Dibdin, Michael John

▪ 2008

      British crime novelist

born March 21, 1947 , Wolverhampton, Staffordshire [now in West Midlands], Eng.

died March 30, 2007 , Seattle, Wash.

delighted fans of detective fiction with a series of novels featuring idiosyncratic Italian police inspector Aurelio Zen. (End Games, the 11th book in the series, was to be published in late 2007.) Dibdin studied at the Universities of Sussex (B.A., 1968) and Alberta (M.A., 1969) and later taught English in Perugia, Italy. His first novel, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978), gained little attention. His third, however, Ratking (1988), introduced the cerebral, world-weary Zen and won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Fiction. Dibdin's non-Zen novels included A Rich Full Death (1986), with Victorian poet Robert Browning turned amateur sleuth, and the Agatha Christie-like whodunit The Dying of the Light (1993). Two of his later novels—Dark Spectre (1995) and Thanksgiving (2000)—were set in the U.S., where he settled in the 1990s. Dibdin also edited The Picador Book of Crime Writing (1993) and The Vintage Book of Classic Crime (1997).

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