Review of Louise Penny's The Long Way Home

The Long Way Home by Louise Penny

The Long Way Home (Minotaur Books, August 26, 2014) is Louise Penny's tenth Armand Gamache/Three Pines novel and, at this point, regular readers can mentally categorize them. No, it's not that they fit neatly into slots, but along a continuum, where some are weighted more toward the crime-solving end, and others more toward the examination of the soul. The Long Way Home, like The Beautiful Mystery, for example, is one of the latter.

After all the intensity and heart-thumping tension and action of the last novel, How the Light Gets In, everyone's due for a little recovery and reflection. And that's just what the newly-retired Armand Gamache is doing, now living with Reine-Marie and the German shepherd, Henri, in a cottage on the green in Three Pines.

Gamache has a lot to process, and every morning he sits on a bench on a hillside looking down at the town, reading a slim, leather-bound book. But, each morning, he begins at the beginning and stops at a bookmark before the end. Longtime readers of the series will suspect where that book came from and why Gamache doesn't move on past the bookmark.

Gamache's contemplation and retirement are interrupted when Clara Morrow asks for his help. Clara and her husband, Peter, fellow artists, had reached a crisis in their marriage the previous year. They agreed that Peter would leave, but return to their home in Three Pines exactly one year later, to see if their marriage could be saved. But Peter is now weeks late in returning, and Clara has no idea where he is or if he is well.

The bonds of friendship compel Gamache to help Clara, teaming up with her, Clara's friend, Myrna, and Gamache's longtime protégé, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. They track Peter along what seems to be a kind of quest, maybe a search for the mythical Tenth Muse, but something that will purge the artistic jealousy that has poisoned his soul and his marriage.

The trail finally leads to the Charlevoix region, a place of powerful, but sometimes savage beauty, along the St. Lawrence river, east of Québec City. And what the searchers find will change them all. (By the way, this is another Louise Penny book that makes me think the Canadian tourism bureau should be paying her. She makes me want to visit every place she describes, and right away.)

I'm making the book sound like it's ultra-serious, but of course it isn't. This is Louise Penny, after all. That means foul-mouthed Ruth and her one-note cursing duck, Rosa. It means a lot of affectionate ribbing, as here:

"Ergo, he painted them on his return to Canada," said Clara.
"Ergo?" asked Myrna.
"Don't tell me you've never wanted to use it," said Clara.
"Not now that I hear how it really sounds."

C'est encore Charlevoix, by Gerard Lapointe

So, yes, along with the serious business of tracking down Peter and dealing with some deep emotional damage, we have the usual pleasure of spending time with the people of Three Pines, who by now seem so real that it's hard for me to believe I can't just drive a few hours to southern Québec, just over the Vermont border, and drop into the Bistro in time to have a glass of wine and some of Mr. Béliveau's cheese with them all.

This feels like a transitional novel; one that moves Gamache into a new kind of life. So far, Jean-Guy is still part of it, which is good news for longtime readers. Maybe in future books we'll get to see much more of Reine-Marie, something I think many of us have long hoped for.

Note: Thanks to the publisher for providing an advance reviewing copy of the book. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Review of Louise Penny's How the Light Gets In

How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny

It may be summer for us, but it's December in Québec as How the Light Gets In begins. The story in this ninth in the Armand Gamache/Three Pines series picks up shortly after the predecessor book, The Beautiful Mystery, ended, and things are just as grim as you would imagine for Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, if you read that book.

Gamache's longtime enemies at the Sûrété du Québec are circling like sharks, taking bites out of his Homicide team. All of his team members have been moved to other departments, except for Isabelle Lacoste, and the officers moved to his team in their place are slackers, insubordinate and obviously playing for Gamache's saturnine enemy, Chief Superintendent Francoeur.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache's second-in-command and closest colleague to both him and Lacoste, is now with Francoeur. Jean-Guy is a mess. Hooked on painkillers again, completely alienated from Gamache and broken up with Gamache's daughter Annie. Of course, all of this has been orchestrated by Francoeur and his compatriots. The sharks have isolated their prey and are coming in for the kill.

The Dionne Quintuplets

Considering what his office has become, it's almost a relief to Gamache when Myrna Landers, Three Pines's flamboyant bookseller, asks for his help to find a missing friend. This seemingly simple case unexpectedly becomes a last chapter in the story of Québec's most famous baby boomers, the first quintuplets to survive their birth. This part of the plot is obviously based on the Dionne quintuplets, whom the baby boomers among us will remember very well.

The Sûrété corruption plot that we've been following for this entire series takes center stage in this book, and it's a nail-biter that puts all of the characters under make-or-break stress. For those who have been wondering about the reach of the corruption and the long-term goals of its principals, this will be a particularly satisfying read.

