The author is Michael Dibdin (1947-2007), and I came across him while reading up about Donna Leon's Death in a Strange Country.

Dead Lagoon was originally published in 1994; however, I read it courtesy of the Internet Archive, and the only version available was in French (Lagune Morte, translated by Pierre Guglielmina, and published in 1996).



As was the case with Donna Leon, here again we have an anglophone author creating an Italian police officer. This time, our man is Aurelio Zen; he works with the Criminalpol in Rome; and while the different books of the series have him turning up in various parts of Italy, this one (the fourth) sees him returning to Venice, which is the city where he was born.

My question-marks are therefore similar to those discussed in my post on Death in a Strange Country. There's the co-opting of a very different viewpoint; and there's scene-setting that runs very close to stereotyping (in this book, for example, we open with a wild riff involving, sequentially, a man out in a small boat on the "dead lagoon", who runs across a newly minted corpse on Venice's ossuary island of Sant’Ariano; a mad old countess, who lives in an elegant palazzo, often sees ghosts, and this evening returns home to encounter a skeleton; and two muffled men being quietly rowed along the canal in the middle of the night -- it's all very atmospheric, but it's somehow what we have come to expect from Venice...).


Palembang, Sumatra, Indonesia: Another contender for the Venice of the East

Zen, while ostensibly investigating the persecution of the old countess, is actually trying to find out what happened to one Ivan Durridge, an American, who has gone missing. The investigation into his fate seems to have stalled, so some American contacts have prevailed upon Zen to take a little extra money to do some clandestine ferreting around (totally illegal, of course).

The inter-related cases become increasingly murky, as drug dealers, corrupt police officers, and on-the-make politicians put obstacles in Zen's way at every turn. And the ending is very bleak (a good thing, in my opinion). No-one is brought to justice. The shady politician will probably be elected. Zen ends up responsible for the deaths of two people (by doggedly pursuing his purpose at the expense of looking ahead to possible implications). He has been betrayed by an old family friend, Cristiana, and the liaison with this woman has put at risk his relationship with Tania (still back in Rome). And whereas at one point he longs to come back to Venice, his native city, now he feels repulsed by it all. "I'm sorry," he replies to the tourist who asks him the way right at the end, "I'm a stranger here too."



Like Leon, Dibdin does not glamorize the watery world of Venice. We're told here too about the rubbish in the canals, the smelly mud, and the septic tanks (pozzi neri). Residents recount a catalogue of woes that includes empty houses, high rents, and no work. At one point, Zen reflects: "Returning would be to damn himself to a sort of spiritual incest. Nothing new could any longer happen here, nothing real... This city was in the process of being extinguished... In 50 years there would not be any more Venetians."

Such issues provide plenty of grist for the independence-for-Venice brigade. A shrinking Venice, with rising rents and more outsiders, should be a signal, say the nationalists, for Venetians to take charge of their destiny. Twenty million visitors, we're told, and yet Venice doesn't benefit: "Most of them spend less than a day in the city..." (Oops... Pangs of guilt here, thinking about our November itinerary, when we're down to spend just a few hours in La Serenissima...) "That kind of tourism," the complaint continues, "is like the acqua alta, which inundates the whole city, makes daily life impossible, and when it goes, leaves nothing but shit!" The answer, then, should be a visa for Venice...

In the early 1990s, there's also a separatist model just across the water in Croatia... Dal Maschio, leader of the secessionist party Nuova Repubblica Veneta, proclaims: "Venice has always been different! Istria and the Dalmatian coast have always been closer to us than Verona; Corfu and the Aegean more familiar than Milan; Rome no less strange than Constantinople. When others look inwards, our eyes look out to sea. This difference is our heritage and our glory... We will make this city a free port, we will resume our old relations with the new republics on the Dalmatian coast, we will offer businesses financial and commercial advantages, in order to make Venice once again the essential interface between the east Mediterranean coast and northern Europe."

He challenges Zen, in the kind of language beloved of all right-wingers: "Sooner or later, you're going to have to choose... The new Europe won't be the place for cosmopolitanism and wandering. It will be covered with frontiers, both geographical and ideological, and they will be strictly guarded... There are no real friends without real enemies. Without hating what we are not we can't love what we are... The people who deny these truths deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birth, even their existence! They won't easily be forgiven."

It's hard to know how entrenched the independence aspiration is among modern-day Venetians. Whereas an unofficial referendum in 2014 had 89 percent of the 2.1 million participating voters opting for independence from Italy (out of a possible 3.7 million eligible voters), an official referendum in 2019 fizzled after failing to gain even the necessary 50 per cent quorum.



Whatever the rights and wrongs of Venice's status, Dibdin has a lot to say both about regional and national politics and society. Corruption and the ensuing anti-corruption drives are a big theme (there's some useful background here).

Many police officers think the campaign to root out venal practices has gone too far. "Just like in Russia," says Zen. "Maybe the old system was terrible, but at least it worked." Anti-corruption moves, meanwhile, are holding everything up (no-one will take bribes any more, so nothing gets done). “Total chaos,” says Zen's colleague, Aldo Valentini: "Every day it turns out that another big name, someone you would have sworn was absolutely untouchable, is under investigation on charges ranging from corruption to association with the Mafia. Result, no one dares do a friend a favour any more. Nothing would please me more than to see this country turn into a paradise of moral probity, but how the hell are we supposed to get by in the meantime?" It's all very reminiscent of the climate described in Elena Ferrante's The Lost Child.

Also interesting, given the date of publication, is Durridge's back-story. He was born Duric, in Sarajevo, in 1919. He chose the wrong side to support in WWII, so when Tito's partisans seized power in Yugoslavia, the Duric family fled. They migrated to the US, and became very rich. But Duric/Durridge is said to have a long list of WWII atrocities on his record-sheet, and -- taking advantage of the conflict raging after the collapse of Yugoslavia -- has been supplying arms to Bosnian Serbs.



So the setting is quite intriguing. But a major problem for me was that I didn't like Zen much... He's a philanderer; he's self-centred; he pays no attention to the possible consequences of his actions; AND -- worst of all -- he threw his broken old kettle into the CANAL (in general, there are far too many people dropping detritus into the waterways...).

I totally understand I'm in the minority here. For Jasper Rees, for example, Zen is "the most fascinating of Euro-cops solving crime in print", and Dibdin tells him in an interview that the character has multi-dimensional origins: "[Zen is] partly based on Italians I know, partly on a certain perception I have of what Italian bureaucrats are like, and partly on me." He reflects "a kind of Mediterranean fatalism about what is achievable and what isn't".

Unlike Leon's Brunetti novels, Dibdin's Zen series has been translated into Italian -- although he's not totally satisfied with the standard of translation: "The problem is really they translated them quite quickly and obviously the translations are correct but there isn't a lot of life in them, particularly in the way the dialogue is translated; maybe they don't grasp the different registers I'm using in English, but they're speaking in a rather stiff Radio 4 afternoon-theatre way in Italian, whereas that's not in fact how cops would talk to each other, for instance; they would talk in a much slangier way."

Bottom line: I would try some more Michael Dibdin, but I would probably head for his non-Zen works, and -- given he has a reputation for being an accomplished stylist, I would opt for English next time.