Louise Penny, Chief Inspector Gamache, and what keeps us coming back for more

but what about the bad history, anti-church bias, and that extreme Quebec weather?

I’ve read eighteen Louise Penny Chief Inspector Gamache novels and I still have a hard time putting my finger on what keeps me coming back when I find them in almost equal parts cozy and frustrating.

Penny’s Three Pine novels, as the books are also known as, are first and foremost detective fiction. Inspector Gamache is a great detective character. He has suffered, he has a strong sense of good and evil, yet is incredibly compassionate and psychologically astute. He treats colleagues and suspects with uncommon respect, holding up human dignity and understanding his role as an administrator of justice to the human community.

Then of course, there is the wider cast of characters within the fictional, and almost mythical (it’s mentioned in every book that the village itself isn’t on any map of Quebec! And I could make some Quebec jokes here but I won’t), village of Three Pines, Quebec. The townspeople are a quirky bunch of Starshollow-esque artists, elderly poets, and accomplished chefs who may possibly be murder suspects at any time. But these characters are crafted to be likeable, if at times perplexing and frustrating. Their backstories may morph somewhat over the course of eighteen books, but what remains the same is that they all seem easily to entertain each other in their homes with little to no planning, and they all are used to murder.

But I’ve got some grievances. Firstly, Penny’s plotting is at best sparse, at worst messy. She isn’t a fine Agatha Christie plotter who examines scenarios and works around evidence, motive, and the usual important mandates of mystery writing. Nor does she have any footing within the tough and tumble world of real police work. There is no hard plodding through evidence and suspects like Michael Connolly or Robert Galbraith. In fact, the weakest novels are the ones where Penny dips her toe into police corruption at a systemic level but basically leaves out all details of what the system is or does. Gamache often pulls the murderer from the small assortment of suspects from a psychological insight he gleaned from a passing conversation.

And yet the conclusion of the novels are almost always satisfying. Maybe not deeply satisfying on a literary level, but good enough to explain the evil that has been committed, but in an understandable way that has been puzzled out with the help of everyone in Three Pines and/or Gamache’s family. The mysteries themselves largely blur together, there are a few that stick out in the memory usually because the location changes or a major character has something crazy happen to them. And for what felt like five straight books weird, severe weather events happened in Quebec. A shocking amount even for Canada.

The enjoyment of these books lies in the cozy nature of the setting and stable of village characters, and the character of Gamache. The mysteries are intriguing reasons to hang out with these people who we know couldn’t exist in one small town together, but so wish they would. We want to eat the croissants, enjoy the isolated yet safe parameters of Three Pines when Gamache is in town. We want to know these characters dark secrets, yet also know that they will not be rejected from the community should they come to light. We want to enter a world where you would hang out with your friends at a bistro furnished with antiques, while enjoying boeuf bourguignon and solving mysteries. It is not a world of realism whether it be the setting, situations, or plot lines. It’s a delightful world of escape that also delves into murder mysteries and what makes up the psychology of people.

Penny’s Morality

Obviously over the course of eighteen books you will come across many an author’s personal beliefs and values sprinkled throughout their storytelling, be they blatant or more submerged. This series is no different, so there are plenty of windows into Penny’s belief system.

Penny herself has said many times that she does write from a personal belief in the importance of community, acceptance, and understanding and that she writes the characters of Three Pines to portray that. And these are comforting virtues to read about, especially when contrasted against murder and crime.

As far as a broader and deeper belief system though, Penny doesn’t delve much deeper. She is very much a secular Canadian boomer who espouses the values of acceptance, tolerance, and universal healthcare being the answers to most of human nature’s flaws.

There is the allowance for a tentative belief in the afterlife at times. The Anglican Church in the village serves as a location for personal reflection, Christmas concerts, and confessions—never to a priest only other characters, but in accepted Canadian custom religion isn’t seriously given much thought.

All writers, but especially mystery writers, operate out of a moral framework. Agatha Christie’s rock solid foundation of Christian values is never called into question by her main characters. Even though Poirot at many times makes decisions that may run contrary to legal standards, his morality never wavered.

Similarly, Gamache has a strong moral sense. He believes in the existence of evil, even if he does operate from the equally powerful understanding that human beings who commit evil acts still deserve to be treated with dignity. But because Penny has a foundation of moral quicksand, the rest of her panoply of characters have murky ideas of morality. In some books murder seems justified, in other unthinkably hateful. Penny says she likes to explore morally murky waters through her characters, but she also doesn’t hide what she obviously believes to be correct, and that opinion usually lies in the unsurprising subjective moralism of contemporary culture.

