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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} End Games by Michael Dibdin Zen and the art of cooking tomatoes. The late Michael Dibdin was a dominant figure in British crime fiction for 20 years. Regarded as one of the genre's finest stylists - Val McDermid described his writing as 'limpid and extraordinary' - his 10 Aurelio Zen novels and seven 'stand-alones' are also notable for their clever plotting and intelligent analysis of the changing face of Italian and British society. As Dibdin explained: 'Crime fiction is an objective, realistic genre because it's about the real world, real bodies really being killed by somebody. And this involves the investigator in trying to understand the society that the person lived in.' His 11th Aurelio Zen novel, End Games, published posthumously, makes his early death (he was only 60) all the sadder since it marks a tremendous return to form after the series had begun to flag a little. Here the moral, sometimes lazy but always determined Venetian policeman Zen is sent to the remote region of Calabria, in the toe of Italy. He is expecting a quiet life but must first investigate the kidnapping of an American lawyer, then a horrific murder. Soon he is up to his ears in sub-plots involving a secret search for a fabulous lost treasure, a Hollywood movie being shot about the apocalyptic final battle of the Book of Revelations, old-fashioned banditry and decades-old conflicts between landowners and peasants. Dibdin's satirical swipes at US fundamentalist Christians, moronic Californian software millionaires and pretentious Italian film directors are a delight - as are Zen's droll remarks about the false ascendancy of the tomato in Italian cooking. As usual, Dibdin's ability to look below the surface of a particular region's social and political structure is as acute as his descriptions of the beautiful, forbidding landscape and the echoing alleys and piazzas of the city to which Zen has been sent. The violence is as brutal as ever. This combination of gritty violence, often wildly funny satire, and wonderful descriptive writing has been the hallmark of Dibdin's Zen novels. And Zen himself is a masterly creation: he is anti-heroic and pragmatic but obstinate, cunning and positively burdened with integrity. Over the 11 novels he has had to negotiate the politics of competing government agencies, changes of political leadership and the ambitions of the wealthy and the long-established. He spends as much time trying to hang on to his job as he does solving the crimes to which he's been assigned. As his name suggests, he's a man of thought rather than action. Zen first appeared in 1988 in Dibdin's third novel, Ratking, which won the CWA Gold Dagger. Italy was relatively unexplored territory in UK crime fiction; British readers were familiar with translations of Carlo Emilio Gadda's masterly That Awful Mess on Via Merulana and Leonardo Sciascia's terse Sicilian stories but only Magdalene Nabb was writing a series set there - her atmospheric, Florence-based Marshall Guarnaccia novels. Dibdin set Ratking in Perugia, where he had lived for four years, teaching English language at the university. There were experiences from that time Dibdin wanted to write about and he also wanted to explore corrupt bureaucracies and the hidden power of the wealthy. Zen is little more than a cipher in the novel, which is what Dibdin intended. Years later he recalled: 'I invented the Zen character for that book, but I wasn't really particularly interested in him, so there wasn't a lot about him. He's really just a facilitator who comes in and makes it possible for other things to happen.' Nor did Dibdin intend the book to be the first of a series. When he did return to write about Zen, his detective remained enigmatic. 'He's a friend I like, but I don't feel I know terribly well. Which is an advantage, you know. He's capable of surprising me.' Zen is often transferred from one region to another (usually as punishment for not toeing the line) so he is always an outsider - a prerequisite for an investigator in the crime genre. Dibdin was an admirer of Raymond Chandler and particularly the way he exposed social and political problems but didn't attempt to offer solutions to them. Zen is constantly walking down Philip Marlowe's 'mean streets' but the forces ranged against him require a different, more cunning approach than the tough-guy attitude of the classic US private eye. In Vendetta (1990), Zen is sent to Sardinia to forge evidence to free a possible multiple murderer; in Cabal (1992), which won the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier, he's up against the Vatican and secret societies; in Dead