Giorgio Scerbanenco was born in
Kyiv, in what was then the
Russian Empire. 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. He found work as a
freelance writer for many Italian magazines, chief among them
Annabella before becoming a novelist. 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. 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 . These include the series of novels with main character
Duca Lamberti, a physician struck off the register for having performed
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. He died of a heart attack in
Milan on 27 October 1969. As well as in Milan, the writer lived for a long period in
Lignano Sabbiadoro, a town on the
Adriatic Sea in
Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The town holds his archive. == Style ==