Giorgio Scerbanenco
I ragazzi del massacro

I had put the word EIRE in the back of my mind I don't know how many years ago; for me, it was something from middle school geography, memories from the late eighties, like Maurizio Seymandi or Edu and Skoro, stuff that thinking about now, I don't know if I dreamt it or if it actually existed.

Yet the word EIRE stubbornly continued to exist and be used even though I had forgotten about it. I checked on the internet just to be sure, and it reappeared in my life after thirty-something years and two hundred pages of a crime novel, during a lesson from a young teacher at an evening school for troubled kids.

And the subsequent pages where the young teacher is thrown to the enhanced fury of her students have taken that word from my carefree memories and drenched it in entirely different connotations.

A few years ago, a comment from Confaloni on one of my reviews put me on the trail of Scerbanenco. It was a response to my challenge: “Writing a good detective story set in Milan, now that is quite a task...”

The Milan I found in the novels of the series featuring Duca Lamberti is indeed far from the city of “pheeeega,” of money, of cocaine&belen, that I have in mind.

It is hard, barren, filthy, poor... hopeless, it reminds me a bit of the Vallette and barrierana areas of Turin.

The first novel I read from the aforementioned series, “Venere Privata,” left me with a bit of bitterness. Maybe I was expecting a nice intricate mystery to solve and found nothing of the sort, and the character of Duca Lamberti seemed too forced to me, too much of a caricature of Philip Marlowe.

While reading “I ragazzi del massacro,” I believe I understood Duca Lamberti a bit better, a struck-off doctor put in jail for performing euthanasia on his patient, who, after getting out of jail, became a policeman.

A raw character for sure, but not as cool as Philip Marlowe, and maybe because of this, a bit more real, with many contradictions and insecurities, and a bit of mean and selfish jerkiness, which makes him consider it acceptable to put the success of his endeavours before the dangers and tribulations of people he cares about.

Cris, I'm replying here even though I'm not sure if it's the right way: as I said, “Venere Privata” didn't impress me much, I liked this one much more, Scerbanenco was certainly a nice discovery, but there are "buts" for me as well.