I Bid Farewell to Chief Inspector Gamache

I’ve been a fan of Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache mystery novels for years. I was fascinated by the village of Three Pines in Quebec, so small and out of the way that it can’t be found on most maps. The Villages residents – Olivier and Gabri at the Bistro, the off-the-wall poet Ruth Zardo, artist Clara Morrow, Myrna the bookstore owner, all had their stories on how they came to live there.  

I felt t home with Gamache’s family – his wife Reine-Marie and his grown children. His daughter Annie marries Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache’s second-in-command at the Quebec Surete. And his police team. 

 

From novel to novel, and there are now 20 of them, I’ve followed the characters through personal crises, upheavals, near-death experiences, entanglements in crime, and overall well-done stories. But with No. 18, A World of Curiosities, Penny wallowed personal politics to color the story. I was encouraged with No. 19, The Grey Wolf, because she seemed to be returning to her narrative storyline. 

 

Then came No. 20, the sequel to The Grey Wolf. It’s entitled The Black Wolf. 

 

I have two problems with it. 

 

First, a considerable portion of what was conveyed in The Grey Wolf gets rewritten. What we knew then is not what we find out now. Appearances were deceiving. This happened in a significant way once before in on of Penny’s stories, when a village resident gets caught up in a crime and goes to prison after trial and conviction. In the next novel, what we knew turned out to be untrue, the character is redeemed, and all is well in Three Pines, after all. It happens again with The Black Wolf. It might work as an individual story, but it weakens the overall series. You begin to ask yourself, what else is going to get rewritten? 

 

My more serious problem is that Penny is once again slipping personal politics into the story. She includes the occasional mini-lecture, and the wise characters speak to what’s really right and true. But the heart of the story is the larger part of the problem. Those evil people south of the Canadian border are always up to no good.

 

Louise Penny

What happens is that personal politics overtakes the story. I stopped reading about page 200, just over halfway through. Maybe the story gets better. Maybe the politics goes away. But I decided I didn’t want to find out.

 

The fact is that I’m tired of politics overtaking everything, and that’s especially true for books I buy expecting to read a good story. I did not pay good money to read Louis Penny displaying her wisdom – or her version of wisdom – on current events and issues.  She’s taking pot shots and passing them off as deep insights from her characters. Conservatives are bad. Christians are bad. No one believes in church any more, except perhaps as a place to meet informants (because no one would ever think of going there for any other reason).

 

If you are of a progressive or leftist persuasion, you might think this is fine. I’m not; neither am I of a far-right persuasion. And I don’t think it’s fine. If you as a mystery writer are going to do this, then you need to slap a warning label on the cover.

 

So, I bid farewell to Chief Inspector Gamache. I will miss all the pastries and breads dripping in butter at Olivier and Gabri’s bistro. I won’t be reading about crazy Ruth Zardo the poet and her equally crazy duck Rosa. No more support and words of wisdom from Reine-Maries Gamache. 

 

No more anything from characters I’ve thought of as something like friends. 

 

Related:

 

My review of Kingdom of the Blind.

 

My review of Glass Houses.

 

My review of A Great Reckoning.

 

My review of The Long Way Home.

 

My review of How the Light Gets In.

 

My review of The Beautiful Mystery.

 

My review of The Hangman.

 

My review of Penny’s A Trick of the Light.

 

My review of Penny’s A Fatal Grace.

 

My review of Penny’s Still Life.

 

My review of Penny’s The Cruelest Month.

 

My review of Penny’s A Rule Against Murder.

 

My review of The Brutal Telling.

 

My review of Penny’s Bury Your Dead.

 

My review of A Better Man.

 

My review of All the Devils Are Here.

 

My review of The Madness of Crowds.

 

My review of A World of Curiosities.

 

My review of The Grey Wolf.

Some Monday Readings

 

Your phone is a fake house – Adam Aleksic at The Etymology Nerd.

 

Our Days Are Short – Terry Whalin at the Writing Life.

 

An Autumn View Over London from Westminster Cathedral – A London Inheritance.

 

How to Ask Timeless Questions – Joseph Epstein at The Free Press.

 

Thoughts on Ethan Frome – Michael Connolly at The Imaginative Conservative.

