I have been reading Louise Penny’s books for many years. I don’t know when I started or which book was my first. For the last decade, at least, I have devoured every new book as soon as it came out. In the spring and summer of 2020, when I was completely alone at the height of the pandemic, I reread the entire series. I would go to a spare bedroom in my condo and read these books and escape my loneliness and my anxiety for a few hours. Those books gave me great comfort. They kept me sane and gave me some hope for the future when things looked pretty bleak.
In 2021, I also read the book she co-authored with her dear friend, Hillary Clinton, even though political thrillers are not my favorite genre, nor am I a big fan of Hillary Clinton.
I have been a member of the Louise Penny Book Club on Facebook for several years and have recently joined some other LP or Three Pines groups. In January of 2022, I created a running compilation of articles, reviews, videos, and podcasts that document Louise Penny’s thoughts about her writing and the world’s reaction to it. The last two years have been intensely busy for Ms. Penny, with her 17th novel in the Gamache/Three Pines series, The Madness of Crowds, being published in 2021 at about the same time as State of Terror, her book written with Hillary Clinton. This year, her 18th Gamache novel, World of Curiosities, was released within a few days of the start of the Amazon Prime series, Three Pines, an adaptation based on the Inspector Gamache series. The interest in Penny’s works has increased dramatically, with many discovering her books through the interest generated by State of Terror and now with the Amazon Prime series.
Louise Penny fans are an intense bunch. Her books touch so many people in different ways and at different levels. Some people want to live in the fictional town of Three Pines that forms the backdrop for most of the Gamache books. They feel that the town’s inhabitants are their personal friends. They visit, in real life, the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Montreal and Quebec City and take Louise Penny tours. People have entertained themselves for years imagining who should get to play the main characters, if the books were ever brought to life on the screen. What stood out to me with these endless casting calls was that there was never any consensus on who should play the various characters. Each person had their own vision of how the characters should look and there would sometimes be strong differences of opinion among people who were ostensibly using the same source material.
Different people love or hate different characters or aspects of the books. I, for instance, could happily live without the frequent appearance of Rosa the duck, while Rosa is the highlight for others and they constantly post duck pictures on the Louise Penny social media sites. There are the literalists, who track every detail of the food served in the bistro, who want to know who pays for the food and when, who worry that cell phones work in the later books when they did not work in the earlier books, who get upset when a new relationship that they did not feel was given an adequate foundation is sprung on them in a book. There are people who accuse Louise Penny of fat shaming because one of the primary recurring characters in the books, Myrna, is described as a very large woman. If someone goes on and on about these things for too long in the social media groups, I block them so that I never have to see what they are obsessing about again. Although I love these books, I do not obsess about the physical details. It is the metaphysical that interests me.
One of the things that I love about Louise Penny, and the reason I consider her to be a great writer and not just a great mystery writer, is that she tackles tough topics in all of her books. And she does so with great sensitivity. The very first book, Still Life, addresses homophobia in the first few pages when the beloved bistro has shit thrown on it by a gang of teenage boys who hurl homophobic slurs along with the shit. She tackles police and government corruption, the way that indigenous people have been ignored and mistreated, addiction (she is a recovering alcoholic), and many other issues that come out of Canadian history. She weaves these topics in with her murder mysteries and the quirky and mostly lovable cast of recurring characters in Three Pines. She writes about people and relationships and love and hope and redemption. After she wrote the book with Hillary Clinton, a number of her fans began to complain that she was changing and that her books were becoming “too dark.” I sometimes have wondered if we had read the same books, because Louise Penny has never shied away from the darker side of humanity. But the light almost always wins out over the darkness in the end.
With the Amazon Prime series (eight episodes in Season One) coming out in December 2022, the literalists went crazy. Oh, my. This character was miscast. Another was too young. Another wasn’t fat while another wasn’t thin. The duck was the wrong kind of duck! The pine trees were not big enough! The town didn’t look right. On and on the obsessive focus on physical details went. I did a lot of blocking of these nitpickers in the last few weeks. There were people who accused the author of selling out. One brilliant article in Psychology Today perfectly described The Outrage of Louise Penny Fans.
One of the things that I liked immediately about the series was how Canadian it was. 16 of 18 primary actors were Canadian, including several quebecois and several indigenous actors. The shots of Montreal and the Eastern Townships of Quebec are highly evocative. The writers took a theme that Louise Penny touched on, missing indigenous women and the infamous residential schools, and made it a primary theme of the first eight episodes. Louise Penny has said she wished she had developed that more in her books. This is an ongoing issue in Canada right now and it is superbly handled in the series.
Well, I just finished episodes 7 and 8 of the Amazon Prime Three Pines series. The last two episodes of Season One. They blew me away.
In my opinion, the series got better with every episode and really came into its own with episodes 7 and 8. To all the naysayers who said the series was awful, that the writers could not possibly have read the books, that the acting was terrible, that Three Pines didn’t look or feel right, I say: “you were dead wrong and needed to have some patience.” The characters evolved and deepened as the series progressed. The relationship between Armand and Reine-Marie was parfait! Jean-Guy’s character is spot on. Myrna is developing nicely. The atmosphere of the town is growing in complexity. The relationship between Gabri and Olivier is deep and complex. And the pace of the last two episodes rivaled the books themselves! I care about these characters. One may be skinnier than described in the books. Another may be quieter. Another may be younger. But those are trivial details. The writers of the series got the essence of the books. Formidable!
I hope there will be a Season Two. Brava to Louise Penny for taking this monumental leap of faith and allowing your works to be adapted to the screen. Bravo to the writers and producers for making this such a timely and honest Canadian production.
March 7, 2023 Update
Today, Louise Penny informed her fans that Amazon had decided not to renew the series. She was disappointed, hurt, baffled. Many people responded to her appropriately, expressing their love for her work and their enjoyment of the series. But there were, unfortunately, far too many people who just had to rub salt in Louise’s wounds and say how much they hated it, how bad the casting was, say they hated Alfred Molina as Gamache, and on and on. People on social media forget that there are human beings at the other end of the comments sometimes. There are so many places for people to be brutally honest. It was so unnecessary to share these vitriolic comments on the author’s own page.
These were the author’s own words:
We finally have word from Amazon Prime Video. There will be no second season of THREE PINES. Despite achieving #1 for Prime in US, Canada, UK and other markets, and top ten wherever it was broadcast, Amazon has decided to cancel it. I am shocked and upset. Like any show, it had growing pains, but it was only going to get better and better. And it already had Alfred Molina as Gamache! Alfred was deeply invested in the show. He wanted to pass this along to you:
**Sadly, we will not be returning with a second season. My personal disappointment aside, I am proud of what we achieved, and honored to have been part of a wonderful creative team who gave everything to bring Louise’s books to the screen. **
If you want to write to Amazon with your thoughts, the executive in charge of Prime Video Television is Vernon Sanders. His email is: vernon.sanders@amazonstudios.com
See also my blog post The Controversy Around Louise Penny’s Books
See also my blog post listing articles, videos, websites, and interviews by or about Louise Penny.
Lifetime musings 