Now and Zen

I already wrote a few days ago about the PBS-TV series Zen, starring Rufus Sewell as Michael Dibdin’s Italian police detective, Aurelio Zen. But since that delightful, three-episode drama begins tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT, running as part of Masterpiece Mystery!, I thought I’d provide another teaser. The video below features short clips from tonight’s premiere episode, “Vendetta,” as well as an interview with star Sewell.



Zen will continue for the next two Sundays on PBS.

READ MORE: “Michael Dibdin’s Zen on PBS,” by Oline Cogdill (Mystery Scene); “His Name Is Zen, Aurelio Zen: ‘Vendetta,’” by Leslie Gilbert Elman (Criminal Element).

An All-Too-Brief Italian Affair

Writing today at the Kirkus Reviews site, I preview the sexy new British-made TV crime drama Zen, which will make its broadcast debut in the States this coming Sunday night at 9 p.m. ET/PT as part of PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery! series. You’ll find my piece here.

For Zen, screenwriter Simon Burke has adapted the first three of Michael Dibdin’s 11 Italian detective novels starring police commissioner Aurelio Zen: Ratking (1988), Vendetta (1990), and Cabal (1992). However, he’s reordered them, making Ratking the last of those three televised installments. That decision has required some changes in the plots, but then so has the shift in media from books to the boob tube. Perhaps newcomers to Dibdin’s tales won’t spot the assorted modifications, but veteran readers of this author’s excellent work surely will.

Which shouldn’t suggest, though, that Zen has lost its appeal through adaptation. It hasn’t, as I make clear in my column:

Shot on location around Rome, this program is lush with architecture and landscapes evoking the splendors of ancient history. Aurelio Zen, played with low-key authority by English actor Rufus Sewell (Eleventh Hour, Middlemarch), remains the too-scrupulous-for-his-own-good cop who lives with his mother, resents the cheating wife from whom he’s separated, and tries to exact justice in a system epidemic with corruption. He’s joined here--in more ways than one--by the younger Tania Moretti (aka Tania Biacis in Dibdin’s books), his chief’s fetching and unhappily married assistant, portrayed by Italian former Bond girl Caterina Murino. Although Zen’s cast is international, and everybody speaks English with a different accent, it’s quite easy to overlook that illogic as the drama unfolds, its marvels, mysteries and treacheries tumbling over one another in a seductive rush.

New York Times critic Elizabeth Jensen further elucidates Zen’s many visual and storytelling attractions:

While the Zen mysteries follow the formula of crimes that can be solved in 90 minutes, the series’s broader theme is a departure for “Masterpiece” as well, as Zen tries to maneuver his way around corruption in his own department and the government, with conflicting pressure from all sides in the cases at hand.

“I rather liked that he’s set up to fail,” said Andy Harries, the chief executive of Left Bank Pictures, which--fresh from adapting Henning Mankell’s “Wallander” mysteries, also shown on “Masterpiece Mystery!”--developed the series for the BBC and “Masterpiece.” “The levels of corruption are so immense, so culturally ingrained in Italy,” he said, referring to the scandals involving the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. “We might regard it as corruption, but the Italians don’t. It’s just a very, very different culture.”

The tension “makes for quite a subtle show, with the ambivalence and complexities,” he added. “It was designed to push the boat out further, make the viewer work a little harder.”

Though all three episodes are well worth watching, the third one, “Ratking”--in which the ever-melancholy Zen contrives to win the release of a wealthy kidnapping victim--is the most satisfying in terms of character and plot development. It also offers some enjoyable dialogue. At one point, for instance, a politician chides Zen by remarking, “Your scruples do you credit. But really, it’s no way to get ahead, is it?” Later, the curvaceous Tania, questioning Zen’s choice to make a ransom money drop himself, says, “I hope you know what you’re doing.” To which the pragmatic cop replies, “Of course I don’t.”

The only thing I find sad in all of this is that these three episodes of Zen might be the only ones ever made. UK broadcaster BBC1, which commissioned the series, cancelled it earlier this year, despite favorable viewer ratings. However, Left Bank Pictures, the independent producer of Zen, is hoping that some other broadcaster will now pick up the program. My fingers are crossed that Zen, Tania, and the rest of the cast will be gracing our screens again very soon.

To give you a feel for Zen, I’m embedding two videos below. The first features the series’ lovely opening credits and three scenes, the last of which finds Zen and Tania visiting an ailing but perceptive police colleague. The second video focuses on Zen’s budding relationship with Tania, which they’re both trying to keep quiet at the office.

Dibdin’s Short Finish

The sad news coming out of Seattle, Washington, today is that Michael Dibdin, the 60-year-old author of an award-winning series starring Venetian detective Aurelio Zen (Back to Bologna), died there last Friday, March 30, after what Britain’s Telegraph says was “a short illness.”

Generous in both length and tone, the Telegraph’s obituary of Dibdin, who was born in Wolverhampton, England, in March 1947, but has lived in the United States since the early ’90s, is the best one I’ve spotted yet. As that piece explains:

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”.

