Backstage: Stories of a Writing Life

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.)