Louise Penny: where goodness exists
Excerpts from the interview by Lynn Kaczmarek in the August/September 2009 issue of Mystery News
One of the best things about publishing Mystery News is the opportunity to meet authors whose books I admire. What fun to talk to writers about their books, about the work they do, their inspiration and their lives. I've been doing this for over twelve years now and I've interviewed a lot of authors. And I'm always just a little surprised about their willingness to talk. As you would expect, some are much more open and real than others. And every once in a while there's a real connection. For me, that connection came with Louise Penny.
It was 2006 and the Canadian author's first book, Still Life, had been published in the US earlier that year and it took me totally by surprise. I thought it was a cozy and with my medium-to-hard-boiled reading taste, I didn't have a lot of hope for it when I opened the cover. But I was looking for something "softer" at the time and the book jacket caught my eye. And then I read the first page. It was amazing and it was then that I decided I needed to talk to this lady. By the end of the book, I had a whole new respect for the traditional mystery. And by the end of our interview, a whole new respect for this author...
A lot of things have changed since Still Life. "What I know for sure has changed is my confidence. I know that when I wrote Still Life, when I was writing it, I didn't know what I was doing. It took a long time and rewriting and whatnot. So when it came time to write the second book, I was petrified because I really didn't know how I had written the first one. So it seemed kind of like a miracle to me that I had a book out. But then I had to write the second book and I really struggled with fear with the second one. And as the book progressed, the fear diminished and I think what happened was that I became more mature as a writer. And I don't necessarily mean that the writing grew more mature, but as the writer I grew more mature. And I think I stopped being quite the ingenue that I think I felt I needed to be at first. You know, the sort of wide-eyed kid...
"I know for sure that I'm much clearer about the characters and who they are ad there's a kind of a depth now that I can feel about them because I know them so intimately. But you know, when people ask me questions, I'm a lot less likely to say I don't know. And a lot more likely to say I have an opinion. I may not be right, but having been doing this now for five years and a few years before that writing Still Life, I have a sense of how the industry works and how I work and how to structure a novel and character development and all those issues that had you asked me when Still Life first came out I genuinely wouldn't have known. Or if I did know, would not have felt I had a right to an opinion. And now I feel I have that right."
If Louise Penny has changed, have the books? Has the writing in fact matured? My answer is a resounding yes. A Brutal Telling is her fifth book. Set in Three Pines, Chief Inspector Gamache finds himself investigating the murder of a stranger found in the middle of the village bistro. The Bistro is non other than that owned by two of the recurring characters, Olivier Brule and his partner Gabri. And as Gamache investigates, he uncovers carefully hidden secrets, explores the meaning of "how much is too much" and exposes the identity of the murderer. A Brutal Telling is a story of excess and internal battles...
Read the complete interview in the August/September 2009 issue of Mystery News