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snappy, staccato exchanges between characters engaged in dramatic
action. Higgins, on the other hand, typically wrote not so much dialogue
as a series of monologues, characters rambling on discursively, revealing
as much about themselves as about the events they describe. His books
move in sweeping, slowly inclining curves, like a highway gradually wind-
ing its way up a mountain, moving in one direction without ever seeming
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to point there. Gleaning information from Higgins speakers whether
it s the criminal lowlifes in Eddie Coyle, the small-time lawyers in the
Jerry Kennedy novels, or the Boston politicians in A Change of Gravity
(1997) is like gleaning information in life: you piece it together slowly,
often learning more from the tangents a speaker follows than from any
direct answers he or she might give.
Unlike other crime-fiction innovators, Higgins did not transform the
genre. Why? Because no one else has ever been able to do what he did:
tell a story not through action in the present but almost entirely through
backstory, characters commenting on what happened in the past. Higgins
is one of the few successful crime novelists who rarely describes a crime
as it is occurring, although (as if to show he could do it if he wanted to)
his last novel includes a vivid, chillingly precise description of a real-time
killing. Usually, however, we hear only postmortem discussion, remind-
ing us again and again that events are less important than how we react
to them.
Attempting to copy this technique is a surefire method for accumu-
lating publishers rejection slips. Among mystery writers, only Higgins
could make it work consistently, and it s satisfying to discover that he did
it as well in his last novel as in his first. In At End of Day, he returns to
the Boston criminal underworld that has served him so well throughout
his career. The novel tells the story of the undoing of a Boston mobster,
Arthur McKeon, but much of what we learn about McKeon and his top
henchman, Nick Cistaro, we hear at dinner parties gatherings at which
the two underworld figures break bread with two FBI agents. This unholy
alliance is at the heart of Higgins tale: Is it corruption to attempt to con-
tain the Mafia by protecting their rivals or is it creative policing? Higgins
doesn t give us an answer, of course, but he makes the question a human
one by showing us how mobsters and FBI agents think and how similar
they are to one another.
Higgins has always been a writer who respected work well done a
low-rent lawyer digging into a case, a car thief plying his trade shrewdly,
a mobster outthinking his rivals. There is a moral dimension to his work,
too, but it grows out of the details and the interactions between people,
and it is never a conventional view. At the end of his too-few days, Higgins
should be remembered not only for talking his special talk but also for
the way he used that talk to create context rich, ambiguous, full-bodied
context.
Booklist, February 15, 2000
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MICHAEL DIBDIN
WITH THE DEATH OF Michael Dibdin on March 30, 2007, crime
fiction lost one of its most distinctive voices. It s entirely fair to say that
Dibdin s Inspector Aurelio Zen series, which debuted in 1988 with Rat-
king, launched what eventually would become the still-flourishing renais-
sance of the Italian crime novel. Obviously, there were Italian mysteries
before Zen, written by Italians, of course, but also by expats the formi-
dable Magdalen Nabb jumps quickly to mind but with Zen came the
distinctive world-weariness that eventually would define the new Euro-
pean procedural, not only in Italy but also in Scandinavia. Zen s weari-
ness comes as much from within the justice system as without; he is adept
at battling bureaucrats but is always on the verge of being overwhelmed
by the complex web of deceit and corruption that surrounds him. But
unlike the American hard-boiled hero even the most cynical of whom
tend to be squishy idealists at the core Zen is perfectly OK with a cor-
rupt world. A typical Zen novel finds the inspector doing his level best
to play the system rubber-stamping cases with the convenient solution,
double-dipping if possible, taking long lunches. Alas, this approach never
quite works. Although he believes utterly in the maxim that a policeman
must never think you have any hope of ever achieving anything, Zen
cannot resist the lure of an undiscovered fact. And it is from those facts,
once discovered, that Dibdin s Zen novels grow.
Appropriately, the path of Zen s career moves ever downward. The
more he fails to sweep his undiscovered facts under the rug, the more
alienated he becomes from the politicos who run the Italian police sys-
tem, and the more they, in turn, attempt to sweep Zen under the rug,
sending him on one apparently dead-end assignment after another to far-
flung outposts around Italy, well away from his nominal home base in
Rome. As this pattern becomes established, a funny thing happens to the
series: the tone changes dramatically, from the hard-edged neo-noir of
the early novels Ratking, Vendetta, Cabal, and Dead Lagoon (which
returns him to his Venice home) to a peculiar black comedy, which
often merges into a kind of dark farce.
This daring shift in tone is announced in Cosi Fan Tutti, which finds
Zen, typically in the dog house, assigned to the backwaters of Naples,
where he lands in the middle of a comic opera. Complete with chap-
ter titles lifted from those in the libretto to Mozart s Cosi, the plot of this
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absurdist farce hinges, like the opera, on lovers testing the fidelity of their
mates. And, yet, just as we wonder if Dibdin hasn t lost it all together,
throwing his neo-noir hero into opera buffa, we recognize all the signature
elements of Zen s world: an enormous muddle encompassing bureau-
crats, criminals, friends, and lovers. Patching together quotes from two
philosophers, Zen observes in the novel s last pages that in life every-
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