Giorgio Scerbanenco

At an early age, his family immigrated to Rome (Scerbanenco's father was Ukrainian, his mother was Italian), and then he moved to Milan when he was 18 years old.

His first fiction books were detective novels set in the United States and clearly inspired by the works of Edgar Wallace and S.S. Van Dine signed with an English-sounding pen name.

These include the series of novels with main character Duca Lamberti, a physician struck off the register for having performed a euthanasia, and turned detective (Venere privata - A 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 kill on Saturday, 1969), as well as Sei giorni di preavviso (Six Days of Notice), his first novel.

Scerbanenco was a frail, shy man, and his style was notable for the realistic way in which conveyed and evoked the helplessness and despair of weak people being cruelly victimized.

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.