Dirty Tricks

Michael Dibdin

Some writers like to freshen up a long-running detective series with one-off pieces of fiction in between. Michael Dibdin is one of those (his detective is of course Aurelio Zen the Italian detective). Dirty Tricks was the first Zenless Dibdin I'd picked up and it sounded like a good holiday read.

The plot is this. Reasonably normal guy, a teacher at one of those EFL schools which soak up miserable French and Spanish teenagers in the summer, gets involved with a well-off (but in teacher's eyes, irredeemably vulgar) couple. The chap half of the couple dies in mysterious circumstances and teacher marries the dim (but sexually athletic) wife for her money. Teacher goes on to have increasingly preposterous adventures involving more mysterious deaths, kidnappings and contract killings. It's supposed to be a dark comedy, I guess, but the dark bits aren't dark (or convincing) enough and the comic bits just aren't all that funny. Perhaps Dibdin should stick with Zen.

I read this on holiday cycling in Ireland last week and, since reducing weight-in-your-panniers is a priority when you're cycling, I donated Dirty Tricks to the B&B lady at one of our stops. "Dirty Tricks?" said the nice lady. "Ooh, is it a dirty book?" (think delicious Irish accent at this point). I admitted that there was some naughtiness involved but warned it was more of a thriller. Ignoring my caution, the nice lady beamed and said her "Ronnie" would love the "dirty book". Ronnie is going to be disappointed, and on several counts.