Sunday, November 18, 2007

"End Games" Final Case of Italian Sleuth - Aurelio Zen - by late Michael Dibdin

The ANNOTICO Report

 

The late Michael Dibdin shows prime form in, alas, the last outing for his sensitive Italian Sleuth.It is the last because last March, Dibdin died after a short illness. He was only 60, and he leaves behind a series of crime novels that rate at the very top in wit and originality.

 

In the 11 crime novels written by Dibdin, sleuthing has taken Zen all over Italy, to Sardinia (Vendetta, 1990), to the wine country south of Turin (A Long Finish, 1998), to the Italian Alps (Medusa, 2003).

But no region, not even mafia-riddled Sicily (Blood Rain, 2000), gets as critical a look as Calabria in "End Games".  

 

"End Games" The Final Case of Aurelio Zen

Toronto Star - Ontario, Canada
Jack Batten
November 18, 2007

 

End Games; by Michael Dibdin;  McClelland & Stewart,; 317 pages, $34.99

Tomatoes offend Aurelio Zen. They're bland. They don't belong in authentic Italian cuisine. To Zen's dismay, this is a message that hasn't reached the chefs of Calabria in the south of Italy, where Zen has the misfortune to find himself working a murder case.

For lunch, a local trattoria serves him the dish of the day. It's pasta soaked in the dreaded tomato sauce. The owner of the place confides to Zen that the sauce is from an ancient family recipe that takes hours to prepare. Zen inquires about the owner's background. For 30 years, the man worked construction "in a Canadian city called Tronno," then returned home to Calabria to open a trattoria specializing in the cuisine of his youth.

Zen pushes the soggy tomato mush around his plate. When he leaves, he is confirmed in the belief that Calabrians are cultural barbarians.

Aurelio Zen, a man of impeccable standards in all things, grew up in Venice, lives in Lucca, and works in Rome for Criminelpol, the elite wing of the Italian police. In the 11 crime novels written by Michael Dibdin, sleuthing has taken Zen all over Italy, to Sardinia (Vendetta, 1990), to the wine country south of Turin (A Long Finish, 1998), to the Italian Alps (Medusa, 2003).

But no region, not even mafia-riddled Sicily (Blood Rain, 2000), lacks the graces as blatantly as primitive and ignorant Calabria. Zen curses the bad luck that has sent him there as a temporary replacement for a chief of police who shot himself, not metaphorically, in the foot.

As it happens, Zen isn't the only stranger in town. The other interlopers have dropped in from America with plunder in mind. Their scheme, which incorporates several of the native low-lifes, is so intricate that it frequently skips plausibility and proceeds straight to comic lunacy.

The Americans are convinced that a sacred Jewish vessel, 2,000 years old and made of cast gold, is buried somewhere in the Calabrian hills. Their plan is to locate the vessel with hot shot technology, then make off with it, carrying out the operation under the cover of an epic film they're pretending to shoot in the region.

Things go awry from the start when someone murders the movie's advance man, an American lawyer with mysterious family ties to Calabria. The murder, as well as triggering the crime story, provides the book's second small piece of Canadian content, though it's no doubt inadvertent in this instance; the murdered guy's name - Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel will swoon with joy - is Peter Newman.

As a rule, plots count for little in the Zen books, and End Games  observes the rule. Dibdin is more interested in jokes, satire, odd characters and Zen's endless jousts with infuriating criminals from which he seldom emerges unscathed. In all of these categories, Dibdin is in prime form in End Games, making it probably the funniest of his novels.

In the satire department, he offers an aging, much venerated and foolish Italian film director. The character seems inspired by the late Bertolucci in the period when he made Little Buddha with Keanu Reeves as Prince Siddhartha. In Dibdin's hands, the director is hysterically pompous.

An entirely different satiric target is Jake, the Seattle software genius. Jake has all the money in the city not claimed by Bill Gates or Starbucks. He decides to spend a tiny speck of the billions to finance the Calabria heist. The thing about Jake is that his intelligence lurks somewhere between human and artificial. He's too dumb to be human, too messed up to be a machine.

Dibdin even takes a passing swipe at American Bible Belt fundamentalism. The coming Apocalypse and all that goes with it may be part of a massive scam, but it's effective. Millions believe in it. A few prosper from it. Look where adherence to it got George W. Bush.

Among the dolts, idiots and no-goods who parade through the book, Zen remains patient, sane and long suffering. He's not an ambitious man, but he keeps his eye on the ball. His duty is to discover who murdered Peter Newman, and though Newman may have been as larcenous as everyone else connected to the American-financed enterprise, Zen will persevere as the only man in all of Calabria, cop or otherwise, interested in solving the case.

Oddly enough, given that Zen has already appeared in 10 previous books, he becomes in End Games  a much clearer physical presence than before. It's now easier to hold a mental picture of the man. One 80ish Calabrian crone thinks Zen resembles a certain sort of priest: kind, indulgent, exhausted, depressed. The woman knows she would have fallen for him in a minute if she were only 50 years younger.

The pompous movie director spots a more specific religious reference in Zen's looks. He thinks Zen must be a dead ringer for John of Patmos. Tall, lean, haunted and angular, Zen would pass for no one less than the author of Revelations. That sounds about right for someone who lives on caffeine, nicotine, sugar and attacks of despair.

Sometimes the reader wonders whether Zen might throw up his hands and walk away from the stress of lonely crime solving in all the regions of Italy. Sad as it is to mention, fate has taken that decision out of Zen's hands. Last March, Michael Dibdin died after a short illness. He was only 60, and he leaves behind a series of crime novels that rate at the very top in wit and originality.

 

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