Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Dark Spectre by 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, , won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger. Other titles in the series include , and . 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 , 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 (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 (1992), (1994), Cosi Fan Tutte (1996), (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'. He singles out Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Conan Doyle, as originators of the atmospheric detective story, and Agatha Christie for the traditional 'whodunit, where the struggle between detective and criminal gives way to a clue-dropping contest between author and reader. Dibdin is not only a fine reviewer of current crime fiction, but also a skilled pasticheur of its classic forms: though an expatriate, he is himself undoubtedly Britain's most stylishly 'literary' crime writer. He has developed the genre to include an unusually rich mixture of psychological, cultural, and social-political sidelights, especially within his ongoing series of novels featuring the Italian police Inspector Aurelio Zen. Another aspect of Dibdin's quality is a conspicuous literary allusiveness, and the ingenious deployment of English poets within his own plots. Thus Robert Browning turns detective in A Rich Full Death (1986) , and the prophetic books of William Blake lie behind a number of apparently random murders in his America-based thriller , Dark Spectre (1995). Among Dibdin's confections are two highly enjoyable works of homage to past masters: The Dying of the Light (1993) parodies the Agatha Christie country hotel murder, and The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, his first book, published in 1978. The latter takes the form of a confessional manuscript written by Dr. Watson; Dibdin opens the locked trunk for us, fifty years after Watson's death, and the parodic action is pursued with great panache and affection. Sherlock Holmes has been called in to assist with the 'Jack the Ripper' investigation in 1888 after a series of grisly murders of prostitutes. There are many plot twists and surprises, before a splendidly perverse re-run of the climactic scene in which Holmes makes his exit at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Dibdin began to develop his darker side in contemporary psychological thrillers such as The Tryst (1989), set during Mrs. Thatcher's government, a gothic narrative involving mental illness, a mystery-within-a-mystery, and the violent activities of a gang of glue-sniffing squatters. A 'ghostly resemblance' to an old lover gets a woman psychiatrist obsessed by the case of a disturbed young man who has witnessed a murder. In parallel, we also have a mysterious tale told by an elderly recluse who had befriended the young man. The structure works well in conjuring up a genuinely unsettling vision of Britain, in random urban violence, social estrangement and weird hallucinations. In Blood Rain (1999), Dibdin's world-weary detective Inspector Zen is on the trail of the Mafia, but diverts himself during a train journey with crime thrillers 'offering the prospect of a tightly organized guided tour through a theme park of reassuringly foreign unpleasantness'. Zen's own adventures offer us many of the same pleasures, though a great deal more literary refinement. Dibdin's years of teaching in Italy no doubt gave him the detailed cultural background for the series, which started with Ratking in 1988 and whose latest volume is Medusa (2003). In the books Zen encounters civic and police corruption and rivalries, bureaucracy, terrorism, political cover-ups, Mafia murders and kidnappings. These crimes all have their reasons, 'messages' attached to them, and are seen as stemming from unfinished political business in Italy in the post-war period, and especially since the 1970s. Zen is a civilized cynic, somewhat old-fashioned in his methods and attitudes, a loner who can take a detached view of Italian society. Thus he touches upon its traditional machismo and the changing roles of women, and current problems of illegal immigration and racism. Zen's investigations take him all over the country, and are often specifically themed for the armchair tourist. A Long Finish (1998) , for example, is set within the wine-growing region of Piedmont. Among the latter books in the series, Blood Rain is highly entertaining but with considerable emotional depth. In it, Zen has been posted to Sicily, after a decomposed body is found in a sealed railway carriage, believed to be that of the son of a local mob boss. He has to deal not only the Mafia's internal family feuding, and departmental machinations within the local police force, but also with some sinister government operatives. A subplot involves Carla, a computer expert