La dolce setting for British mystery writer Michael Dibdin
With the Aurelio Zen detective series, the late author probed Italian regions, politics and culture like a native.
One of the fascinating things about the hard-boiled tradition is its geographic flexibility. Writers all over the world have taken the form, altered it to suit their times and temperaments and made it at home almost everywhere.
The peripatetic Michael Dibdin -- who died last year, a few days after his 60th birthday, and whose final novel, "End Games" has recently come out in paperback -- may demonstrate this principle better than anyone.
Born in England's West Midlands and raised largely in Northern Ireland, Dibdin settled in Seattle in 1995 and set most of his books in Italy.
His 11 novels featuring elusive, grappa-drinking police detective Aurelio Zen dig deeply into the culture and politics of Italy's regions and cities. Carl Bromley, who this year wrote a substantial piece in the Nation on the author's "dark, ironic but oddly nostalgic vision," describes each book as "another piece of the jigsaw puzzle" of this alluring and enigmatic country.
Though the novels have been dismissed by detractors as "tourist noir," Zen experiences Italy in almost the opposite way that Anglo vacationers encounter bella Italia.
"Some of the books begin with a phone call," says Edward Kastenmeier, Dibdin's longtime editor at Vintage Books. "And Aurelio Zen is sent to a different part of Italy, where he's not wanted, where he doesn't want to be and where he's trying to solve a crime that many people would like to stay hidden."
Detective novels encourage their heroes to range up and down through society, from dark alleys to the villas of the wealthy. They can give fuller portraits of a culture than can mainstream novels, which tend to focus on a single class, family or milieu.
While certain mystery writers effectively own a city -- James Lee Burke and New Orleans, for instance -- and many have set their work in Italy, Dibdin is unusual in trying to cover the entire country with sociological rigor. Zen must penetrate not only the intricacies of his cases but also a succession of local cultures, with their bureaucracies, dialects and dueling police forces.
"He was really interested in exploring Italian culture," Kastenmeier says, "and he was using the crime novel to do that."
Despite their prevailing noirish tone, the books are anything but joyless. Indeed, they range from the deeply grim to the comic.
