Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Dark Spectre by Michael Dibdin Dark Spectre. Edition: First Edition; First Printing. About this title. A series of apparently random and motiveless murders occurs in towns and cities all over America. There is nothing to connect them with an obscure religious sect operating from a Pacific island, and dedicated to the scriptural study of William Blake's poetry and the initiation of a chosen few. About the Author: Michael Dibdin was born in 1947, and attended schools in Scotland and Ireland and universities in England and Canada. He is the author of the internationally bestselling Inspector Zen Mystery series. The first novel in the series, Ratking, won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger. Other titles in the series include Medusa, Back to Bologna and End Games. He died in 2007. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title. An online business specializing primarily in Crime Fiction and Modern First Editions. We're members of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, and the Rocky Mountain Antiquarian Booksellers Association. We also exhibit at book fairs, and you can view our entire inventory directly on our website: www.bungalowbooks.com. All books are sold subject to approval and may be returned for any reason within 30 days. Colorado residents please add 7.4% sales tax. We accept Visa, MasterCard, Amer. Our standard shipping method is Media Mail and Priority Mail is available upon request. Michael Dibdin. The novelist Michael Dibdin, who has died aged 60 after a short illness, created the Venice-born detective Aurelio Zen, whose tasks took him to vigorously differentiated parts of Italy that rarely afforded him any peace of mind. Zen's peripatetic life and tangled emotional encounters owed much to Dibdin's own spirit. As with detection, the writer may have always had a goal in view, writing, but things happened along the way. Born in postwar Wolverhampton, he was the son of a physicist-cum-folklore expert, whose countrywide work was supported by a wife able to find nursing posts at each port of call. By the age of seven, Dibdin had lost track of all these, and insisted that their halt in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, be permanent and his father exchanged folklore for the rigour of a physics lectureship. An Irish way with storytelling was to be a distinct influence upon Dibdin at the Quaker Friends' school in Lisburn, where an English teacher, the poet James Simmons, enthused his pupils with the spirit of the times, with modern jazz as much a part of their talk as James Joyce. And then there was Eileen Coleman, mother of one of his schoolfriends, one-time lover of the model for a character in Ulysses and equally encouraging. Dibdin read voraciously - including John Buchan (and his archetypal The Thirty-Nine Steps), Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett - and began to write himself. By the early 1960s he had taken up Len Deighton's new thrillers. In 1967 he graduated with an English degree from Sussex University and then studied at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and qualified as a teacher. But, holed up in Alberta, a decorating business was as ill-fated as his early attempts at novels. Having married Benita Mitbrodt, he returned to London in the early 1970s and settled in Chiswick. There his fiction was transformed by the arrival of a friend with an enthusiasm for Jack the Ripper, a subject Dibdin mugged up so he could guide him to grisly spots. At the same time, his wife was reading Sherlock Holmes; his thought to bring them together was so strong that plotlines woke him in the night. A bookseller thought it publishable, and it appeared as The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978). Although adroit, the pastiche was a false start. Uncomfortable with contemporary England and divorced in 1979, he moved to Italy after language work with Vietnamese boat people revived the teaching impulse. While working in Perugia, he met his second wife, Sybil Sheringham, and wrote another novel, A Rich Full Death (1986), set in Victorian Florence, complete with the Brownings. Italy had, however, given him an angle upon the world which, on their return to Oxford, produced Ratking (1988) - and the appearance of Zen, who is among those ignominiously robbed by gun-toting robbers on a train, which later prompts a passenger to sneer: "I never in my worst moments expected to witness such a blatant example of craven dereliction of duty as I have seen today!" The tone of Zen's existence is set by a visit soon after to his mother: "The heavy front door closed behind him with a bang, shutting him in, shutting out the world. As he moved the switch the single bulb which lit the entrance hall ended