The recent BBC adaption of novels featuring the improbably named Italian detective Aurelio Zen makes the name of the late Michael Dibdin topical again.

Not one to miss an opportunity, here is a review of a non-Zen novel set in England which I read a while back.

Dirty Tricks by Michael Dibdin (1991)

There is precious little gallantry in Dibdin’s fictional world. His male lead (never named) is a shiftless shit of the first order; but he is good company. The action takes place among Oxford’s middlebrow executive set where our ‘hero’ is initially  a fish out of water.

He is a low paid, bicycle riding EFL teacher surrounded by well healed BMW drivers. When a bored businessman’s wife, Karen Parsons, comes on to him at a dinner party a series of dark but credible events are set in motion.

He is nothing if not an opportunist. He’s driven by personal ambition rather than any deep felt emotion – perfect qualities among the unscrupulous go-getters for whom selfishness is a sign of maturity. These characters are archetype products of the then new realism that was the modus operandi of Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government. The narrator’s own youthful radicalism has long since been washed away in the entrepreneurial tide. He realises that he too must make a fast buck before the bubble bursts. In a world of dog eat dog he plans to be at the top table.

He seizes the chance to leapfrog to a higher social sphere whilst engaging in rampant sex with his new-found benefactress. There are shades of Emile Zola’s Thérèse Racquin in the raw explicitness of their passion and in the convenient demise of Karen Parson’s husband (drowning in a boating accident).

Dibdin’s protagonist is both misanthropic and misogynistic. The reflects on “ the pain that lies behind the hatred we can all feel for women, our need to hurt them”. He is no new man!

Dibdin’s TEFL anecdotes are sharp and funny, as are his jibes at the snobberies inherent in the British class system. His characters are stereotypical and sketchy rather than deeply drawn. This allows the plot to unfold at a cracking pace with enough twists to keep the reader hooked. The most subversive aspect of the novel is that the manipulative central character is so convincingly unrepentive.  The facts are set before the reader in a first person narrative that is akin to a formal confession.

In the genre of contemporary crime fiction this novel is unusual in that there is an absence of murders and a lack of whodunit intrigue. Instead we are merely privy to a couple of violent deaths, a vicious revenge-driven dose of GBH and a clever frame-up.

Ultimately, one is forced to conclude that the guilt of the central character is more moral than criminal.

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