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Ratking

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Michael Dibdin is a genre writer of many styles. He has written stand alone thrillers, The Tryst and Dark Spectre, parodies, The Last Sherlock Homes Story and The Dying of the Light, and one of the great modern detective series - the Aurelio Zen novels. This is the first novel in that series. Critically applauded at the time of original publication (and winner of the British CWA Gold Dagger Award for crime novel of the year) it perhaps deserves reappraisal in the light of the other books in the series.

The Zen novels take place around Italy, this in Perugia. Zen is seconded there from Rome, following political pressure being placed on his superiors. The pressure is brought because an important businessman has been kidnapped, and in the many months he has been missing the local police seem to be having trouble finding the kidnappers. Zen's imposition is resented by locals, and his intervention used by members of the businessman's family, and the local prosecutors.

In its favour the novel has a strong sense of place, Perugia being well evoked; and wonderful characterisation. Zen is one of the great fictional detectives. He starts here a man on the shelf. Having been sidelined during a kidnapping investigation many years before, he has been out of operative duty for some time. He is not quite as he seems, not wholly corrupt, a man au fait with the politics of the police force. There are many contradictions in his character. Also, Zen is an outsider. He is from Venice, the wrong part of the country for some.

Zen's opening scene in the novel says much of his character. As a robbery takes place on a train, he sits by and watches. He is berated by his fellow passengers, then at the next station leaves the train to make some phone calls. The reader is never completely sure where they stand with Zen.

The sketchy family background hinted at in this novel is fleshed out in later novels.

However, the joy in this novel is the strength of the minor characters. The Miletti family (the kidnapped man's children) and their partners are well drawn. The Marxist prosecutor is a wonderful character. Partly jealous at the Miletti fortune, partly zealous to perform his job well, but never above playing political games. Characterisation is brought out through small actions, minor insults. Sometimes Dibdin tells the reader, rather than showing (e.g. the treatment of Ivy Cook at an early family dinner). These glitches are less pronounced in later novels in the series.

The plotting is sound, the novel part puzzle, part atmospheric. It is an enjoyable work. It is in the subsequent novels in the series where plotting is tightened, and characterisation strengthened, together with the increasing familiarity with the principal and his regular support, that Dibdin's strengths as a writer really show.

If you enjoyed Ratking try Dibdin's Cabal or Vendetta, or the Dalziel and Pascoe series of novels of Reginald Hill (Particularly Deadheads, Bones and Silence, or A Killing Kindness) or Ian Rankin's Mortal Causes or The Black Book (two Rebus novels).

First in Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series.

A terrific start to an extremely well-written detective series, set in various places in Italy (this one in Perugia). It is a very good idea to start at the beginning and read the series in order, unless you don't mind obtaining mosaic-like insights into the motivations, psychology and personal relationships of the almost-but-not-quite 'anti-hero' Zen. The outcomes of previous cases are discussed in subsequent books, which could prove to spoil earlier ones for a non-sequential reader.

Dibdin conveys the Italian settings well - you can almost feel yourself walking alongside Zen through the piazzas of Rome and the precipitous streets of Perugia.

Zen is not another Commissario Brunetti (Donna Leon's equally as engaging Venetian detective). Zen's psychology is much darker, his demons more active, his personality more brittle and his relationships more fragile. Above all, his morality is more able to cope with (and indulge in) matters not always just 'shady', but sometimes downright illegal. Dibdin does successfully capture, however, the Italian body politic with both its unbending public bureaucracy and more flexible private state.

For an intelligent police procedural, with well-drawn characters, and a wonderful sense of place, I heartily recommend Ratking as a wonderful series opener.

Instead of those wooden dolls that nest one inside the other, Michael Dibdin creates a story line, which offers not only a variety of possible solutions, but also an unknown number of suspects and motives. And just like the dolls I mention, until you open the final one, you don't know how many there are, or what finally lies in the nest's core.

