Blood Rain is a novel by Michael Dibdin, and is the seventh in the Aurelio Zen series. Blood Rain (novel). From Wikipedia, the Series, Aurelio Zen series, # 7.
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Although his plots were convoluted "as tangled as a dish of spag bol," as one reviewer put it , Dibdin was a thoughtful exponent of crime fiction with a literary cast, specialising in unsympathetic heroes someone noted that Aurelio Zen is not a man with whom one would want to be marooned in a gondola , and he took an academic interest in the history of the genre.
As for politics, Dibdin was careful not to taint his narratives with an identifiable ideology, but he believed that a wider political lens was not only essential to telling criminal tales but also unavoidable. He admired Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, both of whom were Left-leaning and disturbed by the corruption and abuses they saw in the society they wrote about.
Like them, Dibdin shunned an overt political agenda in his books.
Michael John Dibdin was born on March 21 in Wolverhampton, the son of a Cambridge-educated physicist; his mother was a nurse. The family moved extensively around Britain while his father, a passionate enthusiast for folk music, collected material for the English Folk Dance and Song Society.
Michael Dibdin
When at last John Dibdin accepted a college lectureship in Northern Ireland, his son, then aged seven, issued an ultimatum to the effect that he, for one, intended to stay put. The boy got his wish "so I grew up as an ex-pat, in a way" and attended Friends School at Lisburn. There his French teacher, George Craig, instilled in him a sense of intellectual rigour, and of the wider world beyond his small provincial town. At the same school, the poet James Simmons taught Dibdin English, but perhaps an even greater influence was his best friend's mother, Eileen Coleman, who had been a lover of Oliver St John Gogarty, the model for one of the characters in James Joyce's Ulysses.
Dibdin was fascinated not only by her endless fund of good stories but also by her ability to smoke an unfiltered Woodbine until two inches of ash drooped from its end, only dropping off when she tapped it.
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An "inveterate scribbler" from an early age, the teenage Dibdin read voraciously at school, and was influenced by such crime writers as Chandler, Simenon and Conan Doyle, as well as by the early novels of Len Deighton. At the height of the "Swinging Sixties" he took a degree in English Literature at Sussex University, and "surprised myself" by accepting a graduate assistantship for a Master's degree at the University of Edmonton in Canada, qualifying as an English teacher so that he could travel.
But in the event Dibdin stayed in Alberta for five years, painting houses to make a living, getting married for the first time and writing "a huge, pretentious, unreadable novel about the meaning of the universe by someone who didn't have much to say". His first published novel, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, his self-proclaimed "pastiche", appeared in Dibdin then spent four years in Italy, teaching English at the University of Perugia.
The experience gave him a glimpse of Italian bureaucracy and corruption that provided the social and political backdrop for his series of Aurelio Zen crime novels.
Blood Rain
The first of these was Ratking, published in , which introduced readers to the commissario's morally shady world. Other books in this series include two of his best titles, Cabal , which was awarded the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier, and Dead Lagoon This, coupled to news of Carla's death, temporarily puts him out of action, and when he returns to his headquarters in Catania he is given a clue that not everything is as it seems by a file that Corinna had sent him, supposedly as a birthday gift for Carla.
This points to irregularities in the investigation of the murder of a Mafia chieftain's son and a possible Roman "third level" aiming to destabilise the powers of the old clans. Zen is more than usually at sea in the Sicilian atmosphere of double-cross and ambiguous messages in which it looks as if his own side is out to kill him. Finally he risks being taken for cross-examination by the Don of a declining clan who suspects Zen of murdering one of his henchmen.
Blood Rain (novel) - Wikipedia
He convinces Don Gaspare that the actual murderer was a police agent who Zen had later shot. On his way back to Catania the police take revenge by blowing up the car in which he is riding. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Blood Rain First edition. The irrelevant passages of plot filler do not add to the depth of the story, only to the length of the book.
How did the narrator detract from the book?
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Kitchen ought not to narrate books. He is a reasonable television actor but listening to his idiosyncratic pacing for more than ten minutes make my toes curl.
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- Blood Rain (Aurelio Zen, #7) by Michael Dibdin.
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Blood Rain worth the listening time? And I would not read anything else narrated by Kitchen. He's nearly as bad as Scott Brick. The excellent Michael Kitchen in his singular way brings this intelligent and exciting book to life. We absolutely loved it, it sustained us on long motorway journeys through France, and made us look forward to them! I hope there will be more of him reading these books and others he is terrific.
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Michael Dibdin Narrated by: Aurelio Zen , Book 7 Length: Audible Studios Whispersync for Voice-ready. Publisher's Summary Inspector Zen receives the order he has been dreading all his professional life: Set against the backdrop of the year old city of Catania, Blood Rain reveals Aurelio Zen at his most desperate and driven.
More from the same Author Aurelio Zen: And Then You Die. No Reviews are Available. Most Helpful Most Recent. Great narration, great story Michael Kitchen is simply awesome. A gripping story, excellent characters I've listened to this book 5 or 6 times over the past decade, and the intricacies of the plot, the variety of characters, and the descriptions of Sicily and Malta fascinate me each time. A great piece of writing This story seems to leave Zen and follow other characters.
Be prepared for a rain of blood! Aurelio Zen What reaction did this book spark in you? Comedy, tragedy and acute observation This Michael Dibdin masterpiece is beautifully rendered by Michael Kitchen's precise and understated performance.