Saturday,
April 14,
Remembering Michael Dibdin;
Creator of Aurelio Zen, Italian Detective Series
But
just as each Zen novel is set in a different part of
And
although Dibdin's novels are darker than those of
other Italophile crime writers such as Donna Leon and
Magdalen Nabb, he matches
their ability to convey, in spite of the institutional craziness, the beauty of
Like
Robert Browning, Dibdin
describes how the Italians go about the business of death in order to
illuminate their way of life.
Some
of Dibdin's Aurelio Zen Titles are: Cosi Fan Tutti; Dead Lagoon
(4); A Long Finish (6); Medusa (9); Back to Bologna
(10); End Games (11); Vendetta ; Cabal ; Blood Rain;
Dibdin's alternated between Zen and other Crime Novels.
I'm not sure of , And Then you Die; The Dying of
the Light; The Tryst;
RatKing; A Rich Full Death
Non
A
Vision of
Telegraph.co.uk -
April
14, 2007
The untimely death of Michael Dibdin was a terrible blow to admirers of superior crime writing.
Jasper Rees remembers him
'There is a sense I very much get about this place. Italians know what life is for and they know it won't last very long. And so they take advantage. I like that. Particularly at my age."
I last met Michael Dibdin on a freezing February morning in
Having concluded our business,
we shouldered our way into the grid of narrow alleys just off the Piazza
Maggiore, the cold air aromatic with the whiff of Grana
Padano and prosciutto crudo. Dibdin needed to buy some
supplies to take back to the apartment he was staying in. Shopping for food in
streets which are, in effect, the gastronomic centre of
At the time it struck me as
uncharacteristic of a man of unstinting appetite who, every time I met him,
seemed that little bit heftier. On reflection, his box of eggs was entirely in
tune with the spirit of his series of Aurelio Zen crime novels. Migrating in
each of them to a different region, he took care to skirt around the sensual
side of Italian life beloved of Tuscanophile
holidaymakers. Zen's longest - and, in fact, only - stop in
"What are you going to say
about
The
news of Dibdin's own death at the age of 60 is a
terrible blow to fans of superior crime fiction. The spectral Zen, a shadowy
detective answerable directly to the conniving Interior Ministry in
Fortified by Venetian cunning and unfazed by ethical compromise, he wove a guileful path through a maze of corruption and institutionalised patronage, brusquely cutting corners, blithely breaking rules and opening cans of worms, but in the end accepting that it was never quite possible to penetrate to the heart of modern Italy.
Dibdin had been in
"When I finished it," he told me, "I went to Faber and said quite unashamedly - and I'm not this sort of person - 'I think this is the best thing I've ever done.' I meant that simply as a matter of fact. Like saying, 'I'm taller than that guy.' I just felt it very strongly."
He was certainly bigger than a lot of guys. The first thing that struck you about Dibdin was his physical presence. He had the barrel-shaped body of a boxer, a jaw jutting out at right angles, shoulders amply filling his suit and a halo of baby-boy ringlets.
I first met him in 1995 when
Faber were about to publish Dark Spectre, an
underrated thriller about a murderous cult which take as their text the
writings of William Blake. For a while he had a routine of alternating between
Zen books and non-Zens, of which this was the best.
It was his first book set in
Far more of his life was spent
outside
"I don't think I know that
much about Zen, really," he told me in 2003. He never quite worked out who
Zen's fans were. In A Long Finish, the sixth Zen, he indulged them with
descriptions of truffle-hunting mores, of viticultural
custom and autumnal fog blanketing hill-crest villages in
In the follow up, as a sort of corrective, he decided that it was time for Zen to take on the Sicilian mafia. If you didn't read the final paragraph of Blood Rain carefully enough, he appeared to come to an explosive end. "I discovered that almost everyone thought he was dead," Dibdin later told me. "On some level it slightly got up my nose. I was getting contact from people who were saying, 'How dare you?' I thought, wait a minute, I invented this character."
The publication later this year of the 11th Zen novel, End Games, will inadvertently answer a question that Dibdin always fretted about: what is the appropriate length for a crime series?
"The received wisdom within the community," he once told me, "is that you can't go on forever, but precise estimations of what 'forever' means vary enormously. I don't know the answer."
"Some say seven, some 10," he said another time. "I think if it's a serious series, if you're really trying to write books rather than churning out a formula, then 10 is there or thereabouts."
Zen and the art of detective fiction
Like all great detectives, Aurelio Zen has superb ratiocinative powers and a love of justice: the qualities that put him at odds with his colleagues in the monstrously bureaucratic Italian police force.
His job is to make sure that police procedures are correctly followed; procedures whose real purpose, as he says in Vendetta, is "to maintain or adjust the balance of power within the organisation itself". He is not supposed to solve crimes. He solves crimes. Knuckle-rapping ensues.
Unlike his hero, Dibdin was not a victim of his own success: he did not allow himself to become enslaved by the lucrative Zen, and abandoned him whenever he felt the need to experiment. He was a good pasticheur. He wrote novel-length parodies of Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, while his Oxford-set Dirty Tricks featured a real-ale-drinking opera fan called Inspector Moss; and he managed convincing American narrative voices in his excellent US-based thrillers Dark Spectre and Thanksgiving.
But Dibdin always returned to Zen. Critics often compare Zen with Maigret and they do share an unshowy sort of wisdom and incorruptibility; but Zen is more of an outsider, more pessimistic and, sometimes, more prone to making mistakes.
He really needs a Signora Zen
along the lines of the sympathetic Madame Maigret,
but when we first meet him he is divorced and lives with his batty mother. His
fitful love life picks up in the later novels, but he also becomes increasingly
depressed and unpredictable, perhaps reflecting his disgust at
A criminal in Medusa (2003) jokes that if only he were Silvio Berlusconi he could change the law to make his activities legal.
But just as each Zen novel is
set in a different part of
And although Dibdin's
novels are darker than those of other Italophile
crime writers such as Donna Leon and Magdalen Nabb, he matches their ability to convey, in spite of the
institutional craziness, the beauty of
Like Robert Browning (whom he used as a detective in A Rich Full Death), he described how the Italians go about the business of death in order to illuminate their way of life.
Jake Kerridge
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