What does this have to do with the book? Read it and find out.

Penny uses the corruption plot not just for thrills, though, but as a return to one of her perennial themes, good and evil. I remember back in A Trick of the Light, the seventh book in the series, there was a passage explaining the difference between Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Gamache always believed there was good in people, but Beauvoir was the opposite. Beauvoir believed that at bottom, you would always find evil, "without borders, without brakes, without limit."

Now Gamache, at his moment of crisis, wonders if Beauvoir was right, that maybe evil has no limits. He knows that it will be hard to find the impetus for the corruption, because most likely, it "started as something small, invisible to the naked eye. It was often years, decades, old. A slight that rankled and grew and infected the host." And now the infection is overwhelming.

Nathaniel Parker as Armand Gamache in the upcoming film of Still Life

Penny always manages to explore the themes of good and evil, love and hate, and sin and redemption without sounding preachy, because she does it through her particular strength, the character study. After reading all the books, and then going back and listening to the whole series on audio, I've come to know the characters as real people, with histories, strengths and flaws. I know their homes and how they live. Louise Penny writes so that there is no distance between the reader and the characters; their thoughts and emotions, what they eat and drink, how they interact with each other and, most important, how they react when bad things happen.

Penny is such a keen observer that it's all too easy to believe that you can travel to Three Pines, sit down at the Bistro and join in the conversation with all these characters, walk the green with them and watch the village children playing hockey, sit in Clara's messy house and enjoy a meal, browse for books at Myrna's bookshop and head upstairs to sit around the wood stove with a cup of tea and a scone. Hmm, there sure is a lot of eating and drinking that goes on in Three Pines––not that there's anything wrong with that! But there's more to it than that. Penny can also use a small moment to evoke poignant emotion, as when she has Gamache pick up a book at a murder scene, flip it open to the bookmarked page and see what the victim would now never read.

Louise Penny has transformed the police procedural and village mystery genres into not a mash-up, but something unique, original and genuine. Every summer, I look forward to my next visit with these characters, and at the end of the book I regret that my visit was all too short. I hope you'll visit too.

Note: How the Light Gets In will be published on August 27 by St. Martin's Minotaur. I received a free review copy of the book.

Investigating the Detectives

Most mystery readers have a few detective series that they follow closely, as much for the characters as for the stories. And authors are very clever, releasing personal information about their characters' current and prior lives very s-l-o-w-l-y. They can take quite a few books to build up a reasonably robust picture of the protagonist's life and character for the curious reader. During a recent spate of hurry-up-and-wait appointments, I had time to ponder a few of the more memorable detectives whose adventures have enlivened my days.

Elizabeth George's Thomas Lynley, eighth Earl of Asherton and Scotland Yard Inspector, is a very interesting character with a brooding Heathcliffe touch. He was in college when his father died, leaving him with the title and estate and some responsibility for a younger brother, Peter. The tangled relationships within his family and his guilt at the accident that crippled his best friend, Simon Allcourt-Saint James, led him to abandon his mother and brother after his father's death in favor of the police force. He has acquired quite a reputation as a ladies' man, and goes home to his estates as seldom as possible. His friend Simon is engaged to Deborah, who had an earlier fling with Lynley, whose interest in her lingers in the early books. Lynley's partner, Sergeant Barbara Havers, comes from an entirely different working-class background. Her father is critically ill, and her mother beginning to show signs of incipient dementia. Barbara's in-your-face attitude and gritty hardscrabble home life is quite a contrast to Lynley's, whom she initially loathes. You can follow this cast of characters through a satisfying series of now 17 Lynley books, the first of which, A Great Deliverance, won numerous prizes. Several of the stories have appeared on PBS, with actor Nathaniel Parker in the title role.

I am seriously intrigued by Louise Penny's compassionate, philosophical Armand Gamache in her Three Pines series, and have followed the gradual unfolding of his personality and life with avid interest from book to book. An honest, observant, even-tempered man, he has reached his position of Chief Inspector of the homicide department of the Sûreté du Québec through effort and talent alone. In contrast to Lynley, Gamache's home life is full and satisfying, if seldom glimpsed by the reader. He has been married for many years to the elfin Reine-Marie, and they have two grown children; a son in Paris and a daughter in Québec. We learn early that Gamache had been orphaned in childhood, and that there is something odd about his late father. Gamache is a supportive leader and mentor to his team, who trust him implicitly. His relationship with his second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, is paternal as well as professional. It is not until Gamache meets the coldest woman in the series that I got a fuller––if viciously biased––picture of Gamache's father from a deliberately hurtful woman who happened to be the mother of his friend Peter Morrow, a Three Pines artist.

