Interview with Louise Penny
(Excerpts)
For the past forty years or so, crime fiction has taken a dark turn. The hallmarks of the blockbuster genre novel have become sex, violence, gore, and the musings of pathological minds. One author who has successfully bucked this trend, reaching No. 1 on the New York Times bestsellers list eight times, and bagging almost every crime fiction award possible, is Louise Penny.
Penny’s Inspector Armand Gamache novels hearken back to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and the works of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Rex Stout, Margery Allingham, and John Dickson Carr. However, Penny has elevated the genre and updated it for a modern audience by working in elements of the crime thriller. Her character-driven plots focus on the “why” rather than the “how,” as the residents of her idyllic fictional town of Three Pines in Québec challenge readers to ask questions about human motivation and personal responsibility. To all that, Penny has added a good dose of literary style and created a unique mosaic that has captured the imagination of millions worldwide.
Born in Canada, Penny had a successful career working as a broadcast journalist and host for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before deciding to quit her job and write a novel. The result, Still Life (2005), won several awards and quickly established Penny as a talented new voice in crime fiction. At the core of the first book—and the series that followed—is the genteel, philosophical, and urbane Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec. Readers expecting a detective juggling fraught relationships with a bottle of Jack Daniels in the desk and nightmares bleeding into his waking hours were in for something else. Although Gamache suffered a traumatic upbringing and has witnessed his share of ghastly crimes, including police brutality within his own department, he maintains his humanity and faith in mankind. Often, it’s his understanding of human behavior and his empathy that help him solve his cases.
Into this mix, Penny has weaved in thoughtful explorations of universal themes and current events. In The Long Way Home (2014), tracking an estranged husband through Québec, she looks at how blind ambition, pride, and self-loathing can lead people to destroy themselves and those around them. All The Devils Are Here (2020), set in Paris, is an exploration of love, sacrifice, and the cost of family loyalty. And The Madness Of Crowds (2021) questions censorship, the role of personal responsibility, and the double-edged sword that is free speech. Penny’s next Gamache novel, A World Of Curiosities, is due out in November.
Louise Penny lives in Knowlton, Québec, a town not unlike Three Pines, with a corner bistro, a cozy bookshop, and an inviting coffee shop.
Louise Penny
AFG: Tell me about the town of Three Pines . . . Is it based on where you live now?
LP: A little bit. It’s based on all sorts of things—having read Golden Age mysteries, it’s a little my fantasy of what those little villages looked like. It’s inspired by the place where I live. It’s very much an ode, an homage, a love letter too. You know, when you and I just started off talking about home and I said I’d searched for thirty-five, forty years for home and found it here in Québec where I couldn’t even speak the language. Here outside of Montreal in the forest, I found home and I found friends and I found that sense of belonging. Oh my God, when you search all your life for a place where you belong and it’s like, they saved a spot at the table for you, it’s magic. I wanted to bring that sense of magic, of belonging to the books. And that’s what Three Pines is.
Three Pines isn’t a physical place, it’s a state of mind. It’s when you’re kind, when you’re decent, when you have friends, when you belong to a community, then you are within Three Pines. So that was really important to me to have, and it actually coincided with 9/11, oddly enough, where I know no Canadian could ever feel as traumatized by what happened as Americans and certainly as New Yorkers, but I think it affected the whole world where we realized that no place is safe. And so I wanted to create a sense of safety. At the same time, the other thing 9/11 taught us is that physical safety is an illusion. Even in Three Pines, nowhere is actually physically safe. So you could never guarantee that. But the only thing you can guarantee is a sort of emotional safety. And as we’ve discovered in the pandemic, if not in other circumstances, that comes when you have friendships, when you have a sense of connection, when you have a feeling of belonging and community.
AFG: You were born in Toronto. How did you end up in Québec?
LP: Well, when I was a kid, my family moved from Toronto to Québec because my father was transferred, and I just loved Québec. . . . After I’d graduated, I went into journalism . . . I moved around from city to city in Canada. I reached a stage in my early thirties where moving around felt really uncomfortable. . . . I just wanted to put down roots. . . . And I thought, where was I happiest?
So I decided to move to Québec City—where you really have to learn French if you want to eat—and proceeded to absolutely butcher the most beautiful language. I once called Québecers “good pumpkins.” [laughs] And in a taxi once, when I wanted to go to the train station, I said, “La guerre s’il vous plaît.” And he turned around and said, “And which war exactly?” [laughs] I ordered “flaming mice” in a restaurant on a first date. Oh my God, it was awful! But yeah, I learned.
AFG: Your books deal with a lot of relevant and timely issues. How do you manage to slip those in without ever slowing down the plot?
LP: . . . For the first five books, I didn’t bring in events from the current time. I hope I brought in universal philosophies and thoughts . . .. I think I felt I wanted it to be timeless. And then I was reading some of the old Golden Age books and I realized that those books were very timely and specific to the 1940s or ‘50s . . .. It was fascinating to read their take on their times. And so I thought, I need to start doing that myself and to really root it in the culture that I’m living in. I started doing it in book five or six. And now all the time I bring in things either from Québec’s recent past or from the present . . ..
These are excerpts from the interview with Louise Penny which appeared in issue 67 of the Strand Magazine