Duca Lamberti is the main character in four crime novels by the Ukrainian-born Italian writer Giorgio Scerbanenco, conventionally known as the Milano Quartet, published from 1966 to 1969. The son of a police officer, he is a former physician who lost his medical licence after having performed euthanasia, and is approached by a colleague of his deceased father to help with a sensitive investigation in Milan. He eventually becomes an official police detective.[1]
Lamberti appears as a guilt-ridden and cynical misfit in the shadow of the Italian economic boom of the 1960s, and was written as a contrast to the shallowness of the mainstream culture of Milan at the time. He has similarities to the typical detectives of American hardboiled fiction, such as alcoholism, despair, cynicism and misogyny, but unlike them is committed to middle-class family life, although his family is unconventional. He contrasts not only to shallow post-war culture, but also to traditional Italian society, through his family which consists of his sister and her illegitimate child, and his girlfriend who is an eccentric philosophy teacher.[1]
