Crime fiction is driven by death, but the guaranteed survival of the detective counters the morbidity of the form. So it’s unsettling beyond the usual effects of the genre to read a book by a writer who has recently died.
The shadow of mortality and mourning that is a basic requirement of mysteries is doubled in the case of End Games, Michael Dibdin’s 11th novel about the Italian cop Aurelio Zen, because the advance copies began to circulate just after the news of the writer’s death on March 30, nine days after his 60th birthday.
more from The Guardian here.