From Booklist online, by Bill Ott:
With the death of Michael Dibdin on March 30, 2007, crime fiction lost one of its most distinctive voices. It’s entirely fair to say that Dibdin’s Inspector Aurelio Zen series, which debuted in 1988 with Ratking, launched what eventually would become the still-flourising renaissance of the Italian crime novel. Obviously, there were Italian mysteries before Zen, written by Italians, of course, but also by expats-the formidable Magdalen Nabb jumps quickly to mind-but with Zen came the distinctive world-weariness that eventually would define the new European procedural, not only in Italy but also in Scandinavia. Zen’s weariness comes as much from within the justice system as without; he is adept at battling bureaucrats but is always on the verge of being overwhelmed by the complex web of deceit and corruption that surrounds him. But unlike the American hard-boiled hero-even the most cynical of whom tend to be squishy idealists at the core-Zen is perfectly OK with a corrupt world. A typical Zen novel finds the inspector doing his level best to play the system-rubber-stamping cases with the convenient solution, double-dipping if possible, taking long lunches. Alas, this approach never quite works. Although he believes utterly in the maxim that a policeman must never “think you have any hope of ever achieving anything,” Zen cannot resist the lure of an undiscovered fact. And it is from those facts, once discovered, that Dibdin’s Zen novels grow.
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