David D. Downie (born in San Francisco in 1958) is a multilingual Paris-based American nonfiction author, crime novelist and journalist who writes most often about culture, food and travel.
Biography Downie's family background is revealed in his memoir Shadows of Rome. His father, Charles E. Downie Jr., a Californian from Garden Grove, previously a journalist on the San Francisco Chronicle, served as a G.I. during the Second World War, fighting in the Italian campaign and reaching the Gothic Line. His Italian mother, Romana Anzi, an artist trained at the Fine Arts Academy in Rome and a runner for the Italian Resistance, thus became a G.I. bride. The couple lived for five years in Rome, where Charles wrote for the Rome edition of Stars and Stripes until it closed in 1945, then became a founder member of the editorial team at the Rome Daily American, unaware that it was funded by the C. I. A.: he was thus an unwitting participant in Operations Mockingbird and Gladio. Discovering some of this in 1950, he resigned, took his family to San Francisco and returned to the Chronicle. Romana renounced her Italian citizenship so as not to imperil her husband's job in the xenophobic McCarthy era.David Downie, Shadows of Rome (Seine, Tiber & Bay, 2025) "By way of introduction" and chapters 19–25. She lived as an eccentric, pantheist art teacher in San Francisco and the Bay Area.Downie, Paris to the Pyrenees (2013) p. 28 Thanks to her and to his "formidable" grandmother, who eventually migrated to California to be with her daughter but never learned English,"Buried Treasure" David, youngest of six children, can claim Italian literally as both second language and mother tongue.Sion Dayson, "First! Ever! Giveaway! David Downie’s “Paris, Paris”" at Paris (Im)perfect (7 April 2011)
Downie was "weaned on crime novels and thrillers"Janet Hulstrand, "Q&A with David Downie, author of “Paris: City of Night”" at Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road (19 November 2016) and grew up reading Victor Hugo and Dante in old illustrated editions.Kaaren Kitchell, "David Downie On His Passions for Paris" at Lauren Zuckerman's Paris Weblog (2 November 2015) His love for Rome, his mother's native city, arose from living there briefly in the mid-1960s: his mother, lonely and unhappy in San Francisco after his grandmother's death, took her children with her to Italy, where, preying successively on various relatives, they lived in Rome, on the shore of Lake Garda, at Verona and Padua until at last his father persuaded them all to return to the Bay Area.Downie, Shadows of Rome (2025) chapters 28–31.
In Berkeley in the late 1960s the reunited Downies "settled into a 1920s mock-Tudor house high upon the rolling hills, our family home for the next quarter century", where, quoting this time Downie's own understatement, "a lively time was had by all".Downie, Shadows of Rome (2025) chapter 31 His early and enduring enthusiasm for Paris springs from waiting tables at a Bay Area French restaurant, from volunteering as an usher at the San Francisco Opera where he saw Puccini's La Bohême,June Sawyers, review in The Chicago Tribune (14 July 2015) and from a first visit to the city in 1976.
A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Downie took a master's degree in Italian from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was a Kenyon Scholar and University Fellow. He worked in the early 1980s as a translator, interpreter and press officer in Milan. Fiction that he wrote at this period received "very flattering rejection letters" from The New Yorker, but he was already beginning to publish nonfiction in magazines and newspapers. After what he calls a "roller-coaster marriage" to an Italian artist, he returned to Paris in 1986, and soon afterwards married the photographer Alison Harris. Now spending part of each year in Italy and part in France, for more than thirty years he has lived by his writing.Downie is "steeped in Parisian lore, and an acclaimed writer": Donna Seaman, "The Allure of Paris" in Booklist (April 2015) Subscription required
Together with Alison Harris he walked across much of central France following sections of the Way of Saint James, the greatest medieval European pilgrimage route. Appropriately for a "skeptic born and raised by skeptics ... a survivor both of the Haight-Ashbury and Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue", this was more of an "anti-pilgrimage" from which he created a memoir, published in 2013. "After twenty years of living and working in France," he wrote, "I simply felt the need to make my own mental map of the country by walking across it step by measured step", beginning at Vézelay and passing through Bibracte and Cluny on ancient pathways.Downie, Paris to the Pyrenees (2013) pp. 4-7 According to classicist and art historian Andrew Riggsby, in Paris to the Pyrenees Downie turned a story of self-discovery into an exploration of time and place. In this image of France "layers of the past are stacked and patched and run together: Caesar and his legions confronting Vercingétorix ... Roland and Charlemagne ... Viollet-le-Duc’s theme-park-ish restorations ... the Resistance to the Nazis, and even the travels of an earlier, more gluttonous, and less reflective David Downie".Andrew Riggsby quoted in "Paris to the Pyrenees" at Global Geneva (19 April 2013) Anthony Sattin, another writer who combines travel with history, considers that in Downie's case the act of walking with the photographer Alison, the pleasures of the countryside, "the lighting out for the territory when one is a certain age", give this book its reason.Anthony Sattin, review in The Sunday Times (5 May 2013) The walk ("which he completed on foot between the titular locations", according to Gilbert Taylor's risky claim in Booklist)Gilbert Taylor in Booklist (August 2017) Subscription required was in reality anything but complete when Downie, "an amiable companion, questioning and willing, and flawed", found that "a damaged back and aching knees force[d] him to stop just outside Mâcon", a long way from the Pyrenees and much further still from Compostela.
