BACKSTAGE

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.