I have read the bookends of the Aurelio Zen series by this talented Author, firstly his newest "Blood Rain", and the inaugural book in the series "Ratking". Although I cannot yet comment on the installments that reside between these two books, unlike some ongoing character based novels, the last was as good as the first.

One of Mr. Dibdin's great talents is his ability to sustain the unknown, or the uncertainty of the solution to his books to the very end. He does not use crude blind alleys or other cliché slights of hand with his pen, rather he brings the reader along with Aurelio, seeing what he sees, but not limiting the reader to only what the Inspector may feel. There is no blatant misdirection, which by definition fools no one, Mr. Dibdin is much more subtle. In "Ratking" he constructs a Gordian Knot, of rat tails/tales, and unlike the Ratking the book describes, he unravels his construct with a self deprecating flair. Unlike other Authors he does not throw open a curtain and hope for the expected gasp, he entertains throughout his work. His novels are wonderfully complete, and amazingly brief. His stories are not based on one clever thought that is then pulled and stretched to novel length. His stories are finished, and written with a disciplined hand.

This Author has no need for gimmicks; he is a Master with a pen, a wordsmith of the first order.

Dibdin's fifty year old Aurelio Zen is trapped like a rat within the law enforcement tunnel of the labyrinth that is the Italian bureaucracy. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time has resulted in a forgotten desk job in Rome where Venetian Zen stares at a phone that never rings. When he is suddenly summonsed to Perugia in the lush Umbrian countryside and placed as lead inspector in a notable electronics magnate's kidnapping, he gets the sense, as we do, that something other than his immediate involvement in the investigation is at work here. Nevertheless, Zen does his job and as he gathers his information, we observe Zen's world of family, friends and Italy from Zen's cynical eyes. After playing the scapegoat once, Zen is wary; he has learned his lesson and has learned it well. Understanding the system as painfully and personally as he has, Zen adapts, manipulates and manages to sever the rat tails of the investigation's ratking while simultaneouly reconnecting himself to the tangle of tails which form the ratking of the Italian Law Enforcement machine.
The mystery here, is secondary to Zen's tainted vision of the world. It acts a conduit to expose Zen's feelings about the present and the past. His mantra, if he has one, could be paraphrased: A man must compromise in order to survive. Dibdin's humorous portrayals of the Italian populace of Umbria, most notably, the Miletti siblings and the Naopolitan driver, are priceless. The reader gets a real sense of the city state mentality of Italy, where there are definite prejudices between Northerners and Southerners. Dibdin's countless behind-the-scenes suggestions of corruption, wire-tapping and self-sustaining acts of betrayal seem too farfetched to be thought solely fictional.
The tone of the story is cynical and dark which makes for some tedious reading. The reader finds himself in his own rat tail tangle of misunderstanding. Zen, a reluctant realist, must deal with an American girlfriend who does not understand his need to keep the details of his relationship with her a secret from his live-in mother. He's got some issues with his father that come to light while he ponders the ties between the Miletti patriarch and his children. Along with the bungled career, there is an ex-wife, an abandoned home in Venice and a lifetime of smaller regrets. In short, he is no designer detective in an Armani suit with wise-guy retorts; he is real and has real problems.
As the first in a series of Zen mysteries, I think this one a worthy introduction and I look forward to seeing how the character manages to survive in the murky environment of real life.

This is the first book in Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series. It's a fine story that marks a good introduction to this series. You learn just enough during the course of the stories to want to learn more, which you do in future installments. It sets the template for what is to come: Zen is given a case that no one really wants solved, there is trouble. Good, solid mystery with many interesting secondary charracters. Read the first, you will continue to the last. Maybe not compulsively but steadily.

A friend passed on this book, saying that I would like it in spite of the fact that it was a mystery novel. He was right. Just desserts are hard to come by in Dibdin's Italy, and Inspector Zen is no exception, right to the very end. A very satisfying novel, full of interesting bad guys and even a few good ones.

