Last March, after an unexpected illness, Michael Dibdin died at his home in Seattle. His death came as a shock to fans everywhere of crime fiction. Dibdin had just turned 60. His Aurelio Zen mysteries are distinguished by their edgy, convincing police work, mordant dialogue and the picture they give of social unease and mayhem in Italy today. Inspector Zen, a Venice-born policeman, is portrayed as a sternly pensive slogger with health and marital problems, a sort of Mediterranean Inspector Rebus. From his début in Rat King (1989), Zen was in a bad way. He smoked too much, drank excessively and fell into lugubrious talk of his (and Italy’s) demise. Still he pushed on with his assignments, and retained a degree of disabused integrity, combined with a sardonic if occasionally malevolent wit.
Dibdin was born in Wolverhampton in 1947, the son of a Cambridge physicist and a nurse. The influence of Conan Doyle showed in his first crime fiction, published in the early 1980s while he taught English at the university of Perugia.
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