Woman of the Month: Maddy Magellan

Maddy Magellan from Jonathan Creek

Having done this Woman of the Month project for over ten years now, I’m surprised that Maddy Magellan has never come up before, as she truly is one of my favourite characters of all time. A few weeks ago I had Jonathan Creek playing as background noise while I did other things, and I was reminded again of just how vivacious she is.

Sometimes the best fictional characters aren’t necessarily the ones you want to meet in real life. Maddy is bad tempered and dishonest, mercurial and fast talking; ruthlessly ambitious in her pursuit of a story and not above tapping into people’s private phone messages or pretending to be a police officer in order to gain access to a crime scene.

She’s everything we hate about investigative journalists, but damn it if she isn’t fun to watch. More importantly, she has a social conscience. The crime exposés she writes are about miscarriages of justice, and – as she frequently likes to point out – she doesn’t get paid much for them. When the time comes to glean more of her family history, we get a sense of why she’s drawn to this particular subject matter, and she’s definitely someone you want on your side if you’re ever the victim of an impossible crime (and not just because she’s essentially the handler of Jonathan Creek, lateral thinker extraordinaire).

It’s really the sheer levels of gumption and verve that Carolyn Quentin brings to the role which makes her so enjoyable as a character. We couldn’t condone half of what she does as appropriate in real life, but her sheer audacity – breaking into houses, reading people’s diaries, going through garbage bags, lying about being Jewish, recruiting a man to impersonate a police officer in order to extract information from her close-lipped colleague – is something to behold. At one point while under arrest she frets that she’ll be injected with a truth serum. Jonathan reassures her: “it wouldn’t stand a chance.”

The show certainly lost something when Quentin left to have a baby, and then for whatever reason, never brought back again. Because the Carla Borrego mysteries are still pretty good, I include them whenever I do a rewatch, but always finish things off with “The Black Canary,” a standalone Christmas Special that I can pretend takes place after Maddy returns from America, ready to pick things up where she left off with Jonathan.

Assertive and confident and quick-witted and unapologetic, she’s someone we could never be… but would secretly like to.