"The Grey Wolf" by Louise Penny

It starts as a series of seemingly unrelated events. Two unrelated people are killed, hundreds of kilometers apart, in the exact same execution style. An elderly visitor leaves a bottle of terrible-tasting liqueur at the bistro in Three Pines. An old coat belonging to Armand Gamache, head of Homicide for Quebec’s Surete, is stolen from his Montreal apartment, and then returned. In a pocket is a list of spices, and a single word – water. Then a young man, an activist for an environmental group, meets with Gamache – and run over in a car inches away from Gamache himself. The driver is later founded murdered. 

Gamache and his team, Jean-Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle Lacoste, will soon learn that they are dealing with a planned terrorist act, designed to destabilize the government, institute a dictatorship, and involving officials at almost the very top of Canada’s political leadership. They will travel to remote monasteries, the Vatican, Washington, D.C., and a remote fishing village in Labrador, desperately trying to determine what’s planned and when.

 

Louise Penny

The Grey Wolf is the 19^th novel in the Armand Gamache series by Canadian author Louise Penny. It’s a gripping, creative fast-paced story, with an ending that keeps the reader on the edge of his seat to the very end. And while it does its predecessor novels proud, very little of the story involves Gamache’s home village of Three Pines and its collection of unusual residents. On the plus side, it avoids the trap its predecessor novel, A World of Curiosities, fell into, when we were given a bit too much of the author’s personal politics.

 

What it does have, however, is the promise of the next installment in the series. Because with a grey wolf, there is a black wolf.

 

Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache novels have been bestsellers in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries. She’s received numerous awards, including a Crime Writers Association Dagger Award and the Agatha Award, and she’s been a finalist for the Edgar Award. In 2017, she received the Order of Canada for her contributions to Canadian culture. She lives near Montreal. 

 

Related:

 

My review of Kingdom of the Blind.

 

My review of Glass Houses.

 

My review of A Great Reckoning.

 

My review of The Long Way Home.

 

My review of How the Light Gets In.

 

My review of The Beautiful Mystery.

 

My review of The Hangman.

 

My review of Penny’s A Trick of the Light.

 

My review of Penny’s A Fatal Grace.

 

My review of Penny’s Still Life.

 

My review of Penny’s The Cruelest Month.

 

My review of Penny’s A Rule Against Murder.

 

My review of The Brutal Telling.

 

My review of Penny’s Bury Your Dead.

 

My review of A Better Man.

 

My review of All the Devils Are Here.

 

My review of The Madness of Crowds.

 

My review of A World of Curiosities.

 

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The Patron Subjects: Who were the Wertheimers, the family that sat for a dozen of John Singer Sargent’s paintings? – Jean Strouse at The American Scholar.

 

Fading Light – Brian Miller at A South Roane Agrarian.

 

Monumental painting in SLAM’s collection only known survivor of its kind – St. Louis Art Museum. 

 

Bah Humbug: The Crime of Loneliness in Holiday Stories – Lindy Ryan at CrimeReads.

 

The Outsized Impact of George Cukor’s “Gaslight” – Bonnie Kistler at CrimeReads.

"Kingdom of the Blind" by Louise Penny

Armand Gamache, former head of the Surete du Quebec, receives a letter from a notary, asking him to come to a farmhouse about 20 minutes from Gamache’s village of Three Pines. Once there, he discovers that Myrna Landers, owner of the bookstore in the village, has received the same letter. As has a young man from Montreal, a building contractor. The notary explains that they have been asked to be executors of a will of a woman known as “the Baroness.”

The Baroness has left millions in capital and real estate to her three children. The problem is that the Baroness was a cleaning lady, who had not amassed anything close to the sizeable fortune cited in the will. Her three adult children have heard the stories – a family feud buried under longstanding litigation that goes back to 19^thcentury Vienna and has somehow survived the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the confiscation by the Nazis. The litigation is still ongoing, but is there any fortune left?

Then the Baroness’s oldest son is found dead. What at first appears to be an accident turns out to be murder, and Gamache and his son-in-law (and chief of homicide) Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves investigating financial management firms, old Austrian wills, and what looks to be a very contemporary case of fraud.

Gamache has another issue on his hands. A dead form of fentanyl is about to hit the streets of Montreal. It is the drug supply that Gamache has allowed into the country in the previous novel, Glass Houses, to break up a huge drug supply ring. But some of the drugs disappeared, and the Surete is undertaking an internal investigation of Gamache with the end of destroying him. Gamache has to find the drugs before a disaster of death hits the streets.