His writing reflects an abiding interest in French and Italian culture and in the history and reality of food. For his first food book, Cooking the Roman Way, "when I had doubts about classic Roman recipes ... I asked my mother," he admitted. "She taught me the basics of cooking as soon as I grew tall enough to stir the pot of bubbling garofolato (beef stew)" for Tuesday dinner, whose leftovers would become pasta sauce for the Wednesday spaghetti feed. The uninhibited conviviality of Roman meals was what made the eating experience so pleasant, he advised the reader: this conviviality was "the hidden ingredient in all the recipes".Downie, Cooking the Roman Way (2002) pp. xxi-xxii "Perhaps Downie takes food a bit too seriously," Miranda Seymour reflected in praising A Taste of Paris in the New York Times Book Review. She quotes him as he savours a Parisian supper: "How delicious my appealingly plated but very old-fashioned roast pork loin with mustard sauce à l'ancienne. How polite and professional the service. How affordable the more than potable Château Haut-Musset Lalande-de-Pomerol."Downie, A Taste of Paris (2017) quoted by Miranda Seymour, review in New York Times Book Review (2 February 2017) Downie scarcely disputes it. Earlier, preparing for the Way of Saint James, he had admitted to "a quarter century of high living as a travel and food writer", to "the recipes I'd tested, the buttery croissants and fluffy mousses I'd savored", to calvados, cognac, and even "Inspector Maigret's Vieille Prune, a lethal eau de vie distilled from plums".
Fiction His first crime novel, La tour de l'immonde, about violence and murder in central Paris and its banlieue, was published in French in 1997 in the fiction collection Le Poulpe. Aiming to sell the English-language version he took the text to New York. An editor at Vintage Books, finding it "too French", was sufficiently intrigued to ask for something new: this in turn was rejected as "too French ... very strange, nice writing, but not for us". The new work, after further rewriting, became Downie's second novel, Paris: City of Night, a thriller involving a putative terrorist plot to destroy parts of Paris. It appeared in 2009. The story came to him, he has explained, "because I woke up one morning blind in one eye. I have posterior ischemic optic neuritis. The color drained from my right eye as the optic nerve died ... Understanding light and the functioning of the eye ... became an obsession". Hence Paris: City of Night began as a murder mystery about a historical character from the world of photography.
A third novel, The Gardener of Eden, was published by Pegasus Books in 2019. It is set in his native California, under a "new crypto-fascist government", in a small town that is now an economic desert, its salmon fishery and lumber industries were sacrificed to clearcutting and environmental plunder".John Pearce, "Review: The Gardener of Eden" at Part-Time Parisian This story of literary suspense is built on "deeply disturbing observations of contemporary American culture".Janet Hulstrand, "Book Review: The Gardener of Eden" at Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road (21 January 2019)
Downie's fascination with left/right politics is an undercurrent in his series of "Daria Vinci Investigations". In the first, Red Riviera (published 2021), Commissioner Vinci of the Italian crime investigation service DIGOS unravels the gruesome murder of a 92-year-old Italian-American former CIA operative."Description" at Colorado Mountain College Library The heroine, a karate expert and "plagued by the constant need to question received wisdom" like the author,Leslie Pietrzyk, "TBR: Red Riviera ... by David Downie" at Work-In-Progress (2021) is supported by two contrasting characters, her sidekick Osvaldo Morbido and her 92-year-old godfather Willem Bremach, but she is almost defeated by the Neo-Fascist local questor (chief of police). Vinci "prove[s] she would risk anything to solve a case, even masquerading as a corpse in a refrigerated morgue drawer, or jumping from a hovering helicopter piloted by a treacherous former lover in the middle of a lightning storm".Museo Italo-Americano Genoa and the surrounding Cinque Terre are compellingly evoked, and Downie claims to have predicted, in an episode involving seabed exploration, the location of a Roman shipwreck that would actually be discovered a year later in the Gulf of Portofino.
The second Daria Vinci novel, Roman Roulette, appeared in 2022. Daria, now at work in Rome, investigates the apparently self-inflicted death in the Catacombs, directly beneath the headquarters of the American Institute in Rome, of a freelance author hired to write the institute's history. The death had taken place at a moment when, not far above, Daria was attending a benefit concert for the institute.Vision Ireland Conveniently Bremach and Morbido are at hand again; in Rome, once again, there is a questor who wants her off the case."P&P Live! David Downie — Roman Roulette, with E.A. Aymar"(2022)