its long, wan existence in an extravagant flash, leaving him in the dark, just back from school." That is the true Dibdin tone, with Zen - a man never free of his past - dispatched to a kidnapping case in Perugia. As in Dibdin's admired Chandler, the plots defy ready summary, and exist as much as anything else for mordant dialogue and world-weary observation; all of this is balanced by such devices as documents disguised in bow-tied cake wrappings. Almost by accident, Dibdin had a series detective whom he did not wish to dwindle into a stock figure - and he was grateful that publishers let him follow his own inclinations. Not only did he have Zen deployed in a different part of Italy with each novel, but these invariably alternated with such English-set novels as The Tryst (1989) and Dirty Tricks (1991), while The Dying of the Light (1993) is an unexpected take upon an old-fashioned country-house murder. As recently as 2000, with the splendid, well-nigh existential Thanksgiving, Dibdin was turning a twist on his own life. This features an English journalist who, after his wife's sudden death, visits, gun in pocket, her first husband who has holed up in the Nevada desert with some curious habits and hobbies. Not that Dibdin did any such thing; such speculation grew, fantastically, from his third marriage, to crime writer Kathrine Beck whom he met at a 1993 conference in Spain. On their marriage in 1995, he bought a house next to hers in Seattle, where writing continued as regularly as ever. Naturally enough, America also featured to murderous account in Dark Spectre (1995), while Zen continued to be so haunted by those for whom life is cheap that he appeared to have come full, final circle in Blood Rain (1999). This lands him in the toughest patch of all, Sicily, where this time a train conceals a decomposing body. Many pages later, "the bridge exploded. It had been an impressive blast, even though they'd had very little time. The quantity of explosives used was only a fraction of the amount which the Mafia had used to kill the judges Paolo Falcon and Giovanni Borsellino, but this too would be perceived as a message. After all, Zen was just a policeman". One, evidently, of bankable fortitude. With a beachside recovery from that ordeal, he resurfaced in And Then You Die (2002), when another, prompt attempt on his life is averted because he had switched loungers. Similarly, his changing seats on an America-bound plane lumbers another passenger with death, and the consequent diversion brings Zen a taste of Iceland. Subsequent excursions include End Games: out this July, it looks set to have Zen follow his creator - a considerably more jovial man - to the grave. He is survived by his wife and a daughter from each of his previous two marriages. Michael Dibdin. His first novel, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story , was published in 1978. Dibdin then spent four years in Italy teaching at the University of Perugia. Italy provided the social and political backdrop for his series of crime novels featuring Venetian policeman Aurelio Zen, the first of which, Ratking , was published in 1988. Other books in this series include Cabal (1992), Dead Lagoon (1994), Cosi Fan Tutte (1996), A Long Finish (1998) and Blood Rain (1999), in which Zen faces death at the hands of the Sicilian Mafia. And Then You Die (2002), the eighth book in the series, finds a contemplative Zen recuperating on the Tuscan coast waiting to travel to America to testify in an anti-Mafia trial. Medusa (2003), explores the murky history of post-war Italy. The last in the series, End Games, was published posthumously in 2007. Dibdin's other novels include Dirty Tricks (1991), a story of greed and betrayal set in Thatcherite Britain; The Dying of the Light (1993), a parody of the traditional 'whodunit' set in a country hotel; Dark Spectre (1995), set in an American town gripped by a series of seemingly random murders; and Thanksgiving (2000), the story of a journalist's obsession with his recently dead American wife. Having lived for a number of years in Oxford, England, Michael Dibdin moved to Seattle with his wife. He was a regular reviewer for various newspapers and journals including the Independent on Sunday. He was awarded a Crime Writers' Association Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction in 1988 and the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1994. He edited The Picador Book of Crime Writing in 1993 and the Vintage Book of Classic Crime in 1997. Michael Dibdin died in April 2007. Critical perspective. In his article on Crime Writing in the Good Fiction Guide (2001), Michael Dibdin suggests that the genre can be thought of as 'a mixture consisting, in varying proportions, of … the Sensational, the Psychological, and the Cerebral'.