Dibdin deliberately tapped into British middle-class fantasies in the Aurelio Zen series. The appeal of the books lay partly in his decision to set each one in a different part of Italy (starting in the beautiful medieval city of Perugia), but also in the character of Zen himself: Dibdin invented him as an outsider, coming to Perugia as a stranger, much as Didbin himself had done when he arrived to teach English at the university there in the late 1970s.

Aurelio Zen’s initials offered a clue to his creator’s methods and motives; in the course of the series, Dibdin pieced together an A to Z of contemporary Italy, a composite of finely-drawn observations about the country and its people. The picture he painted, however, was no rose-tinted idyll: his tenth Zen mystery, Back to Bologna (2005), opened with a football club tycoon slumped dead over the wheel of his Audi, a bullet in his brain and a Parmesan cheese knife rammed through his chest.

Dibdin was an outsized figure with outsized traits and appetites; he had a fondness for fine food and drink, and liked to sport a Panama hat (“he embraces excess”, one observer wrote). Although in person he was private and shy, his books were larded with sex and violence--“two of the things we can do,” Dibdin noted, “which were not possible for earlier generations [of writers], so there’s an understandable tendency to want to take it to the max”.

Although his plots were convoluted (“as tangled as a dish of spag bol,” as one reviewer put it), Dibdin was a thoughtful exponent of crime fiction with a literary cast, specialising in unsympathetic heroes (someone noted that Aurelio Zen is not a man with whom one would want to be marooned in a gondola), and he took an academic interest in the history of the genre.

As for politics, Dibdin was careful not to taint his narratives with an identifiable ideology, but he believed that a wider political lens was not only essential to telling criminal tales but also unavoidable. He admired Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, both of whom were Left-leaning and disturbed by the corruption and abuses they saw in the society they wrote about. Like them, Dibdin shunned an overt political agenda in his books. “They exposed problems,” Dibdin said of them, “they didn’t propose solutions.”

The Telegraph piece goes on to quote Dibdin on the reason he devoted his novel-writing career to crime fiction: “The mainstream has lost its way. 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.”

Dibdin’s first published novel, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, was The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978). It was followed 10 years later by Ratking, the first of his Commissario Zen crime novels, which won the Macallan Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award. “Other books in this series,” The Telegraph notes, “include two of his best titles, Cabal (1992), which was awarded the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier, and Dead Lagoon (1994). Cosi Fan Tutti (1996), a brutal exposé of Italian organised crime and a brilliantly funny pastiche of Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera buffa, was followed by A Long Finish (1998) and Blood Rain (1999), in which Zen faced death at the hands of the Sicilian Mafia.” In addition to his Italian series, Dibdin wrote standalones such as Dark Spectre (1995), which was set in an American town traumatized by an apparently random set of killings, and Thanksgiving (2000), about a journalist fixated on the recent death of his wife.

Back to Bologna was Dibdin’s most recent title, but he has an 11th (and probably last) Zen novel, End Games, due out in the UK in July and in the States in November.

I had the opportunity to talk with Michael Dibdin only once, shortly after the publication in 1997 of The Vintage Book of Classic Crime, a rather curious literary sampler he’d edited. He was by then living in rainy Seattle, after meeting (at a 1993 writers’ conference in Spain) and then marrying local mystery author Kathrine Beck (aka K.K. Beck). I found Dibdin to be a bit gruff at first, delivering clipped responses that he evidently believed would be quite sufficient for an interviewer with no more than passing interest in crime fiction. After we’d spent a good while talking about his work and the genre at a coffee shop in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square district, though, he realized that I was no general assignment reporter, but instead had a longtime interest in the very variety of story to which he had devoted himself. We then carried on for another hour or so, exchanging the names of favorite recent books and talking about some of the acknowledged giants and lesser-known stars of this genre, many of whose work figured into his Vintage collection. We promised to get together again someday, but never did.

My January Magazine colleague Linda L. Richards had a similar experience when she sat down to interview him in 1999. In the resulting article, she wrote:

In person Michael Dibdin’s warmth is not immediately apparent. There is, at first, almost a shyness to our exchange: perhaps a caution. This is the slightly self-protective, intensely private Dibdin who--when he married Seattle writer and single mom Kathrine Beck ...--acquired the house next door to hers in order to have a peaceful nest where he could spin his yarns.Dibdin does warm, though. He has the sort of passion for his work and his genre that doesn’t allow distance in discussion that he finds interesting. Before long, his self-protection is abandoned and his eyes sparkle with interest and intelligence as he discusses his work and his passions.

Regrettably, such encounters are now no longer possible.

Blogger-mystery maven Sarah Weinman remarks that Dibdin’s demise is a “huge blow to the crime fiction world and to literature at large.” I’m sure that much more will be expressed about Dibdin’s loss in days to come. He demonstrated crime fiction’s potential for making sense of the world, at the same as it entertains. Can literature expect to do any more than that?

READ MORE: “Michael Dibdin: RIP,” by Lindesay Irvine (The Guardian); “Remembering Michael Dibdin,” by Maxim Jakubowski (BBC Radio 4).