Day 396: Back to Bologna

The Aurelio Zen series begins as fairly traditional mysteries featuring the bemused Italian detective. Gradually, they become more and more comic. In Back to Bologna, Dibdin presents us with more of a spoof than a mystery novel.

Zen is not feeling his normal self. He is just recovering from a stomach operation, and he is also coping with troubles with his girlfriend, Gemma. She is leaving for Bologna to meet her son when Zen is also recalled to duty and sent to Bologna to solve the murder of a football team owner.

The victim is Lorenzo Curti, a millionaire entrepreneur who was found dead in his Audi, stabbed by a Parmesan cheese knife. Zen actually has little desire to investigate. His main reason for coming to Bologna is to keep an eye on Gemma.

A ridiculous situation is created by a celebrity cook-off between local semiotics professor Edgardo Ugo and the singing TV chef Romano Rinaldi, or Lo Chef. Ugo has suggested in a newspaper article that Lo Chef can’t cook, which has sparked a rivalry and this competition. Gemma gets tickets to the cook-off, and Zen ends up being arrested after Ugo is shot in the wake of the comic event.

Dibdin presents us with a large cast of characters, including a rich student of Ugo’s who is an “ultra” football fan, the student’s illegal immigrant girlfriend “Princess Flavia of Ruritania,” and the worst private detective imaginable. Despite the large number of characters, the solution is not at all difficult to guess. 

Zen does very little detecting as we watch a series of incredible mishaps result in the murderer being delivered right at Zen’s feet. Although I found this novel mildly amusing, my interest in this series has been winding down, and I think this is a good place to stop.

Day 384: Vendetta

Aurelio Zen is faced with a seemingly insoluble mystery in Vendetta, and the hapless detective falls into the solution, this time literally. Some government ministry officials assign him to the murder of an eccentric billionaire, Oscar Burolo, whose corrupt dealings have made many Italian politicians wealthy. The chief suspect is a friend of one of the politicians. They want Zen to find a murderer–just about anyone except the suspect will do–and if he has to frame someone, that’s fine, too.

The problem is that Burolo was killed on his seemingly impregnable estate in Sardinia, where every room is monitored by video. Burolo’s death is plainly visible on the cameras, but not his murderer.

Before Zen leaves for Sardinia, though, some odd things happen. He thinks someone may have been following him, and someone has been in his house. A criminal he put away has just been released from jail, and a magistrate has been slain, but he sees no connection between these two incidents. It takes awhile, but Zen figures out that someone is stalking him. His growing relationship with his coworker Tania is also complicated by his being forced to go out of town.

On the scene of the crime, Zen finds an odd care-taking couple and learns that the chief suspect was probably not the murderer. Everyone that was on the scene was killed with a shotgun, and no one else appears to have been in that part of the house. Yet, the estate’s safeguards make it next to impossible for someone to have sneaked in from the outside, it appears.

In his bumbling way, Zen remains incorruptible while managing to stumble into a solution of the crime that makes everyone happy. Dibdin’s mysteries always cynically expose corruption in the Italian government. Zen is a somewhat befuddled detective, nattily dressed, and Dibdin takes great pleasure in occasionally covering his impeccable detective with muck. Vendetta is no exception. Zen’s romances and his difficult relationship with his nearly senile mother are important components of the series, which is occasionally funny and furnishes a clever puzzle to work out.

Day 368: Dead Lagoon

Dead Lagoon is the most atmospheric of the Aurelio Zen mysteries I have read. In the novel, Zen returns to his home town of Venice, ostensibly to look into the “haunting” of the Contessa Zulian, his mother’s old employer, who is convinced that costumed “swamp dwellers” are invading her home. The contessa has long ago been deemed batty because of a tale she has been telling for years about a missing daughter. Although Zen has hitherto been incorruptible, he is actually there to work on the case of a missing wealthy American businessman, being paid under the table by the businessman’s family.

As Zen wanders or boats through the misty winter setting of Venice, visiting places he knew in his youth, he keeps stumbling over “ghosts,” some from his own past, and some actual dead bodies. A fisherman who spotted a ghost on the Isle of the Dead is drowned, then a crooked cop, head of the Venice drug squad, is found smothered in a sewer. In the search for the ghost on the cemetery island, an unexplained skeleton is found.

