Magdalen Nabb (1947–2007)

According to her Web site, Magdalen Nabb was born in Church, a moorland village in Lancashire, England. She studied art and, later, pottery which she taught in an English art school whilst exhibiting her own work until 1975 when she moved to Florence, Italy. There, she continued to work on pottery in a majolica studio in Montelupo Fiorentino, a pottery town near Florence, and began writing. It was in Montelupo that she met the model for Marshal Guarnaccia. The town itself, with its tumbledown factories and its wonderful restaurant, are featured in The Marshal and the Murderer. She lived and wrirote in Florence, near enough to the carabinieri station in the Pitti Palace to stroll there regularly and have a chat with the marshal who kept her up to date on crime in the city. She wrote for adults and for children and did occasional journalistic pieces for English, German and Italian papers.