A Private Venus

"A noir writer richly deserving rediscovery."
—Publishers Weekly

The book that gave birth to Italian noir . . .

Milan, 1966: When Dr. Duca Lamberti is released from prison, he’s lost his medical license and his options are few. But thanks to an old connection, he lands a job, although it’s a tricky one: guarding the alcoholic son of a plastics millionaire.

But Lamberti soon discovers that the young man has a terrible secret, rooted in the mysterious death of a beautiful woman on the gritty side of town. The fast cars, high fashion, and chic nightclubs of glitzy and swinging Milan conceal a dirty reality . . . This is no dolce vita.

A Private Venus marks the beginning of Italian noir: Giorgio Scerbanenco pioneered a new type of novel that trained its gaze on the crime and desperation that roiled under prosperous Italian society in the 1960s. And at the heart of this book is Duca Lamberti, an unforgettable protagonist: obsessive, world-weary, unconventional in his methods, and trying hard not to make ?another fatal mistake.

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 Litterature Policiere. 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.