The Back Page: Magdalen Nabb.
Ott, Bill (author).
FEATURE. First published February 15, 2008 (Booklist).
It’s been a rough couple of years for fans of the international crime novel. First, Israeli writer Batya Gur, author of the groundbreaking Michael Ohayon series, starring the brooding Jeruslaem police detective, died of cancer at only 58 in 2005; then Michael Dibdin, author of another landmark series starring a brooding detective, Italian investigator Aurelio Zen, died in March of last year, a few days after his sixtieth birthday. And more recently, on August 18, Magdalen Nabb, also author of a superb Italian crime series, died in Florence, again at 60. (On a personal note, I had another reason to be dismayed by the death of three of my favorite crime writers: like all of them, I was born in 1947.)
Nabb came to crime writing fairly late in life. After a divorce, she left her native England and moved to Florence with a young son in tow. A trained artist, she was working as a potter at a studio near Florence when she noticed the carabinieri officer, tears streaming from his eyes, apparently the result of an allergy, who would become the model for her fictional creation, Marshal Salvatore Guarnaccia. The first Guarnaccia novel, Death of an Englishman, appeared in 1981 and was followed at regular intervals by 13 more, most of which were based on real crimes committed in Florence. The last of the series, Vita Nuova, to be published posthumously in June, will be reviewed in our March 1, 2008, issue. In addition to crime fiction, Nabb wrote numerous children’s books, including 11 novels in the popular Josie Smith series.
Nabb’s mysteries were never as popular in the U.S. as Gur’s and Dibdin’s, probably because those authors’ world-weary protagonists helped signal an essential shift in the nature of the international crime story, away from the Georges Simenon model and toward a global updating of the American hard-boiled hero. But if Nabb’s Guarnaccia novels remained in the Simenon style (Simenon, in fact, was a big fan of Nabb’s), they still prepared the soil for Dibdin and Donna Leon, whose Guido Brunetti novels, along with Dibdin’s Zen series, are often credited with launching what many have called the renaissance of Italian crime fiction.
Though he shares Aurelio Zen’s melancholy and Guido Brunetti’s love of family, Nabb’s Guarnaccia is very different from either of those heroes. He is not nearly as sophisticated as they are and is far less cynical, much more of an ordinary man. And, above all, he is not a detective, not renowned for his investigative abilities. No, Guarnaccia is essentially a street cop; even with the rank of marshal in the carabinieri, he is a relatively minor cog in the massive bureaucracy that is Italy’s law-enforcement system. The carabinieri, an arm of the military, provide the kind of day-to-day policing that Americans associate with uniformed beat cops, while serious investigatory work is usually the province of the Polizia di Stato (state police), or what we would call plainclothes detectives. Typically, the heroes of Italian crime series are members of the Polizia di Stato, and the carabinieri, when they appear in novels at all, are usually inefficient, corrupt, or both-institutional roadblocks around which freewheeling mavericks such as Aurelio Zen or Guido Brunetti must steer.
The idea of a crime series starring a carabinieri marshal, therefore, is in itself a bit of a shock. If Guarnaccia has an antecedent, it would be Columbo, but even he was a detective. Like Columbo, Guarnaccia is uninspiring at first glance, utterly self-effacing, and, as a Sicilian stationed in Florence, an outsider, seen by most of his superiors and many of those he encounters as a slow, even dim-witted southerner (Columbo, of course, is viewed in much the same manner by the Los Angeles elite with whom he often spars). Usually in uniform, Guarnaccia lacks Columbo’s rumpled raincoat as a symbol of his apparent inadequacy, but he makes up for it with his own personal quirk, the same allergy to sunlight that Nabb noticed on the officer that became her model. With his eyes likely to tear up at any moment, Guarnaccia is constantly putting on dark glasses, even indoors (a weeping cop hardly inspires confidence).
Over the 14 Guarnaccia novels, Nabb developed her hero into a working-man’s Maigret, a bit of a plodder, yes, but hypersensitive to human nuance and to the sometimes overwhelming sadness that lurks beneath the surface of daily life (Guarnaccia’s tears aren’t always caused by his allergies). Handled less subtly, the marshal might have become a sentimental figure, but Nabb places him in an utterly unsentimental world, a place where his sensitivity typically leads to his own heartbreak rather than others’ salvation. If you love Italian mysteries, but you have avoided Nabb, thinking she was either too cozy or too Old World, you’ve made a big mistake, but one that’s easy to remedy. Presuming there are no other Nabb novels to be published posthumously, her oeuvre has reached a sadly premature ending point, but there are still 14 Guarnaccias in print and waiting for new readers. Here’s hoping they find them.
