Join this Discussion Also, submit your poetry in the Poet's Corner , hosted by volunteers from the League of Canadian Poets. Venetian detective Aurelio Zen was born when Michael Dibdin got fired from an Italian university for no good reason.
Revenge tastes sweet.
The uncle he barely knew died in the 1970s, bequeathing to Dibdin's family a sprawling house in west London. For a man then in his late 20s, with no visible means of gainful employment, this invitation to free rent was a blessing not to be rejected. The unremembered friend from Canada asked Dibdin to escort him on a tour of Jack the Ripper locations in London. As it happened, his wife's bedside reading at the time concerned another prominent 19th-century figure of sorts, one Sherlock Holmes. Dibdin had already written two and a half unpublished novels and was more or less convinced that wherever his future might lie, it was not in literature.