Louise Penny

Kingdom of the Blind by Canadian mystery writer Louise Penny is the 14^thin the Armand Gamache series, and it maintains Penny’s consistently high quality of work. The reader is hooked into the story from the outset, and the story just won’t let go.

Penny is a master of characterization. She helps us crawl inside her characters’ heads, and it is from there that we watch each new development unfold. And the regular cast of characters from Three Pines make their contributions to the story (and the case being investigated), especially crazy poet Ruth Zardo, artist Clara Morrow, and Ruth’s duck Rosa. At the center of the drug case is Amelia Choquet, the former prostitute and all-around bad girl that Gamache recruited for the police academy and who’s been dismissed (and almost arrested) for drug possession.

And it wouldn’t be a Gamache novel without snow. A lot of snow.

Kingdom of the Blind has a kind of valedictory feel to it. Penny explains in an afterword that she didn’t think she would write another Gamache novel after the death of her husband. The way the novel ends, it could be the last, if Penny so decides.

Or perhaps not. We hope.

Related:

My review of Glass Houses.

My review of A Great Reckoning.

My review of The Long Way Home.

My review of How the Light Gets In

My review of The Beautiful Mystery.

My review of The Hangman.

My review of Penny’s A Trick of the Light

My review of Penny’s A Fatal Grace.

My review of Penny’s Still Life.

My review of Penny’s The Cruelest Month.

My review of Penny’s A Rule Against Murder.

My review of The Brutal Telling.

My review of Penny’s Bury Your Dead.

Top photograph: A scene in Freleighsburg, Quebec, a village not unlike Three Pines.

“A Great Reckoning” by Louise Penny

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is back, having decided what role to undertake with the Quebec Surete. He’s accepted the position of commandment at the Surete Academy, and for a simple reason: The massive corruption he exposed in the Surete itself is not done until what is happening at the academy is also changed. And what is happening is a crime in and of itself – the shaping of police officers into brutal killers who believe society is their enemy.

Inexplicably to almost everyone but himself, he retains Serge Leduc as a professor, the man who’s taken kickbacks and bribes and the chief culprit in what has happened at the academy. What Gamache sees is that Leduc isn’t intelligent enough to pull off everything that’s been happening; there’s someone else, hidden in the shadows. Gamache also hires a disgraced officer, Michel Brebeuf, who is also Gamache’s former best friend from childhood.

Leduc is found dead, at first believed to be a suicide, but it’s soon determined he’s a victim of murder. Gamache himself may be a suspect. What the inspector does is to spirit four police cadets away from the academy to Three Pines, the village where he and his wife Reine-Marie now live. The lives of the cadets are in danger; and one of them may be a killer.

A Great Reckoning by mystery writer Louise Penny may be her best Gamache story yet. (I think I’ve said that about 10 times now.) Penny weaves an intriguing mystery through the lives of the Surete officials and the villagers of Three Pines.

Louise Penny

And we finally learn why Three Pines cannot be found on any map, and who it was who actually planted the pines that give the village its name. A map found in a wall in the village plays a significant role in the story; a copy of it will be found in the nightstand of the murdered man.

Gamache must deal with an investigation that has his name of the list of suspects; an increasingly irritated officer from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, sent to ensure a proper investigation; four cadets who resent their commandant; and doubts raised by his own friends.

Penny spends as much time drawing her minor characters as she does the major ones. Foul-mouthed poet Ruth Zardo, who’s been part of the series since the first book, is back with her equally foul-mouthed duck Rosa. So are artist Clara Morrow, bookstore owner Myrna, bistro owners Olivier and Gabriel, and Gamache’s right-hand man and now son-in-law, Jean-Guy Beauvoir.

A Great Reckoning is one terrific story.

Related:

My review of The Long Way Home.

My review of How the Light Gets In

My review of The Beautiful Mystery.

My review of The Hangman.

My review of Penny’s A Trick of the Light

My review of Penny’s A Fatal Grace.

My review of Penny’s Still Life.

My review of Penny’s The Cruelest Month.

My review of Penny’s A Rule Against Murder.

My review of The Brutal Telling.

My review of Penny’s Bury Your Dead.

Top photograph: The emblem of the Quebec Surete.