Dibdin has a well-deserved reputation as one of Britain’s most stylish crime writers. His earliest novels were skilful pastiches: one brought together Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper; another had Robert Browning sleuthing in Victorian Florence. Ratking, which won the CWA’s Gold Dagger, introduced his Italian series detective Aurelio Zen. A later Zen book, Cosi Fan Tutti, lifts the plot of Mozart’s opera, reverses one or two genders and sets it with typical panache in contemporary Naples.
Dibdin’s other novels include The Tryst, a dark study of the borders of madness; The Dying of the Light, a homage to the traditional whodunnit, set in a ghastly old people’s home; and Dirty Tricks, in which an anonymous narrator leaves a trail of corpses through modern Oxford.