A Zen experience to savor

End Games, By Michael Dibdin, Pantheon, 335 pp., $23.95

There has probably been a tad less interest in whether Aurelio Zen was going to meet his maker in his last adventure than if J.K. Rowling would kick Harry Potter's bucket in whatever the name of that book was.

In this case Zen's maker is Michael Dibdin, who died in March after finishing the ominously titled "End Games," his 11th Italian-based crime novel featuring the crusty detective who feels "the stealthy approach of death" in the current book.

Well, if the Potterites can keep their mouths shut, we Zen practitioners can, too. It can be said, though, that those who delighted in the first 10 stories, in which Dibdin transfers Zen all around Italy, from Venice to Bologna, should savor his last stop in Calabria. From his disdain for southern Italian cooking with tomato sauce to his similar lack of respect for the niceties of police procedures, this is vintage Zen.

Here he's up against the bizarre and barbaric murder of a go-between in a film deal. A Visconti-like film director hopes the biblical film will remake his reputation, even if the company involved seems to have more to do with Mel Gibson's philosophy of filmmaking than Federico Fellini's.

But Rapture Works, we quickly learn, is only using the movie, based on the Book of Revelation, as a front for something else, setting in motion a grim battle between would-be masters of the universe and the sadistic kidnapper of their go-between.

In the middle is our man Zen, looking down his fine Italian nose on more than the Calabrian cuisine. Zen makes world-weariness an art form. "He recalled a dinner party in Lucca, where half the guests had spent the evening yammering away to people who weren't there while ignoring those who were."

Dibdin never did quite raise Zen into the pantheon of crime fiction - his observations are always sharp, but not acute. There's something too predictable about the way that the author and the character look at the world and something too pat about the way that justice is meted out.

That said, "End Games" - a better effort than its predecessor, "Back to Bologna" - is a sterling example of why both Dibdin and Zen will be sorely missed on the crime fiction front. Zen knows that time has passed him by, but he also has the self-confidence and panache to know that he would never trade his outlook on the world for anything that the religious right, the politically correct left, or the shallow younger generation have to offer. His philosophy, such as it is, is outmoded, but all the alternatives are even worse.

And then there is Italy. He is the perfect Italian in an imperfect world. What Dibdin says of Italy, might just as well apply to Zen's approach to police work, and life itself: "Italy was indeed the bel paese, inexplicably blessed, just as some people seemed to be. Everything went wrong all the time, but somehow it didn't matter, while in other countries even if everything went perfectly, life was still a misery."

Buona notte, Aurelio Zen. Grazie and rest in peace, Michael Dibdin.

Ed Siegel is a freelance writer living in Medford.