After beginning his career as an author with a Sherlock Hol-mes pastiche in the late 1970s, Michael Dibdin went to Italy and spent several years teaching in Perugia, and reemerged as a crimewriter in the 1980s with the creation of the Venetian detective, Aurelio Zen.

The protagonist of ten of Dibdin’s extant novels (and of a further one to be published in the summer), Zen garnered an enthusiastic following from discriminating aficionados of the detective genre, for his somewhat inscrutable qualities as a man and professional.

Dibdin once said of his creation: “He’s a friend I like, but I feel I don’t know terribly well. He’s capable of surprising me. In fact, in each new book that I write he usually does surprise me at some point.”

Yet Zen, who remained very much an outsider in his native city, and solved most of his murder mysteries travelling to places far from it, had, perhaps, something of Dibdin’s own make-up in him. Dibdin’s professional life was somewhat peripatetic. Born in England, brought up in Northern Ireland, educated in Sussex and Canada, and then teaching in Italy, Dibdin had lived for the past dozen years in Seattle with his American third wife.

There, his American debut, with a nonZen novel, Dark Spectre (1995), the first to be fronted by a woman detective, was perhaps his sternest examination. Transatlantic fans of the FBI procedural novel are a breed that requires to be satisfied in the authenticity of the minutest details. Dibdin passed this exacting test with flying colours.

But his successful translation to America did not cause him to desert his old friend Zen. Dibdin made regular return visits to Italy to refresh himself on detail, and Zen remained the protagonist of a continuing output of novels.

Michael John Dibdin was born in Wolverhampton in 1947. His father, an academic physicist, moved to a post in Northern Ireland, and Dibdin went to school in Lisburn. From Ulster he went to Sussex University, where he read English, and then on to Canada, where he took an MA at the University of Alberta, where he began writing. After a couple of attempts to publish a “literary” novel, Dibdin broke into print in 1978 with the Conan Doyle pastiche The Last Sherlock Hol-mes Story, in which the great detective is resurrected to help in the Jack the Ripper investigation. This showed Dibdin that he could earn money from writing. But he did not want to continue in the pastiche vein — though he was later to produce another, this time of Agatha Christie, with The Dying of the Light (1993).

In the meantime he decided to earn his living teaching English in Italy, and found a congenial berth in the lovely Um-brian city of Perugia, where he taught at the university. This gave him an insight into the labyrinthine world of Italian university politcs, and he later became curious about the ethos of the country’s police. “Still basically governed by laws passed by Mussolini”, was the conclusion he came to.

But in the process the seeds of Aurelio Zen were germinating. Zen, however, was not the subject of his next published novel. This, rather, was Robert Browning who takes a break from his poetic muse and turns detective in A Full Rich Death, which appeared in 1986.

Zen made his first appearance in Ratking(1988), in which the Venetian detective finds himself investigating a kidnapping involving one of Italy’ richest and most influential families. The book triumphantly established Dibdin’s creation — a man with a profoundly Mediterranean sense of the limits of the possible in police work. It won him a Golden Dagger Award for the best crime novel of the year. It was followed at regular intervals by Vendetta (1990), Cabal (1992) and Dead Lagoon (1994).

Dibdin liked to alternate a Zen novel with one on a different theme, though this was not always possible when his “friend” was at the forefront of his thoughts, and a Zen book might be followed immediately by another, as happened with Così Fan Tutti (1996) and A Long Finish (1998). NonZen novels included The Tryst (1989) and Dirty Tricks (1991), both palpably set in “Thatcher’s Britain”, and providing satirical comment on the social and political ethos of the country in the 1980s, as a backdrop to suspense-filled tales.

The North American debut, Dark Spectre, linked a spate of apparently motiveless murders throughout the US with a religious sect dedicated to the study of William Blake’s poetry as the basis for its ideas. A well-read man, as his academic background might have suggested, Dibdin loved to yoke such bizarre notions together in his stories.

He was also no mean scholar of his chosen genre, and edited The Picador Book of Crime Writing (1993) and The Vintage Book of Classic Crime (1997).

Thanksgiving (2000), another US-set novel, involved the supernatural, in a novel of crime-related mental tensions. But Zen remained the staple, and his last three titles were devoted to his favoured protagonist. Another, End Games, is to be published in July.

Dibdin was awarded the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policiãre in 1994.

He married, first, in 1971, Benita Mitbrodt. The marriage was dissolved in 1986 and he married in 1987 Sybil Sheringham. The marriage was dissolved in 1995 and he married in 1997 Kathrine Beck. He is survived by her, by a daughter from each of his first two marriages and by three stepchildren.

Michael Dibdin, writer, was born on March 21, 1947. He died after a short illness on March 30, 2007, aged 60