I first came across Louise Penny in the pages of the Washington Post; her ‘cosy’ mysteries have a large following. Personally, I found her Kingdom of the Blind rather disappointing. That was the 14th book in her series, though, so it was always possible that the earlier books were better.
Still Life, published in 2007, is Penny’s first Inspector Gamache novel, and I am relieved to say that it is indeed better, and a moderately pleasant read.
Inspector Armand Gamache, Chief Inspector of Homicide at the Sûreté du Québec, does not seem to have changed over time: in this first novel he is almost exactly like his personality in the 14th novel. He is preternaturally calm, wise, thoughtful, caring, perceptive, and an excellent mentor to his subordinates. Here too he is ‘slightly overweight’, has ‘crested fifty’, has no past tragedies and is utterly devoted to his wife Reine-Marie. His second-in-command Jean-Guy Beauvoir appears here too; by the later book he had become Gamache’s son-in-law, but here he is almost like a son, with a personality very like that of Gamache himself. (He too is devoted to his wife, but this wife is not Gamache’s daughter, so perhaps there was some personal drama in the intervening books)
Set in the same village of Three Pines that features in the later books, this novel features a single murder. Jane Neal is an elderly spinster and aspiring artist who is found dead in the woods, with a wound suggesting that she was killed by an arrow. Hunting is very popular around the area; although most hunters use guns or modern compound bows, old-fashioned wooden bows are still used for target practice.
A ‘cosy’ mystery requires that only a small collection of people could be perpetrators. The victim and suspects are often locked inside a snowbound building or trapped on an island to ensure that no random criminal could be the murderer: here, Jane is killed from a wooden blind high up in a tree, while walking along a narrow deer path that only the locals could know about, using an arrow from a quiver belonging to one of the locals.
The same quirky lot that appear in the later book are here. The gay couple who run the bistro. The large black woman who runs the bookshop. And the artists, of which Jane is one, and her friends Clara and Peter are others. Ruth Zardo, the caustic, rude, famous poet appears too, and her personality is thankfully less single-note than in the later book.
The author’s writing tics are less evident in this first novel, which is definitely for the better. In times of emotional crisis, the characters think in short sentences, and they seem appropriate here.
Jane would let her cry, let her wail. Would let her throw crockery, if she needed to. And then she would put her arms around Clara, and comfort her, and let her know she was not alone. Never alone. And so Clara sat and watched and waited. And knew the agony of doing nothing.
In the later book, this style was used almost continuously, providing an overall air of overwrought melodrama to the tone of the novel, but here it is used judiciously, with a lighter touch that is much preferable.
So this is better, but with the same problems that will discourage me from seeking out more of Penny’s books. Cardboard characters, each with one or two distinct, belaboured traits. No apparent arc of character development over 14 books. No elegant sentences or paragraphs that leave the reader marvelling at the artistry of the author.
As for the plot, the murderer turns out to have a rather dubious motive relating to a previous death in the community that was presumed to be of natural causes. Some characters, including the one who inherits Jane’s estate, are simply not considered as suspects because, apparently, of Gamache’s gut feeling. Gamache and team don’t think of checking out the murdered woman’s house until after her niece has a week to ‘renovate’ it, which seems astonishingly dim for the Sûreté. The plot wasn’t terribly convincing, but it doesn’t seriously detract from the story.
A fair amount of prose is wasted on a junior Inspector Nichol, an ambitious young woman who combines arrogance with an astonishing lack of observation and understanding. Much more interesting were the sidenotes about language and culture in Quebec.
[Gamache] was speaking English with a British accent. Yet he’d heard snippets of his conversation with his colleagues, and that was definitely in fast and fluid French. In Quebec it was far from unusual that people spoke both languages, even fluently. But it was unusual to find a Francophone speaking like a hereditary member of the House of Lords.
Gamache’s British accent is not explained, and I would have liked to read more about the tensions between the Anglophones and Francophones in Quebec, but maybe that is too fraught a topic for a gentle mystery.
A quick agreeable read, and better than the 14th book. Perhaps a mystery series should be limited to a maximum of 10 books?
The last line of the review was both amusing and thought provoking – are earlier books in a long (crime-fiction) series better because they stick closer to the original characters, have not run out of steam, or have not run out of plots; or are later books in the series better, because the author is more confident and matured, the style has been developed, the characters embedded?
Perhaps it depends on the author. The first few No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books were charming, but they definitely went downhill later. On the other hand, Tana French’s first Dublin Murder book was excellent, and so was her last.
Would you say the old doyennes of crime fiction — Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers — maintained the quality of their books throughout? Not sure about Christie, but I thought all the Sayers books were excellent.
I promised myself I would read 3 Louise Penny books before coming to a definitive conclusion. I’ll let you know when I read the third one :-).