Fri 5 Sep 2014
Reviewed by Allen J. Hubin: MAGDALEN NABB – The Marshal and the Madwoman.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[6] Comments
Allen J. Hubin
MAGDALEN NABB – The Marshal and the Madwoman. Scribner’s, hardcover, 1988; Penguin, paperback, 1989. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1988.
The [sixth] of Magdalen Nabb’s stories of Florence, Italy, and Marshal Salvatore Guarnaccia is The Marshal and the Madwoman. Nabb writes very well, and offers here several powerfully poignant glimpses of life in that Italian city.
Guarnaccia happens upon Clementina one evening as this woman of the title is engaged in a neighbor-hood shouting match. That night she dies, of murder not well disguised as suicide. The Marshal explores her life, but the traces are all but invisible. He learns about the people who lived near Clementina, and about the effects of a terrible flood some years earlier in Florence. He finds, at last, why a madwoman had to die.
The Marshal is a fine creation, and Nabb paints him here with vibrant strokes.
Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer 1989.
NOTE: A complete criminous bibliography for Magdalen Nabb can be found here in an obituary page for her on this blog at the time of her death in 2007.
September 5th, 2014 at 9:06 pm
Yet another author whose mysteries I’ve never read, and I’ve always meant to. It’s a long list, unfortunately!
September 6th, 2014 at 5:58 pm
Steve
I think there is a television series as well.
Like Mankell’s Wallander these began in the Simenon/ Maigret tradition but soon took off in their own directions. The good news is most of them are short and not difficult reads in the Maigret manner. With the time a relatively fast reader could probably get in two to three a day.
September 6th, 2014 at 7:08 pm
No, no TV series that I’ve been able to find. That’s too bad, too, if I’m right, as it might be a quick easy way to sample the series.
September 6th, 2014 at 9:03 pm
She also wrote a children book series featuring Josie Smith. Josie Smith had a TV series.
September 7th, 2014 at 7:59 am
Thanks, Michael. I don’t know how much readers of this blog will be interested in Josie Smith, but here’s what one source said about her adventures:
“Josie Smith has already starred in several books and her own TV show for Granada television. She’s the child who’s always at loggerheads with her best-friend Eileen, is constantly in trouble, yet invariable comes up smelling of roses.”
If IMDb is to be believed, there were 8 episodes in the series between 1989 and 1992, and they were 5 minutes long.
But with the search leading to IMDb, I kept looking, which I should have done in the first place, and I came up with a British TV movie called THE MARSHAL (1993), a one-off starring Alfred Molina as Marshal Guarnaccia. Here’s the IMDb link, but they don’t have a lot of information about it:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107524/reference
September 7th, 2014 at 8:12 am
Here’s more about the TV movie:
http://www.itnsource.com/shotlist//ITVProgs/1993/04/24/MAM01001/?s=htv
“Sicilian-born marshal Salvatore Guarnaccia (Alfred Molina) is not everyone’s idea of the perfect detective. He’s too large and too slow, and as unconventional as the victim whose death he has been assigned to explain. His superiors often find his individual but effective detection techniques somewhat difficult to understand. During Florence’s August heatwave, he investigates the events that led to the old woman’s murder. Filmed on location in Florence and adapted by Magdalen Nabb from her own novel, The Marshal and the Madwoman.”
Unless I missed it, there’s no mention of the film on her website, or on the Wikipedia page for her.