Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon

World-renowned conductor, Helmut Wellhauer, is found dead in his dressing room back stage at the La Fenice opera house in Venice between Acts II and III of La Traviata. The show goes on with a replacement conductor while Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice police force arrives to begin investigating. The cause of death is clear, cyanide in his coffee. But who put it there, and why?

I don’t usually read mysteries, but I picked this book up in the free book exchange bin at the coffee house near my church, entirely because of the title and the setting. I was in Venice two years ago and will be going again in July. Last time I was there we saw an opera at La Fenice, Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, it was wonderful and the theater is a jewel. I was pleased that Leon is very specific about the Venice settings. She names every church, bar, restaurant and campo and when the detective travels through the town, if it’s by water, she names the vaporetto stop and if he walks, she names the turns he takes: right and left.

Brunetti is a modest character. He’s a middle-aged man, married with three children. He solves the case by interviewing the folks involved and following leads. As a reader there’s no real way to “solve” the mystery, not that I tried; I was happy just to be lead along by interesting characters and a surprisingly well-written text, unusual for genre writing. Thankfully, the solution doesn’t depend on putting together scattered clues or relying on some obscure bit of knowledge. The final answer to Wellhauer’s death only comes together with information Brunetti uncovers near the end of the book. I had to laugh at that because the used copy I read had been meticulously highlighted and underlined throughout the book by whoever owned the book before me. Every line that looks like it might be an important clue gets noted, one or two on nearly every page – all of it for naught.

Wellhauer is an unquestionably excellent musician but with a questionable past. Wellhauer is 74 when he dies and the book takes place in the late 1980s (it was published in 1992), which means Wellhauer was a young man in Berlin and probable nazi-supporter before the war. He divorced his first wife early. His second wife died by suicide. Now, at his death, he’s married a third time, for only two years, to a woman more than thirty years his younger. Brunetti interviews the wife at her Venice home, and also the Belgian housekeeper that looks after the home when Wellhauer and his wife are at one of their other international homes.

The other characters are the lead soprano in the opera, Flavia Petrelli, and her secretary and rumored lesbian lover, the American Brett Lynch. The director of the opera is a gay man, Franco Santore. There’s a thread Brunetti follows that Wellhauer’s death may have been inspired by his homophobic moralizing. There’s a flamboyant gay art critic, too, Padovani, who gives Brunetti some helpful gossip in a comic scene at a party. Comic, too, are the scenes at the police station where Brunetti deals with his aggrandizing and credit-stealing superior.

One more character provides an important piece of the story. She’s Clemenza Santina, a former singer, now old and leaving in a decrepit apartment in Giudecca. Back in 1938 she had refused to go on stage in Rome in the title role of Norma because the cast was told Il Duce was in the audience. Wellhauer had been the conductor. The decision ruined her career. As a young girl Clemenza and her two sisters had been a singing act, where Wellhauer discovered her. The fate of one of Clemenza’s sisters ends up being the key that unlocks the truth for Brunetti.

Death at La Fenice is the first of 32 (!) Guido Brunetti mysteries, so far. The thirty-third is due out in July. The stories have also been adapted for German television. I’m glad I happened upon the first of the series, it would have been less satisfying to read one somewhere in the middle. I’m glad to have read it. But one’s enough.