Michael Dibdin was born in Wolverhampton as the son of a physics teacher. After Sussex University, where he studied English, he went for a course to Canada. Through misconduct he was thrown out of this course. He drifted from job to job, started his own business which went broke. He started to write but no publisher accepted his books. In the Seventies he wrote a 'Sherlock Holmes' novel which was readily published, The Last Sherlock Holmes Story.
In 1979 his first wife left him to return to Canada. Dibdin went to Italy and became an English teacher. In the Eighties he created his popular hero 'Aurelio Zen', an Italian police inspector. In 1994 his second marriage failed. He moved to Seattle, where he lived with the American detective story writer, Katherine Beck.