Ratking by Michael Dibdin

Michael Dibdin introduced Italian police detective Aurelio Zen in the Ratking and carried off the 1988 Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. An industrialist has been kidnapped in Perugia and the powers-that-be want a high-powered detective sent up from Rome to solve the crime. In mad rush of bureaucratic CYA, the police in Rome dispatch Auerlio Zen. The joke is that Zen is a has-been, blamed for the bungled end of the Aldo Moro kidnapping some four years earlier.

Dibdin develops a complex crime scenario. Is the entire kidnapping a fake, a put up job? Is the industrialist's messed up family behind the kidnapping? Why does the family not cooperate with the police? Can Zen arrange for his safe return? If not, will Zen end up back in his duties in Rome?

Zen likens the family to a 'ratking' and whether you believe that ratkings actually exist in nature, these folks are the real thing (look it up - I won't spoil the surprise).

Dibdin, however, does not stop with a mere police mystery, but develops a multi-layered story. He presents a largely dysfunctional Italian society where few people work much or very hard, certainly no more than absolutely necessary. Every individual is subject to power exercised often arbitrarily by nearly everyone else - and that's the trade-off; everyone gets at least a little power to lord over anyone wandering into their bailiwick. And Dibdin also begins to develop Zen as a complex character whose American expat girlfriend resents his sudden involvement in real police work, who lives with his mother, and who mourns the loss of a father he never really knew. In Dibdin's obit (he died in 2007), the Guardian observed that the Ratking's plot existed mainly for the presentation of "mordant dialogue and world-weary observation".

The story did drag at times; perhaps it suffered a bit from setting up Zen's back story, which took the reader away from the main story. One assumes the reader's patience will be rewarded in the remaining ten Zen novels. I look forward to reading Vendetta (Zen), the second book in the series. Highly recommended.

Dibdin's Ratking I found to be an above-average thriller, introducing the reader to Dibdin's excellent style of writing. I read this after reading Cosi' fan tutti, a subsequent Dibdin thriller featuring the same Zen character.

However I thought the plotting of this novel, unlike Cosi' fan tutti, to be slightly "traditional", following the customary sequence of unfolding of events of crime novels.

Having said that, I have recommended Ratking to friends - Dibdin remains (even in his earliest Zen thriller) notches above your average crime writer.

After reading some of the posted reviews for Dibdin's works I couldn't wait to begin reading the first novel in the series. I must confess I was less than thrilled. The plot was engrossing enough, but the writing style left me cold. Dibdin's grammar is inexcusably poor for an English writer (I often wondered where his editor was) and the character of Aurelio Zen seems artifically "tortured", like a poor man's version of Martin Beck. It's an age-old ploy in the detective novel to have one's hero seem superficially bungling, only to have him solve the puzzle in the end. I just didn't feel Dibdin brought anything new to this genre.

This is the fourth book I read in the Aurelio Zen series (after Dead Lagoon, Cabal, and Blood Rain), and I am amazed at how different they are, while at the same time being truly smart and wonderful Italian mysteries. This one is the first one of the series, and it's somewhat too long and winding and does not build enough momentum in the first half. It's also the most ambitious of the bunch. While in Cabal: An Aurelio Zen Mystery, a seemingly mysterious international organization, with ties to the Knights of Malta and the Vatican, turns out to be nothing of the sort; in Dead Lagoon: An Aurelio Zen Mystery, a multitude of plots are as foggy, and blurry, and confusing, as the light reflected in the waters of the Venetian canals; and in Blood Rain: An Aurelio Zen Mystery, deeply disturbing Mafia plots are intertwined with hilarious aside trips to Malta on a ferry and back in a rented tiny plane - while in the other books, things are lightened up by both the author's wonderful humor and by the sense of justice waiting to be done - this novel is more of a family tragedy in the Dostoevsky-an sense. Three brothers, a sister, a brother-in-law, a father; each has unspeakable secrets; in hatred and sin, they are tied to each other like rats whose tails have been inextricably welded together.