Blood Rain by
Michael Dibdin
Published by Faber & Faber
The role of the police detective in crime fiction has changed almost beyond recognition, and as readers we are the richer for it. Writers such as Ian Rankin, John Harvey and Michael Dibdin have taken the stolid, dependable upholder of the status quo and transformed him into a complex, maverick social critic whose emotional life takes the 'fun' out of dysfunctional. For each of these writers, the world of the detective is as much geographical is it is social. Rankin's Edinburgh, Harvey's Nottingham and
Dibdin's Italy are as apparently vital to the shape of their fictions as the crimes they anatomise in their investigations. They write about their
landscapes at three levels -- the 'real' city, with landmarks and street names that are recognisable to anyone who has been there; the 'unreal'
city, with fictitious backdrops to specific crimes and incidents; and the 'ur' city, with its descriptions and references that allow us to recognise places we have never been because they plug in so accurately to our
understanding of the places we have been.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the eight Aurelio Zen novels of Michael Dibdin. Each set in a different region of Italy, they exploit the cultural and topographical variety of a country we think we know from holidays, art, history, film and cuisine. But what Dibdin provides his readers with is a sense of reaching below the shimmering surface to discover what Italian life is really like.
In Blood Rain, Zen is transferred to Sicily. Always the outsider, this posting places him even further on the margins than he has ever been.
Promised a role in an elite anti-mafia squad, he arrives in Catania to find that he is not to take up a post in the Direzione Investigativa Anti-Mafia,
but rather is to spy on that organisation on behalf of his bosses in the Polizia Statale.
As far as Zen can see, this involves little more than taking officers out to lunch and, under the guise of inquiring about their welfare, gathering
intelligence on DIA operations and initiatives that he can feed back to Rome. It's not a bad life for a cop who realises he's trodden on too many toes over the years to have any real prospect of climbing further up the hierarchy.
And what really makes it worthwhile is the presence of his adopted daughter Carla, a computer specialist who is in Sicily to set up an new all-singing,
all-dancing computer system for the DIA. For a man as essentially lonely as Zen, this new relationship holds out the promise of all he has failed to achieve emotionally in his life so far.
But there is no such thing as the quiet life in a crime novel, and now Zen is in town, things start to hot up. The son of one of the local Mafia families is found dead in an abandoned railway carriage, which promises to set alight a new internecine conflict. And something very strange is going on with the investigation. Investigating judge Corinna Nunziatella smells a rat, and takes steps to conduct her own inquiry.
But Corinna is also fatally attracted to Zen's daughter, and a weekend trip that has the goal of seduction has a very different outcome. As the personal tragedies mount around him, Zen is catapulted into a kind of
nervous breakdown. Only in his temporary madness does he finally begin to understand that nothing that has happened since he arrived in Sicily has been what it appeared to be.
As Mount Etna vibrates with the threat of eruption, Zen himself is faced with the most desperate challenge of his career. The only question is
whether he cares enough about anything any longer to flush out the truth and expose the layers of deception that obscure the real machinations of
those who abhor a power vacuum.
What makes Blood Rain tower head and shoulders above most contemporary crime fiction is the breadth of the imagination and the quality of the
writing. Dibdin is a stylist whose prose soars, forcing the reader to fight the page-turning suspense of the story in order to savour the evocative and often elegaic language. There are passages of description here that haunt the memory long after the final dramatic climax is reached. When I got to the end, I wanted to start over again so that I could appreciate the craft without the driving tension to find out what was going to happen.
This is the best Zen novel for some time, providing what feels like an authentic portrait of a fatally weakened Mafia structure, and it reveals an
imaginative writer at the height of his powers. As a reader, I can only hope that the final cataclysmic scene is, like so much of what has preceded
it, yet another cunning deception.
(
Val McDermid
- - Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill)
Blood Rain by
Michael Dibdin