recurring characters in the series are introduced in the first novel in the author's series, Death at La Fenice.


 * External chronology:

The Brunetti series novels do not have an external sequential chronology in the sense that novels in the series are related chronologically in order. There is some minor internal chronology, but the novels can easily be read in any order, as they are primarily independent of each other.


 * Internal chronology:

With the exception of the ages and behaviours of brunetti's two teenage children, the series does not have a fixed, specific internal chronology that links the books chronologically in the series. Some characters introduced in an earlier novel appear again in subsequent novels in the series, and some characters introduced in one novel appear again and again as recurring characters in the remaining novels in the series. Some characters in Brunetti's Questura receive promotions in subsequent novels after they've been introduced in the series. In general, however, it is in the first three books in the series where recurring characters are introduced and their personalities defined.

Literary Awards
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Literary reviews and comments
The series has received widespread critical acclaim internationally; they have been printed in some twenty-three languages [list in a note cited here] in both hardcover and paperback editions. The series is especially popular in Germany, where serialized television adaptions have been made of the novels [note 3 about seeing one of the adaptions on YouTube], and a board game, [give German name and English translation of the board game's name], has been made and marketed [note4 about the YouTube video (in German) about how to play the game.

Reading only the commendatory, non-critical reviews on book jackets and front pages of the novels would lead one to conclude that all book reviewers intensely like and have enjoyed the author's Brunetti series of detective mystery novels. The reviews included with the novels are, of course, selected by the publishers and are intended to increase sales of the novels. However, more critical reviews of the novels can be found on book seller's websites such as Amazon, where purchasers of the novels, especially those who aren't particularly interested in Venice and the author's Venetian travelogues and the occasional dropping of (untranslated) Italian words and phrases play little or no part in their review of the Brunetti series novels.

Publication history
The Commissario Guido Brunetti novels have been published in hardcover editions by Harper/Collins and Atlantic Monthly (Grove/Atlantic) in the United States, and Orion/Chapmans, Macmillan, and William Heinemann in the United Kingdom, and in paperback editions by Harper/Collins and Penguin Books in the United States, and by Macmillan and Random House in the United Kingdom.

Although the series has been published in audio book form, and adaptions for some of the novels have been made for German television, only the print versions of the Brunetti series are listed in this publication summary.