And naturally, he takes his lunch seriously. The real Pellestrinesi won't appreciate all this, because not a word of Leon's best-selling series has been translated into Italian. Because I don't want to be famous where I live. Nobody in Venice knows who I am. I'm Signora Leon.
Nobody has any idea of the extent of the success.
It has all been rather accidental. He was badmouthing the German maestro von Karajan for his fascist sympathies. But the novel lay in a drawer for two years. A friend nagged, so she entered it for the 1991 Japanese Suntory crime fiction competition, and won. HarperCollins snapped it up and gave her a contract for two more.