Zen’s investigation leads to a string of discoveries, of dishonest police, drug smuggling, and ambitious local politicians. His biggest discovery, though, is about his own family, including that nothing is what he thought it was.

I think what makes this Aurelio Zen book stand out is its depiction of Venice. The plot itself is rather disjointed and difficult to explain. Zen is able to solve both cases, but some readers have expressed frustration about the conclusion.

Day 317: Medusa

Medusa is the first Aurelio Zen mystery I read after seeing the series on Masterpiece Mystery!, and I found it to be well written and entertaining.

Aurelio Zen is sent north to the Italian Alps, an area on the far reaches of the known universe as far as he is concerned, because a decomposed body of a man was found in a disused military tunnel. The body has a mysterious tattoo, which could be important, but the corpse disappears from the morgue overnight.

Once the body is identified, it turns out to belong to a soldier who supposedly died in a plane crash 30 years ago. It gradually becomes clear that this mystery has to do with events during or just after World War II. To his dismay, the dapper Zen finds himself clambering around in the cave with the Austrian spelunker who discovered the body.

The narrative alternates between Zen’s attempts to unravel a tangle of clues and the thoughts of some older men who know more about what is going on. It appears that someone is trying to protect a secret, and the secret may have to do with a clandestine group that exists within the army.

As always, Zen’s cynicism about the powers that be in the government and the police force (and in this case, the army) is amusing, and Dibdin seems to get a special pleasure from subjecting the finely dressed detective to scenes where he has to climb around in wet, dirty places.

Day 248: A Long Finish

Aurelio Zen’s assignment in A Long Finish reflects the corruption in the Italian police force and government that is always being pointed out in these books. Zen is assigned to go to Alba not by his superiors but by a famous movie producer. The producer wants him to investigate the murder of Aldo Vincenzo, a noted winemaker–more importantly, to free Vincenzo’s son Manlio so he can get the grape harvest in and oversee the production of the wine. Vincenzo was found stabbed in his own vineyards with his genitals removed. The producer is a wine connoisseur who wants to make sure this year’s vintage isn’t wasted.

Zen finds himself in a dreamy, unfocused state, having nightmares because of several successive personal losses. Unfortunately, I’ve read the Aurelio Zen novels in an entirely random order, so I was confused about the sequence of the events in his personal life. Zen also has a severe cold, and someone is leaving him anonymous phone messages.

The first scene in the book, however, was of the murder, so the readers know that just before his death, Vincenzo encountered a trespassing truffle hunter. But which person was it? The truth may lie 40 years in the past, as indicated by the method of Vincenzo’s death, with echoes of partisan fighting during World War II, or maybe that is just a ruse.

I may be tiring a little of Aurelio Zen. I couldn’t put my finger on anything definite, but throughout this novel I got the impression that Dibdin is just trifling with his readers.

Day 238: And Then You Die

I started reading Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen series after seeing the mysteries about the hapless Italian detective on Masterpiece Mystery. In And Then You Die, Zen is more hapless than usual. I had some problems reading this book because it is apparently a sequel to a book I had not read, and it requires some knowledge of the previous book. I felt this one boiled down to a series of unfocused mishaps.

At the beginning of the novel, Zen is staying under cover in a beach community waiting to be a witness against the Mafia, who apparently tried to kill him in the previous book. He has been a long time recovering from the murder attempt and has not been home for a year.

At the beach, families have reserved places, and someone has occupied the place that goes with his apartment, so he takes another and proceeds to carry on a flirtation with the woman across from him, Gemma. Later on, he finds out the man in his place is dead.

His minders move him, saying that the dead man was killed in mistake for him. Then the plan changes and they put him on a plane to the U.S. to testify there. But the plane has to force land in Iceland after he changes seats and the man who takes his seat dies.

It’s obvious that someone is trying to kill Zen throughout the book, but he doesn’t even seem to notice. I don’t know whether this is Dibdin’s idea of humor or not, but generally Zen is a little sharper than this. Moreover, the episode in Iceland is decidedly odd. In all, the plot seemed very unfocused, with Zen wandering all over the place. I honestly felt as if Dibdin was not putting much effort into this novel.