Lagoon (1994), back home in Venice, it's corrupt politicians and old family dynasties. The next Zen novel, Cosi fan tutti (1996), in which Zen is sent to Naples with very little to do, was structured like Mozart's opera and was, in consequence, lighter and more playful than the earlier novels. Dibdin got back on form with A Long Finish (1998), in which Zen was willing to do anything to avoid being sent to Sicily - even if that meant arranging for the release of a Piedmontese wine expert accused of murdering his own father so that that year's vintage wasn't ruined. But in the Italian crime world, all roads lead to Sicily, home of the mafia, and that's where Zen ended up in Blood Rain (1999). The novel ended ambiguously - had Zen been murdered? - but after a three-year gap, he returned in the lacklustre And Then You Die (2002). Thereafter - with Medusa (2003) and Back to Bologna (2005) - Zen was never quite the same until End Games came along. However, Dibdin's place in the pantheon of great crime-writers had already been assured by his stand-alone novels, in which he played with structure and form. His first, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978) was a Conan Doyle pastiche with a dark twist, as the great detective grapples with Jack the Ripper. The darkness persisted in A Rich Full Death (1986), set in Florence in 1855. It had a clever plot, involving six apparently unconnected murders, with a superb final twist, with nods to Dante's Inferno, Henry James and Edith Wharton. And it was an epistolary novel but with only one correspondent. A Rich Full Death also had a thoroughly unsympathetic narrator, a trait he returned to in the brilliant, Oxford-based Dirty Tricks (1991), a savage satire on Thatcherite Britain. The narrator is a man defending himself from the charge of murder by revealing other despicable deeds of which he is guilty. The Dying of the Light (1993) was a witty but bleak pastiche of the Agatha Christie country-house mystery in the closed setting of an old people's home. After Dibdin moved to Seattle in the mid-Nineties he tried to write the 'big' American serial-killer thriller. Dark Spectre (1995) was well-plotted and Dibdin handled the big cast and multiple points of view with panache. For me, however, he stumbled over the American dialogue. His second American stand-alone was an intriguing novella, Thanksgiving (2000), written in a disjointed, interior style and with a loose plot about a journalist fixated by the recent death of his wife. My favourite of his stand-alones, however, dates back to 1989. The Tryst had an equally disjointed narrative - about the relationships between a psychiatrist and a troubled boy, and the boy and an old man - but a wonderful atmosphere. I always felt it bore comparison in some ways with James's The Turn of the Screw - and the twist at the end is breathtaking. Dibdin's novels have been translated into 18 languages and will endure. His first, the Sherlock Holmes pastiche, has been constantly in print in the UK for 30 years. As for Zen, even though, as one critic said, he is not a man with whom one would wish to be marooned in a gondola, he is one of the great creations of contemporary crime fiction. His influence on other writers will also endure. Ian Rankin, who knew him from the mid-Eighties, told me: 'I did learn a lot from him. Not just his elegant turn of phrase and the scope of his various genre-busting pastiches and reworkings. He wrote with real fire about the country the UK was becoming under the Tories in Dirty Tricks. He also showed me, in his Zen books, that there was room in the crime novel for political debate and a discussion of the corrosive influence of corporate power on politics. My Rebus books became more political as a result.' Michael Dibdin. Michael Dibdin, the bestselling crime writer, who has died aged 60, created the maverick Venetian detective Aurelio Zen, one of the quirkiest sleuths in crime fiction. Dibdin combined a flair for complex plotting and biting characterisation with a mastery of satire and the surreal. In all he produced 16 novels, 11 of them featuring Zen, and his work was translated into 18 languages. With popular success came critical acclaim: "During the Nineties," noted the legal commentator Marcel Berlins, "no writer of crime fiction attracted as much praise, and gave as much enjoyment, as Michael Dibdin." His trademark was the multi-layered literary whodunnit, couched in prose that his contemporary Val McDermid described as "limpid and extraordinary"; another admirer concluded that Dibdin remained "one of an elite cadre of crime fiction writers for whom literary critics break out all of their favourite adjectives".

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