MICHAEL DIBDIN – Blood Rain.

Detective Book Club [3-in-1 edition]; hardcover reprint (*). First edition: Faber & Faber, UK, hardcover, 1999; trade ppbk, 1999 (*); paperback, April 2000. Pantheon, US, hc, March 2000 (*); Vintage, trade pb, May 2001. (* = shown, in this order)

   One question to which I’ve never been able to come up with a definitive answer is how long did the Detective Book Club last? What was the last selection?

   There must have been subscribers all the way through to the end, but I’ve never been able to find one of them who’d be willing to say with any authority that here’s the one that was the last.

   (I’d also like to obtain more of the selection booklets sent to members over the years. I have a few, but it’s nearly a hopeless cause, since of things ephemeral, I can thing of very few things more so, except serviettes at McDonalds.)

   In the last few years of their existence, though, the DBC put volumes numbers on the spine. The one for this book, for example, is D655, which is the highest I’ve ever had in my possession. The other two books in the same volume are copyright 2000, which puts this awfully close to the end, whenever it was.

   And for the record, if you can’t make them out on the cover shown, the other two books are The Hard Detective, by H. R. F. Keating, and Manifesto for the Dead, by Domenic Stansberry.

   As for Blood Rain, it’s a book in Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen series, about which you can read more in an obituary for the author which I posted here on the blog early in 2007.

   Zen is a Venetian-born police detective whose successive posts have sent him on a guided tour of Italy today. Other observers have suggested reading the books in order, which is a good idea, as in each of them, the situations he finds himself in are as much about him personally as they are about the crimes he is forced to confront.

   Unfortunately I did not take this advice. To tell you the truth, I didn’t take the time to see what advice these other observers had already given, so I plunged right in. And it took me a while to sort out why he has been relegated to Sicily in this book, and why he seems to have a daughter he never knew about and who really isn’t his daughter according to DNA data.

   And to tell you the truth again, I never did completely sort any of either of the above. It’s that kind of book. Very well written, very literary, and very vague on details that depend on either previous books or exactly who is doing what to who in the midst of a Mafia war that seems to have broken out in Sicily at about the same time as Zen’s arrival.

   Zen’s new daughter Carla is in the middle of it, as she is there too, working on installing a new computer system for the police, and so is Corinna Nunziatella, an anti-Mafia judge who has taken a liking to Carla.

   Basically, this is what it is. There are Mafia families against Mafia families in this book, some on the way up, others on the way down. Some are up-to-date regarding new technologies and new sources of income, and some are old-fashioned and designed to stay in the backwaters of the new commerce.

   Dibdin’s prose is witty, clever, introspective and descriptive. His is the type of novel that literary critics go head over heels for, as it typifies the term, “transcending the genre.” Those of us who are old-fashioned and are relegated to the junk heap of wishing to read about old-fashioned detection in our detective fiction may not be as enthusiastic about the story itself as those previously mentioned literary critics have been.

   Please don’t get me wrong. I meant what I said when I referred to Dibdin’s prose as witty and clever. Unfortunately Zen, in this book at least, is a leading character who reacts to events, instead of being pro-active in tackling them head-on, which makes all the difference in the world. Not that he’s any kind of slouch about what he does, but his forte is thinking, when he has a well-defined need to, and not so much doing. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

   And oh, yes, before I go. I understand there was quite a reactive uproar about the ending of this book when it first came out. It’s far enough along in time now, after the fact, to say that the cliffhanger of an ending seems to have worked out in Zen’s favor, but nobody knew that at the time, not until the next book came out, Medusa, four years later, in 2003.