Giorgio Scerbanenco was born in Kiev in 1911 to a Ukrainian
father and an Italian mother, grew up in Rome, and moved to Milan
at the age of eighteen. In the 1930s, he worked as a journalist and
attempted some early forays into fiction. In 1943, as German forces
advanced on the city,
Scerbanenco escaped over the Alps to
Switzerland, carrying nothing but a hundred pages of a new novel he
was working on. He returned to Milan in 1945 and resumed his
prolific career, writing for women's magazines, including a very
popular advice-for-the-lovelorn column, and publishing dozens of
novels and short stories. But he is best known for the four books
he wrote at the end of his life that make up the Milano Quartet, A
Private Venus, Traitors to All, The Boys of the Massacre, and The
Milanese Kill on Saturdays. Scerbanenco drew on his experiences as
an orderly for the Milan Red Cross in the 1930s to create his
protagonist Duca Lamberti, a disbarred doctor; it was during this
period that he came to know another, more desperate side of his
adopted city. The quartet of novels was immediately hailed as noir
classics, and on its publication in 1966, Traitors to All received
the most prestigious European crime prize, the Grand Prix de
Littérature Policière. The annual prize for the best Italian crime
novel, the Premio Scerbanenco, is named after him. He died in 1969
in Milan.
Howard Curtis translates books from French, Italian, and
Spanish, and was awarded the John Florio Prize in 2004 as well as
the Europa Campiello Literary Prize in 2010.
Praise for Giorgio Scerbanenco "[A Private Venus] has just been
released . . . in a crackling new translation by Howard Curtis. I
read it in a single sitting . . . Scerbanenco was a trailblazing
radical who pulled the mask off a whole era." --John Powers, NPR's
Fresh Air "Compelling." --The Wall Street Journal "A gem . . . A
vivid portrait of Milan's seamy underbelly . . . Scerbanenco
reveals Duca Lamberti to us; in doing so, he also unveils the
Italian hardboiled hero."
--Crime Fiction Lover "Scerbanenco's dark, moody novels have much
in common with the darkest of Scandinavian crime fiction . . . This
forgotten noir classic from 1966 is finally available in
translation. That's good news!"
--Library Journal "There is courage in his books, the courage to
call things by their name . . . No filters shield you from the
reality, which is as desperate, fierce, and stark as in the best
novels of James Ellroy or Jim Thompson."
--Carlo Lucarelli "[Scerbanenco can be] as dark as Leonardo
Sciascia, as deadpan realistic as Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, as
probing in his observation of people as Simenon, as humane as
Camilleri, as noir as Manchette . . . but with a dark, dark humor
all his own."
--Detectives Beyond Borders "The Duca Lamberti novels are
world-class noir, and their publication in English is long, long
overdue."
--The Complete Review
"A blast from the past, a sleek, stripped-down reminder of the
fast, brutal days of Continental noir."
--Kirkus
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