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“... What are you?’ As far as I remember, these were the first words ever spoken to me by an Ulsterman. Well, an Ulster child, actually. We would both have been about seven years old and it was my first day at school in the province. I’d previously attended a preparatory school in Cambridge and another in Dunfermline, but neither had prepared me for the question so abruptly shoved in my face that morning ...”

“... How do you like to be approached by a strange work of fiction? Do you prefer a hearty handshake (‘Call me Ishmael’), a more discursive line (‘All happy families are alike’), or a low-key manner (‘For a long time I used to go to bed early’)? What about this, for example? After I became a prostitute, I had to deal with penises of every imaginable shape and size ...”

“... To vanish from sight; be traceable no farther; cease to be present; be lost, especially without explanation.’ The verb in question normally behaves intransitively, but in Argentina after 1976 it learned to take a direct object as the military regime disappeared between nine and twenty thousand people. Humberto Costantini and Omar Rivabella both write about this, but their approach is so different that their books in fact complement each other ...”

“... imaginative benefits, weakens any intended social point. So it is no surprise that Stuart Hood and Michael Dibdin concern themselves with the present state of society and morality via Science Fiction and a crime story. Both have produced ingenious – indeed, immensely clever – fictions. Hood’s Peter Sinclair, a battered ‘historical ...”

“... A Long Finish, to the wine and truffle country of the Piemonte, the sue tragicomic adventures of Michael Dibdin’s Venetian-born ‘supercop’ Aurelio Zen have offered many of the pleasures of tourism. Dibdin, however, skips over Italy’s ancient monuments to concentrate on its kidnappings and financial scams, its ...”

“... preference – the demands of the form prevail, and person is inevitably upstaged by plot. Michael Dibdin’s Vendetta marks the reappearance of Aurelio Zen, the Venetian cop who cleared up an unsavoury kidnapping in Ratking (Gold Dagger Award, 1988), where the unsparing exposé of depravity among the powerful of Perugia was matched by a command ...”

“... appears in so many legends and quite a bit of history. And in the fiction of Leonardo Sciascia and Michael Dibdin, where a crucial question about any crime is not who did it, but what to do with any knowledge you may have of this fact. Is there anyone you could report it to who might not be the criminal’s friend or protector? The same question arises in ...”

“... time is teasingly twisted, like a Möbius strip. That would perhaps not be a fair description of Michael Dibdin’s The Tryst, but it is nevertheless a novel of complex structure, the recurrent theme of which is the operation of the past in the present. ‘The past is dead,’ psychiatrist Aileen Macklin tells her young patient, Steven ...”

“... Monsters and delusions of a more agreeable kind lurk in the stylish, elaborately skilful pages of Michael Dibdin’s A Rich Full Death. Ostensibly this is a detective story, a species of Holmesian charade penned by a paranoiac Dr Watson: yet even at this level it teases the reader with mysteries that go beyond the conventionally mysterious. The story is ...”

“... crime of the day, kidnap and ransom is the Italian equivalent and forms the main business of Michael Dibdin’s Ratking. The title, incidentally, alludes to an unwilling syndicate of rodents, whose tangled tails oblige them to act as a unit: I suspect the image is not zoologically sound. The novel’s detective hero, Aurelio Zen, is a Venetian ...”

“... How many of our highbrows, for example, the ones who get the lead reviews, write as well as, say, Michael Dibdin, author of the haunting Ratking? P.D. James’s new novel seems to return us straight to Auden’s theology. It is set in rural East Anglia, and takes its title from the Anglican prayer book: ‘We have erred and strayed from thy ways like ...”

“... to is Zen – not Aurelio Zen (the detective who featured in eleven crime novels by the late Michael Dibdin) but the meditative self-awareness associated with Zen Buddhism (the dedicatees of Okotie’s three novels – Maitreyabandhu, Danayutta and Sanghasiha – are all associated with the London Buddhist Centre). The Okotie detective is ...”