Wintry Mix

Recently the Washington Post held a poll on the best fictional detectives, and the winner was Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache. Mortified by my ignorance about this author and detective, I put the first available Penny novel, Kingdom of the Blind, on my library list. This one, it turned out, was the 14th in her series.

Set in Montréal, Penny’s novels feature Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec: brave, caring, a leader, physically strong, capable of making quick decisions which are invariably correct. He has a deeply beloved family: saintly wife Reine-Marie, who provides warmhearted bed and board for anyone who appears, sensitive son-in-law Jean-Guy Bouvier who is head of homicide at the Sûreté, daughter Annie who rivals Reine-Marie for saintliness, and charming grandson Honoré (Ray-Ray).

Filling out the cast of characters is a collection of relentlessly quirky neighbours in the little village of Three Pines outside Montréal where the Gamaches live. Myrna is a psychologist who also runs a bookshop. Clara is a painter, whose fame is rising. Wisecracking gay couple Gabri and Olivier run the bistro. And quirkiest of all is the cranky Ruth Zardo.

Clara Morrow’s paintings were otherworldly. And yet they were also achingly, profoundly human. She painted what appeared to be portraits, but that was only on the surface. The beautifully rendered flesh stretched, and sometimes sagged, over wounds, over celebrations. Over chasms of loss and rushes of joy. She painted peace and despair. All in one portrait. With brush and canvas and oils, Clara both captured and freed her subject.

Ruth Zardo. A gifted poet. One of the most distinguished in the nation. But that gift had come wrapped in more than a dollop of crazy. The name Ruth Zardo was uttered with equal parts admiration and dread. Like conjuring a magical creature that was both creative and destructive.

Ruth’s peculiarity is enhanced by her companion Rosa, who just happens to be a duck who makes only one sound, ‘Fuck’. Some readers may find this cute, some annoyingly cutesy (I’m in the latter camp).

Penny has a distinctive style, evident in the paragraphs above, of short, incomplete sentences. Building on each other. Many of which start with conjunctions. I did not find this particularly interesting. Or appealing. Or indicative of great writing skills.

The inner monologues in the book involve a lot of pop psychology. This is the kind of novel where a rattled young man looks into someone’s eyes and instantly sees that the other person is ‘Smart. Bright. Thoughtful. […] and Kind’. There is much along the lines of ‘In grief people were themselves and not themselves’. There is plenty of emotional angst, but a little unusually for this genre, it is mostly on the part of the men.

The best part of the book was its setting. Set in midwinter, Montréal and Québec are an intrinsic part of every scene. The roads are covered in snow, and drivers need to be careful when off the main roads. Storms and blizzards swing through, and Three Pines sometimes loses power. Cars have to be dug out each time anyone goes anywhere, and there is horror when a naive young man admits that he does not have snow tires. The bitter cold is palpable.

Her cheeks were bright red and her eyes, tearing up, took time to adjust to the dim light. The short walk over to the bistro through the brilliant sunshine had rendered her almost snow-blind.

‘Minus thirty-five’, said Olivier proudly.

Penny captures the stunning beauty of the snow-covered landscape as well.

The aurora borealis. Otherwordly green light, flowing across the night sky.

Puffs of snow being lifted, then falling onto the massive banks that now circled the village green. They were so high, Myrna could no loner see who was doing the shoveling. Just the bright red shovel and the cloud of snow. It felt as though she was ringed in by a newly formed mountain range.

What of the plot? Many mystery novels stretch the credulity of the reader, and this one is no exception. When the novel starts, Gamache is on suspension and has his own career to worry about, as well concern about an illegal drug that has reached Montréal. Out of the blue, he gets a letter from an unknown person demanding that he go to a remote farmhouse at a particular time. Does he ignore it? You know the answer. With minimal research, on a cold day with a snowstorm approaching, he heads off for this mysterious assignation.

Later in the novel, he wants to confront a suspect with their lies. Does he meet the suspect in a public place or in a private office? No, he invites the suspect to give him a snow driving lesson, a situation where he is locked in a vehicle with this suspect who controls the car. (The suspect panics, swerves, veers out of control, and they both almost die).

Some of the tension-causing events, thus, seem rather artificial.

There are two parallel plots: one involving the denizens of Three Pines, a will, an inheritance, a European title, and ancestral lineages. The second thread of the plot relates to the drug carfentanil, a deadly variation of the dangerous opioid fentanyl. Gamache had successfully broken the drug ring involved, but in the process (presumably detailed in an earlier novel of the series), a large shipment of the drug has entered the city. This plotline allows Penny to display a side of Montréal that may be unfamiliar to many visitors.

The streets of inner-city Montréal had changed. Never safe. Never clean. Never fun, now they were many degrees worse. Darker, filthier.

[The dealer] was twenty-five at most, but looked ancient. Like something dug up at some primitive burial site. They all did. A mass grave, under micrograms of fentanyl, on the streets of Montréal.

His breath on her face smelled of rotten eggs. Of sulfur. Of hellfire.

The underworld of Montréal involves dealers and ‘junkies, whores and trannies’ — a strange grouping, but clearly one that Penny likes, because she repeats the phrase multiple times through the book. At one point, a character finds these street people following her through the frigid streets, eyes glowing (?!).

She felt, more than saw, the junkies and whores and trannies form a semicircle around her.

It was all rather like a bad zombie movie, and it made me chuckle; probably not the emotion it was intended to evoke.

One of the author’s tics was rather cringe-inducing: her habit of focusing attention on the looks of those who are apparently considered unattractive. This is more than a casual mannerism, simply because it appears so frequently.

Hugo seemed much older than the others, with features that looked like they’d been worn down by the elements. His hair was iron-gray. Not the distinguished gray-at-the-temples of Anthony or the soft dyed-blond of Caroline.

Got it. Hugo is not as good-looking as his siblings. But Penny doesn’t stop there. Every time Hugo appears on the scene, there is a comment about his looks. A few examples:

He stood like a gnome in a garden. Concrete, mute, ugly. And yet, somehow, the dumpy little man dominated the elegant room.

[His mother] was by just about any measure, ugly. No way around that. […] Hugo Baumgartner obviously took after her.

Hugo smiled, which perversely, made him look even uglier.

“You look deep in thought,” said the ugly little man.

A thick winter coat, a tuque, and cheeks ruddy with cold did nothing to improve [his] appearance.

“Who was that? Looked like […] something from Lord of the Rings.” [says another character about Hugo]

‘He is ugly as original sin. Vile to look at. Really quite disgusting. But like many ugly people, who look like villains, he has to make up for it by being obviously decent.’ [says Hugo’s boss]

Towards the end, there is a somewhat dubious connection to the murder, but this relentless commentary on Hugo’s looks, and the words used to describe him, remain rather discomfiting to a reader.

All said, this is a quick read and an interesting setting, but not, for me, standout mystery writing. I am clearly in the minority, since Penny’s novels have won pretty much every mystery award in existence. I plan to look for a couple of the earlier books in the series, to get a sense of whether this one is typical or whether, as with many series writers, the novels have gone downhill with time.