“I’m a stranger here myself.”

Odd this should be the last thing I hear from Aurelio Zen. I’ve just read Zen’s parting shot in Dead Lagoon, the Michael Dibdin mystery novel I’ve saved unread for several months. Didbin wrote eleven novels featuring Zen, the solitary, dark-hearted Italian police inspector. The first, Ratking, was published in 1988, when Zen is almost fifty and nearly washed-up as an investigator, and the last, End Games, was published in 2007, a few months after Dibdin’s death. Born in England in 1947, Dibdin taught in Italy for several years before beginning the Zen series. He died in Seattle in March 2007, having lived there many years with his wife, Katherine Beck, also a mystery novelist.

I became intrigued with Didbin after reading his short non-Zen novel, Thanksgiving, a disturbing, creepy Sam Shepard-like American tale set in the Nevada desert. The first Zen book I read was And Then You Die (2002), which picks up the inspector’s story as he recovers from an assassination attempt. I quickly moved through the somewhat grisly Medusa (2003), about caves and fascism; Back to Bologna (2005), a sly tale of soccer, bungled murder and an off-kilter semiotics professor out to get a popular TV cook; and finally End Games (2007), published posthumously, a strange, comically cynical end-of-world tale about the attempt to make a Mel Gibson-inspired movie about the Book of Revelations.
Continue reading Zen and the art of Michael Dibdin (why I’m a serial reader) →