History with an extra side of bias

I would hardly complain about Penny’s morality as it doesn’t shock me that a contemporary popular writer espouses popular contemporary morality! In fact, finding anything other than the approved subjective, progressive, liberal, whatever you want to define it as, lack of morality in contemporary fiction is like finding a dodo in the wild. What I have a much greater problem with when it comes to Penny’s writing is her poaching of historic facts and incorporating them into her stories in a way that completely misrepresents what actually happened.

I’m not an expert in Canadian history by any stretch of the imagination, but I am a Canadian so I do pick up on Penny’s plucking a facet of Canadian history and then extrapolating from it some theme that connects with the current mystery. Take for example in Penny’s latest novel A World of Curiosities, the characters find a clue which is purported to be a spell book of a seventeenth century Quebec witch. Penny’s characters say that this woman was threatened by the Church with burning at the stake and then banished from Montreal to die alone in the wilderness.

Anne Lamarque was in fact acquitted and never punished for her supposed crimes. Penny admits this in a tiny footnote within her over three pages of acknowledgements at the end of the book. But the idea of a woman being burned at the stake in Quebec is talked about by the characters in depth, so much so that there is even the direct statement that the seventeenth century Church in Quebec would have persecuted the female inhabitants of Three Pines similarly.

The reader is left with the idea that this was part of a prevailing attitude toward women in the Church at the time, in fact, no woman was ever killed for witchcraft in Quebec by the church or the state. It would seem that Anne Lemarque’s problems arose from a bad priest and being a successful businesswoman. But the way Penny weaves these semi-historic elements into her books plants these ideas into reader’s minds with the assumption that they are fact because of how the characters treat them as fact. This is not unique to this one book either, there are at least three other novels which bring up historic elements which I subsequently researched and found that only part of the history is revealed with Penny novels.

It would be one thing if I were only complaining about lazy historic insertions, but the common thread that most misrepresentations of historical facts Penny uses within her mysteries is that they almost always skew towards being misrepresentative of the Catholic Church. If Penny were just the typical contemporary writer with the usual digs at the Church I probably would have long forgotten about it, but Penny has written 18 books in this series and honestly, it’s the odd ball that doesn’t have at least one direct insult, insinuation, negative portrayal, or history revision involving the Catholic Church.

It simply occurs too often for this not to be a real bias in Penny’s mind and writing. Probably an unrecognized bias on her part since again, Canadian boomer from Quebec, this is simply the air she has breathed her whole life.

I think I find it interesting because as a Catholic who wants to properly defend the Church, meaning I want to understand the facts of what the Church has or has not done in her history in my country and then be able to communicate that properly to others, I find that there is a difference in kind in talking to people about historic events or actions on the part of the Church and what people assume or believe the Church did or did not do. Penny’s writing contributes to the uneducated assumptions that are condoned by society towards history and religion. There is allowance that we can pluck facts from history to use for our own axes to grind today. We’re allowed to nurture one side of an event if we’re trying to build up a narrative of accusation towards one institution, usually religious. But the reality is that history is so much more nuanced and complicated that there is no right side that existed without error continuously over time.

It is lazy writing to pick up historic threads, misrepresent them within your story to a degree where the characters comment upon them, make personal decisions based upon their mistaken beliefs, and then only inform the reader they were wrong deep in your acknowledgements. Sure, this happens in other books, but it would seem that when a rewriting of history happens within a story it is usually done in a way in which the reader knows it to be incorrect. Because Canadian history is so little known or understood by Canadians, let alone by the vastly non-Canadian readership of Penny’s novels, it feels disingenuous.

There’s a lot to like in Penny’s mysteries. There’s a detective with integrity but also a great deal of human perception and understanding. There’s a tight-knit village of quirky characters. There’s a lot of scotch drinking and croissant eating. And as a fan of cozy mysteries and croissants I will probably keep reading these books, but part of me wishes I could sit down and talk with Penny about her own perceptions of history, religion, and faith and the power fiction has in affecting people’s understanding of them.

Tomorrow I’ll be back to rant about Amazon’s series based on Penny’s novels, Three Pines.