Giorgio Scerbanenco

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Giorgio Scerbanenco (birth name in Russian Владимир Щербаненко, in Ukrainian Володимир Щербаненко) was an Italian crime writer.

He was born in Kiev, in what was then the Russian Empire, on 28 July 1911. At an early age, his family immigrated to Rome (Scerbanenco's father was Russian, his mother was Italian), and then he moved to Milan when he was 18 years old.

He found work as a freelance writer for many Italian magazines, chief among them Anna Bella before becoming a novelist. His first productions were detective novels set in the u.s. and clearly inspired by the works of Edgar Wallace and S.S. Van Dine signed with an English-sounding pen name. While Scerbanenco wrote in several genres, he is famous in Italy for his crime and detective novels, many of which have been dramatized in Italian film and television [1]. These stories include his series of novels having as main character Duca Lamberti, a physician struck off the medical register for having performed a euthanasia, and turned detective (Venere privata - Private Venus, 1966; Traditori di tutti - Betrayers of All, 1966; I ragazzi del massacro - The Boys of the Massacre, 1968; I milanesi ammazzano al sabato - The Milanese do kill on Saturday, 1969) and Sei giorni di preavviso (Six Days of Notice).

A frail, timid man, his style was notable for the realistic way in which conveyed and evoked the helplessness and despair of weak people being cruelly victimized, bordering luridness (Duca Lamberti's would-be girlfriend being horribly scarred with a razor, a social worker being raped and killed by her dropout students, the father of a mentally handicapped girl finding her abused and killed...).

His depiction of female characters is quite convincing and less stereotyped than one would expect, evidently thanks to the years of experience in answering to the letters of women magazines' readers.

At odds with his placid, remissive ways was his virulent and over-the-top anti-communism which evidently stemmed from the trauma of losing his father during the Russian revolution, the trauma of exile and the meager life in Rome which followed it. This odd trait helped his popularity among Italian low and middle bourgeousie, who felt reinforced in their social prejudices, but hampered his critical success in Italy; international critics (especially in France) did overlook this facet of his style and praised him when at home he was considered nothing more than a genre writer.

His writing, in the best known books, is curiously Milanocentric, seldom if ever referencing other cities and regions of Italy, showing a degree of sympathy and appreciation for the Lombard city and its inhabitants which is rarely to be found in other writers. While denouncing the evils of the rampant consumeristic and greedy way of life taking hold from the 60s onward Scerbanenco always has a warm word for the peaceful, quiet, hard-working milanese.

This can stem from the relief and gratitude he felt when managing to find himself a secure and comfortable place in Milan's publishing business after the lean and hard times and frustrations he experienced in Rome.

He died of a heart attack in Milan on 27 October 1969.