Dead protagonists and other clever ways to end a series

A few months ago I read a novel that ended when its protagonist died. Needless to say, it was the final book in its series.

With the subject of series’ conclusions much on people’s minds these days thanks to Ian Rankin, John Rebus, and that courageous gay activist J.K. Rowling, I now turn my thoughts to last things as well. To avoid plot spoilers for anyone who might be reading the book in question, I won’t name my dead protagonist. But can you name any? You get half-credit for Sherlock Holmes, whom Conan Doyle killed off in “The Adventure of the Final Problem” but was forced by public outcry to revive later. You get similar partial credit for coming up with Michael Dibdin’s Blood Rain, which ended with Aurelio Zen being blown up by a Mafia bomb … only to begin a slow recovery from his injuries when Dibdin decided to revive the series three years later.

If you can’t think of protagonists who died, what other clever or satisfying ways have authors chosen to end series?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Blogger shows author some love, or More about Michael Dibdin

I got on Michael Dibdin’s case yesterday; today I’m pleased to pass along a thoughtful article from Booklist via the Librarian's Place that says his Aurelio Zen series “launched what eventually would become the still-flourishing renaissance of the Italian crime novel.”

But Dibdin was even more influential than that, according to author Bill Ott: “(W)ith Zen came the distinctive world-weariness that eventually would define the new European procedural, not only in Italy but also in Scandinavia.”

That, readers, is big. And Ott just might be right. The dates work. Dibdin published the first Aurelio Zen novel in 1988. That predates Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander and Andrea Camilleri’s Salvo Montalbano. Ian Rankin published his first John Rebus novel in 1987, but the series did not hit its stride for a few years. In sum, Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen may be the most influential crime-fiction character of the past twenty years.

What do you think? Who is more influential as a world-weary fictional detective than Aurelio Zen? If you haven’t met Zen, who are your favorite such detectives?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Michael Dibin's Italian overtures

You know those novels each of whose short opening chapters introduces one character? I finally figured out what such introductions remind me of: the overture to an opera, in which each little musical theme stands for one character or one predominant situation or emotion from the piece that is to follow.

That's how Michael Dibdin's Back to Bologna begins. In the first chapter, two amusingly disgruntled police officers find a body that may be that of a prominent businessman. Call that a lively introduction that ends in a burst of percussion. In the next, we meet the worried protagonist, Aurelio Zen, out of step with his lover, his job and even himself as he recovers from surgery. The tempo here is slow, melancholy, and the key might be mournful minor with a passage here and there in a livelier major key (Zen is, after all, the hero.)

Next come two students and the Romanian girlfriend of one, and after that Zen's lover, Gemma. Her theme, like Zen's, might be more complex than the others, since her chapter has her thinking about Zen, and Zen's has him thinking about her.

And now I'll stop with the music because I don't want to take this too far. But it's at least plausible for Dibdin if for anyone. He wrote an entire Aurelio Zen novel, Cosi Fan Tutti, using the plot of Mozart's almost identically named opera.

And now, use your imagination, readers: Back to Bologna's beginning is reminiscent of opera. What crime fiction reminds you of something else? Whose prose style or narrative structure reminds you of music or city traffic or guns firing or a gently babbling brook (or of anything babbling gently, for that matter)?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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The last of Zen

In the June 30 Guardian, Mark Lawson found Michael Dibdin's new End Games shot through with clues that Dibdin had turned his mind toward "last things," a poignant reminder of Dibdin's death in March at age 60:

Paradoxically, though, End Games is not obviously an acknowledged finale, though there is, for the reader particularly alert to clues, a rather circuitous inclusion of the word "tomb" in a climactic, and otherwise optimistic, paragraph, as well as an odd, brutal reference to a medical condition that seems to have no functional purpose within the book. Otherwise, it is energetically and meticulously written, and the longest novel in the [Aurelio] Zen series. There is, perhaps, one other subtle indication of a writer knowingly book-ending his career or, at least, one sequence of novels. In the last paragraph of Ratking, the 1988 story that introduced Aurelio Zen, the detective, walking home, notes that "the sky was clear and littered with stars". Almost 20 years on, as he enters the final pages of what we now know to be his last case, Zen looks to the heavens and regrets that light pollution has largely obliterated this natural illumination: "[Within] his lifetime that celestial array had been erased like a medieval fresco gaudily overpainted in a more enlightened era."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Michael Dibdin is dead at 60

Through the Rap Sheet comes the sad news that Michael Dibdin, author of the Aurelio Zen crime novels, has died at age 60. The item links to an obituary from the Telegraph that offers interesting insights into Dibdin, that cleverest of crime authors. A biographical note here includes a bibliography.

Here is what I wrote about Dibdin, Zen and the novel Cosi Fan Tutti in my first post on this blog (Cosi Fan Tutti is almost surely the only crime-novel version of a Mozart opera that you will ever read) :

3) Cosi Fan Tutti, by Michael Dibdin, is an exception to my general distaste for novels set in "foreign" countries by writers not from those countries. Such books often degenerate into travelogues. This novel is formally daring, and talk about surprise endings! Dibdin, an Englishman, spent several years teaching in Italy, and his charmingly named protagonist, Aurelio Zen, offers a kind of Baedeker's guide to official Italian corruption and internecine rivalry, each novel set in a different region: Naples here, the Vatican, Venice, the south in other books. And Rome. Always Rome. "Zen" is a name characteristic of the protagonist's native Venice, but it also has overtones of the detachment with which this Zen moves through the sometimes deadly worlds of Italian officialdom and gangsterdom. Of course, the character's other name, Aurelio, is another clue that he is wise and given to occasional musing, if not outright meditation.

Aurelio is the Italian form of Aurelius, as in Marcus Aurelius, that most philosophical Roman emperor.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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