who claims to be Zen's daughter, and her involvement with a prominent woman judge. There are excellent set piece scenes including a shoot-out in a museum; and a comical episode when Zen's own arrest is prevented by a crowd of drunken English football fans on a ferry. Zen's fatalism and endurance is tested to the limit when he has to seek out Mafia families, but he comes to understand their codes of honour and revenge. Medusa again opens with the discovery of a corpse, though one from thirty years ago, eventually identified as a young soldier who had belonged to a clandestine fascist organization codenamed Operation Medusa. Zen's investigations into the case threaten the interests of surviving former fascists, some now in high places. Departmental wrangling between the Defence and Interior ministries also complicates matters for Zen. We hear the revealing interior monologue of a secret serviceman disgusted by official hypocrisy and social decadence. Alongside all this plotting goes Dibdin's brilliant central metaphor within the title, involving as it does sexual revelations and a woman's 'unfakeable, petrifying look'. Dibdin's USA-based thrillers play on our darkest fears, with a fine eye for American popular culture and police homicide procedures, as in the sinister Dark Spectre (1995). Seattle detective Kristine Kjarstad has to piece together links between a series of nationwide shotgun murders. The plot switches between the investigation and the past lives of ex-hippies who have formed a survivalist sect on a remote island. Thanksgiving (2000) is a short but harrowing tale with suggestions of the supernatural. Anthony, a British journalist, is grieving for his dead American wife, and driven to find out about more about her. In a brilliantly menacing opening scene, he visits her first husband who runs an isolated gas station in the Nevada desert. A grim contest of wills develops between them, and Anthony produces a gun. The narrative involves as much mental processes as crime- related tension, while he finds out what really happened and undergoes a healing process. Its format is unconventional but demonstrates again Dibdin's mastery of those essential crime ingredients: the sensational, the psychological, and the cerebral. Dark Spectre by Michael Dibdin. What is it that binds together a series of violent murders across America and the long-lost Secret of the Templars? The killings always take place in the home, usually in broad daylight, in towns and cities all over America. Citește tot rezumatul cărții Dark Spectre. The victims are of every age and background; they have been bound and gagged and shot in the head at close range. The crimes appear to be random and motiveless and no one has claimed responsibility. So what connects the killings to an obscure religious sect operating from an island in the Pacific North-West? And what clues lie hidden in the Secret of the Templars? If you enjoyed Dark Spectre you may also like Dirty Tricks, also by Michael Dibdin. Citește mai puțin. Aștepți momentul potrivit ca să cumperi Dark Spectre? Nu mai pierde timpul! Am realizat pentru tine lista cu librăriile online care vând Dark Spectre și poți alege librăria cu prețul cel mai mic ca să comanzi chiar acum. Michael Dibdin Books In Order. Michael Dibdin was one of the acclaimed authors from the UK, who liked to write crime fiction, mystery, and thriller novels. He was particularly famous for creating the character of Aurelio Zen. Apart from writing the crime fiction books featuring this character, he also penned several standalone books in his writing career. Aurelio Zen’s character was set mainly in Italy by Dibdin, while most of his other works were set in England and the States. Throughout the course of his career, author Dibdin wrote a total of 18 books, 11 of which were a part of the Aurelio Zen series. The remaining 7 books were either standalone novels or other works. Author Dibdin was born on March 21, 1947. His birth had taken place in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, England. Dibdin’s father was a physicist. After living for a period of 7 years in Wolverhampton since his birth, author Dibdin changed places along with his family and lived in different places. He was mainly brought up in Lisburn, North Ireland. Author Dibdin completed his school education from the Friends’ School in Lisburn, which was a voluntary grammar school of Quaker. Dibdin went on to complete his graduation degree from the Sussex University in the subject of English Literature. Later, he joined the Alberta University in Edmonton, Canada and earned his Masters’ degree. Until his graduation, author Dibdin had lived in various places such as Middlesex, Northern Ireland, Italy, Seattle, and Edmonton. His final place of residence was Seattle. Author Dibdin started his writing career in the year 1978 and completed his first book, titled as