Michael Dibdin; Independent obit (crime novelist)
Hyfler/Rosner
Creator of Aurelio Zen
The Independent
05 April 2007
Jack Adrian
Michael Dibdin, crime novelist: born Wolverhampton,
Staffordshire 21 March 1947; married 1971 Benita Mitbrodt
(one daughter; marriage dissolved 1979), 1986 Sybil
Sheringham (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1995), 1997
Kathrine Beck; died Seattle, Washington 30 March 2007.
Though brought up in Northern Ireland, the novelist Michael
Dibdin was born in Wolverhampton, in the heart of the
industrialised "Black Country", generally reckoned to be the
stroppiest of English regions. He did not disgrace his
birthplace. A maverick with a low boredom threshold, he was
never averse to taking risks with his books, often to the
disquiet of his agent and publishers (at least two of his
novels flopped badly in the United States).
Dibdin wrote clever, and unusual, detective stories, as
idiosyncratic in their own way as anything by Peter
Dickinson, say, or Sarah Caudwell. His series sleuth was
Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen, of the Italian detective
force, who started out, in the novel Ratking (1988), as a
cypher - "a graceless nothing" in Dibdin's graphic phrase -
but who gradually took on flesh and character in subsequent
books.
In fact Zen was only created to last for a single book but
Ratking, in which Dibdin explored corruption at high levels
in Italian society, was not only a popular but also a
critical success, gaining the British Crime Writers'
Association's prestigious "Gold Dagger" for best mystery in
1988. A sequel was clearly indicated.
Luckily Dibdin had a good few thousand words already
written, excised from Ratking. "My agent . . . wanted 50
pages trimmed [from the manuscript]," he revealed some years
later:
She said, "You don't need to put in every insight you've
ever had about Italy. You can always write another book."
This turned into Aurelio Zen's second outing, Vendetta
(1990), in which Dibdin dreamed up an ingenious (and
impudent) variation on the "locked room" formula (wealthy
businessman is murdered in the remote Sardinian hilltop
stronghold he built for himself, the whole event captured on
videotape, although the murderer subsequently vanished).
Temperamentally unsuited to cranking out Zen novel after Zen
novel, Dibdin, throughout most of his career, rang the
fictional changes at regular intervals, turning out
excellently oddball mysteries every so often. The Tryst
(1989) was a chilling psychological thriller with weird
undertones. Dirty Tricks (1991 - initially entitled
Fatalities) centred on Oxford, although a thuggish and nasty
Oxford, by no means the city of dreaming spires of Colin
Dexter's Inspector Morse. In The Dying of the Light (1993)
he turned the classic country house whodunit so viciously on
its head that it actually alienated some of his readers.
Michael Dibdin was born in 1947 and led a somewhat
peripatetic childhood thanks to his father, a physicist and
academic, who moved around a lot. He was schooled for a
short while in Scotland (where he later remembered an
impressive use of the strap), but mainly in Lisburn, County
Antrim, before attending Sussex University, where he gained
a BA in English Literature in 1968, and then the University
of Alberta for an MA, in 1969.
Staying in Canada, he took a variety of jobs, becoming, at
one stage, the Acme Painting and Decorating Company. In the
mid-1970s he returned to Britain with a wife and child, who
then returned to Canada while he travelled to Italy, where
he taught English, latterly at the University of Perugia
(1982-84).
While in London, and needing money to support his family,
Dibdin added to what was at the time (the 1970s) something
of a cottage industry by writing a Sherlock Holmes pastiche,
The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978), in which Holmes took
on Jack the Ripper (an idea which had already occurred to
the scriptwriting brothers Donald and Derek Ford for their
1965 film A Study of Terror). The book elicited generally
excellent reviews, although in later years Dibdin invariably
downplayed it - "It sold about 20 copies."
After half a decade in Italy he decided to try again, this
time with the rather more original notion of having the poet
Robert Browning stalk a murderer in 19th-century Italy, in A
Rich Full Death (1986). Again it received good notices in
his home country although no sales in the US, where his
American publisher turned it down flat.
The subsequent success of Ratking changed his luck and gave
him the confidence to carry on writing, now full-time.
Gradually his Aurelio Zen novels have built up into a
fascinating portrait of modern Italy, in all its (as Dibdin
saw it) corrupt glory, Zen himself invariably having to
slash his way through the nightmarish jungle of Italian
bureaucracy to battle with the "gang of thugs, crooks,
murderers and villains" at the very top of the trees.
In 1993 Dibdin relocated to America's Pacific North-West, to
Seattle, to be with his future third wife, the writer
Kathrine Beck. He had also grown disenchanted with Britain
and was intent upon writing novels with a purely American
background, in the American idiom.
Dark Spectre (1995), an intense portrait of savage, random
violence in his new home, Seattle, was the first fruit of
this decision. But he returned to the Zen series, after the
novel Medusa (2003), becoming, as he admitted, "rather more
interested in him than I've been for a long time".
Dibdin's last book, another Aurelio Zen novel, prophetically
called End Games, will be published in July. As well as the
CWA "Gold Dagger", he was awarded the Grand Prix de
Littérature Policičre in France in 1994.
Jack Adrian
Michael Dibdin was a brilliant, fearless writer who took
readers to the dark corners of Italian crime, writes Tobias
Jones. He could pastiche with the best of them, imitating
Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle, but was also a pioneer.
He almost single-handedly invented a genre which is now
commonplace: the stylish, literary whodunit. In his own
memorable sleuth, the weary Venetian Aurelio Zen, he took
crime writing to a new level: taut plots were interspersed
with cerebral, and relevant, asides about the history of the
peninsula or the mentality of the Mediterranean.
His novels would be the only exhibits needed to prove that
fiction contains as much truth as fact. His sentences are
often so incisive that they tell you more about Italy than
many chapters of a guidebook.
Michael, it's well known, didn't suffer fools, and he could
cut his characters down to size with a few choice words. But
every time I met him he was generous, ready to offer advice
and share jokes as if both of you were undercover
subversives in an absurd world.