THE author Michael Dibdin, who lived in Oxford for most of his writing career, has died aged 60 in Seattle, USA.

He was best-known for his Italian detective Aurelio Zen, who battled corruption and violence in a wide variety of idyllic settings, from Perugia and Florence to the Alps and Sicily.

As well as the 11-strong Zen series, in 1991 he brought out the highly-praised Dirty Tricks, a story of greed and betrayal in Thatcherite Britain that satirised Oxford's social jungle.

Its nameless narrator, a teacher of English as a foreign language, moves to Oxford after several years abroad and throws himself into the middle-class party scene with no inhibitions.

His adulterous affair with a friend's wife leads first to the death of the friend, then to the death of the wife, and finally to the death of his boss.

The author had himself spent four years teaching English in Italy, where he met his second wife Sybil Sheringham, who still lives in Oxford.

On returning to Oxford, he lived in Hurst Street, then Headington Quarry, dividing his time between writing and working on dictionaries for Oxford University Press.

In 1988, he introduced readers to Zen in Ratking. Inspired by his time in Italy, it won the Golden Dagger, the highest accolade of the Crime Writers' Association.

He wrote another ten novels starring the anti-heroic detective, including End Games, which will be published posthumously.

Each book is set in a different, scenic part of Italy, and explores the dark side of Berlusconi's Italy, as Zen tackles political financial corruption, petty bureaucracy and also Mafia murders.

Mr Dibdin also reviewed for The Independent newspaper, and edited two collections of crime fiction in the 1990s.

He met his third wife, a mystery writer who uses the pen name KK Beck, at a writers' conference in Spain in 1993, and moved from Oxford to live with her in Seattle, Washington.

He died in the US on March 30 after a short illness.