The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, in the same year. While writing this book, Dibdin was living in Italy. He spent a total of 4 years residing in Italy. During the course of his stay, he was also involved in teaching English at the Perugia University for some time. Author Dibdin is best remembered for his excellent depiction of Aurelio Zen as the lead character in the series of the same name. The first book of this series won the Gold Dagger Award in the year 1988. The special feature of the detective novels of the series is that they give penetrating insights into the lesser visible aspects of the Italian society that have taken place over a period of the last twenty years. The initial books show a touch of lightness that goes on to become darker as the series progresses. Dibdin has described Aurelio Zen as an anti-hero, which also adds to the black humor and irony of the books. The final book in this bestselling series, End Games, was published posthumously in 2007. The other detective fiction works of author Dibdin are set in the US and England. Author Dibdin entered into marriage for 3 times in total. Her last marriage was with the popular novelist named K.K. Beck. Dibdin’s death occurred in Seattle on March 30, 2007, due to illness. The character of Zen appears to be emotional and erratic. He is middle aged and appears a little bit jaded. Zen has been serving for a long time in State Police, having acquired a senior position. Zen does feel afraid of employing downright underhanded or radical methods while solving the cases. He always struggles to fulfill the demands of the tough job, his girlfriend, and his mother. On certain occasions, Zen accepts the assignments just to escape from the domestic pressures. All in all, Zen tries to keep his heart at the right place and tries as best as he can to bring out sense from the things that confront him. The book series was optioned to make 3 feature length dramas by the Left Bank Pictures and BBC Scotland. The first of the 3 dramas was filmed in Rome and featured the English actor named Rufus Sewell and Italian actress named Caterina Murino in the lead roles. The debut novel written by Michael Dibdin in the Aurelio Zen series is entitled ‘Ratking’. It was released in 1997 by the Black Lizard publication, after its first release in 1988. At the start of the book, author Dibdin has shown a psychological suspense in which Aurelio Zen is asked to investigate the abduction of a powerful industrialist from Perugia named Ruggiero Miletti. Zen feels that no one wants him to succeed in this case. Even the local authorities see him more of an interloper. The children on Miletti also don’t want the abductors to release him. Aurelio Zen wonders whether the Miletti’s kidnapping was the job of professionals or whether someone close to him as carried out this criminal act. Zen suspects Miletti’s son Daniele, his daughter Cinzia, and his other children Pietro and Silvio. Daniele runs drug business, Cinzia hides a devastating secret behind her vapid beauty, and Pietro always manipulates others to his own benefits. And as Aurelio Zen tries to unravel the suspense next of official complicity and family intrigue, he comes across devastating facts and truths. The thrilling plot of the story makes it a chilling masterpiece and gives an in depth account of psychological suspense and police procedural. Another well written book of this series is titled as ‘Dead Lagoon’. It was released in 1996 by the Vintage Crime publication. Author Dibdin has set this story in Venice, Italy. At the beginning of this book, Dibdin has given a delicious yet creepy description in which the skeptical Aurelio Zen is given the task of combating crime. What makes his task even more difficult is that the country is full of people with changing loyalties and the superiors of today might become of the defendants of tomorrow. Returning to his native place in Venice, Aurelio Zen is in search of the ones who tormented a Contessa. He is also looking for a disappeared millionaire from America, who family has paid Aurelio Zen a handsome amount to locate his whereabouts, alive or dead. During his search, Zen continuously stumbles over distressingly concrete corpses. He finds a crooked cop drowned in the black well of the city and a skeleton that is found from the ‘Isle of Dead’. The resulting investigation turns out to be a rich description of deduction and character that gives intense information about the politics, manners, and history of the Venetian setting. The book was highly appreciated and praised by the critics. It was also liked by the readers all over the world. Author Dibdin received numerous positive reviews for his dedicated work in bringing out this excellent novel. Such reviews helped him to gain a lot of success in his novelist career. Dibdin was motivated to pen many more interesting novels later in his career.