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.

“A Better Man” by Louise Penny

It’s early spring in Quebec, and the ice-packed rivers are thawing. The combination of thick ice and thaw, snow and refreezing, is creating treacherous conditions, including an imminent threat of flooding. The situation is so bad in Montreal that dynamite is being used to break the ice-jams. In the village of Three Pines, on the Bella Bella River and near the Vermont border, the residents are sandbagging.

It's also Chief Inspector Armand Gamache’s first day back on the job at the Quebec Surete. No one can quite believe he came back; no one can quite believe he accepted a demotion to return to head of Homicide, replacing his own son-on-law Jean-Guy Beauvoir who’s leaving the force and moving with his family to Paris. As if to punctuate the bad feeling against Gamache, Twitter is alive with hate and personal attacks, including a clearly faked video. 

A member of Gamache’s team reports that a young woman is missing. She’s married to an abusive husband; waiting for to arrive at home, her father is frantic. The abusive husband denies any knowledge of his wife’s whereabouts; he says she’s likely run off with her lover. The couple lived not far from Three Pines, and part of the land is sliced open to relieve the pressures from the flooding. They find the woman’s suitcase in the mud. Then they find the woman’s body.

Louise Penny

It looks like an open-and-shut case, but nothing is ever what it seems in the Quebec of Armand Gamache. 

A Better Man by Canadian author Louise Penny is the 15^th in the Inspector Gamache series, and it’s a winner like its predecessors. Gamache is experiencing change and upheaval on all sides – his family, his job, what he thinks he knows about his colleagues – and Penny tells her story on several levels. 

It wouldn’t be a Gamache novel without help from his friends in Three Pines. Artist Clara Morrow is having an existential art crisis, brought on by vicious attacks on social media. Crazy and profane poet Ruth Zardo tries her hand at helping everyone’s social media problems. Gabri and Olivier are still running the bistro, handing out lattes and warm brioche (it makes one wonder how the characters avoid gaining weight with each successive novel). Ruth’s duck Rosa is still around, keeping her mistress company and shocking visitors with her four-letter quacks.

With a sub-story about the evils of social media, A Better Man is another great Inspector Gamache novel.

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.

"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.

“Glass Houses” by Louise Penny

It’s easy to think of the Inspector Armand Gamache mystery novels by Louise Penny as character-driven. Her dominant character, Inspector Gamache of the Quebec Surete, spans some 13 novels and has survived ambushes, shootings, nefarious plots and betrayals by his own police force, and more. His presence looms large in each of the Penny novels. But even her lesser characters are strong ones – Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache’s son-in-law and second-in-command, Gamache’s wife Reine-Marie, and the residents of Three Pines – Myrna, Clara, Olivier, Gabriel, and especially Ruth Zardo the crazy poet with her duck Rosa.

Penny draws her characters so well that it’s easy to miss what truly drives her stories – and that is the story itself, what each novel is about. Glass Houses, her most recent book (published in 2017), exemplifies the power of Penny as storyteller. She alternates her story between a murder trial in which Gamache is being questioned by the prosecutor and six months earlier when the murder actually took place.

The story centers in Three Pines, the small (very small) village in Quebec, close to the Vermont border and not far from Montreal. This is where the Gamaches have made their home (Gamache has retired once, and then agreed to come back as the head of the Surete). It is here that one November day a cobrador appears on the village green, staring at Olivier and Gabriel’s bistro. Dressed in a body-long cloak and hood, wearing a mask, the cobrador says nothing. He, or she, or it, simply stares.

A few people in the village recognize what is going on. A cobrador is a myth-like figure known is Spain, someone hired to follow a debtor who won’t pay his bills, or really anyone who has done something wrong and won’t atone. A cobrador is a conscience. The question is, who is the figure staring at?

Louise Penny

Then there’s a murder. The body is found in the basement of the town’s small church. The victim has been beaten to death with a baseball bat, and the victim is wearing the clothes of the cobrador.

Back and forth Penney weaves the story, first in the courtroom and then in Three Pines. Slowly we come to see that the prosecutor’s badgering of Gamache has a purpose; there is a plan behind it, and Gamache is part of that plan. Something besides a murder trial, something far greater and more important, is going on. And that “something” is what drives the story of Glass Houses.

It says a great deal about the author that her stories continue to get better and better, when they began somewhere near the level of outstanding.

Related:

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: In Spain, people actually work as cobradors, usually in connection with a debt collection agency. The cobrador in Glass Houses looks more like a monk with a cowl and mask.