The town of Three Pines, in the beautiful secluded Eastern Townships of Québec, is as much a character in this series as the people. The author says "Three Pines wasn’t on any tourist map, being too far off any main or even secondary road. Like Narnia, it was generally found unexpectedly and with a degree of surprise that such an elderly village should have been hiding in the valley all along. Anyone fortunate enough to find it once usually found their way back." Artists, damaged people, and general misfits tend to find it and settle there, offering a heady brew of characters for the novelist. Cell phone and television reception are unreliable; the village gets its outside news from visitors or the newspapers. Even the postman lingers there, to have an espresso in Olivier's bistro and watch the enchanted, slow-moving panorama. Most of the cases in the series are set in or have their roots in this hauntingly beautiful hamlet.

It is hard to believe that Sister Mary Murderous introduced me to this series only a few years ago. I feel that I have known this place and these people forever; yet each book offers fresh insights into the place and characters. The author has finally approved a series of made-for-TV movies based on the series, which PBS will surely pick up for viewing in the states. Curiously, actor Nathaniel Parker, who played Thomas Lynley, will also play Gamache. He didn't work well for me as Lynley, so I will be curious to see how he meets my expectations as Gamache––a more demanding role and character.

The author has said that the character of Gamache is modeled on her husband of many years. If so, these books are a remarkable collection of love letters to a  good and fortunate man and a place many of us have dreamed of finding someday. Each of the eight books in this character-driven series has been a feast of personalities and place, well worth lingering over and rereading. The last, The Beautiful Mystery, closed with an unhappy resolution for the characters, so I am hoping for a better outcome from the next book, How the Light Gets In, due for release in August.

Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey was my first serious fictional crush, and one of my most enduring. Dorothy L. Sayers's Golden Age aristocratic detective is the second son of the late 15th Duke of Denver and the half-French Dowager Duchess Honoria Delagardie, who is a recurring and charming character throughout the series. His brother, the current Duke, is a traditionalist and a bit of a stuffed shirt, and his younger sister Mary fancies herself a bluestocking and a Socialist. While Wimsey presents himself as an affable idiot in society, his keen gift of logical deduction and strong sense of responsibility involve him in the solution of murder mysteries and occasional sensitive diplomatic missions for His Majesty's government.

At the beginning of the series, he is suffering from what today we would call PTSD, as a result of having to order men to their deaths during World War I. His mother and doctors are in despair; he stays in his bed at Denver, terrified to give any order to anyone for fear of possible consequences. Not until his army batman Mervyn Bunter shows up and takes him in hand does he begin to recover. I remember a bit from one of the early books when his mother comes into the London flat and Bunter beams at her and carols "My Lady, he just told me to take away this damned slop and bring him some sausages."  While he continues to recover, Wimsey has recurring bad episodes when murderers are hanged as a result of his investigations throughout the series.

Not until the fifth book, Strong Poison, does Wimsey meet the love of his life, a woman who eludes him through most of the rest of the series. Young author Harriet Vane is accused of having poisoned her artist lover because he was unfaithful. Wimsey becomes involved in the case at the request of a friend, and proves the lady's innocence. He also falls deeply in love with her, and thereafter proposes at least once per book, but she will have none of him. The endless permutations of this most prickly and poetic romance enliven the rest of the series until and even after the lady yields. Common knowledge has it that Sayers herself fell in love with her detective, and even if she didn't, many readers around the world certainly did. The older books in this series of 13 contain references that are shockingly politically incorrect by today's standards, but were ordinary and expected usage for the period in which they were written. At the request of Dorothy L. Sayers's estate, author Jill Paton Walsh completed Sayers's final Wimsey/Vane novel, Thrones, Dominations.  She has since published two more Wimsey/Vane novels, A Presumption of Death and The Attenbury Emeralds.

All of these series are worth reading in order, and rereading from time to time. I am a bit in love with all of these detectives. (Fortunately, my husband isn't the jealous sort.) While I may forget parts of which mystery occurred in which book, I can pretty well track the development of the characters and their relationships throughout the series. They are developed enough to provide good company in boring or frightening times, and never yammer or intrude when not wanted.

Book Review of Louise Penny's The Beautiful Mystery

The Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny

One beautiful Saturday morning in September, Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec Sûreté and his closest colleague, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, are called from Montréal to a hidden island to investigate a murder. The island is home to a massive, stone monastery, built long ago by a small order, the Gilbertines, who fled to Canada to escape the Inquisition. (Much to my surprise, Beauvoir never makes a Monty Python joke about this. Do you suppose French Canadians don't watch Monty Python?)

Just two dozen monks live at the monastery, where they grow vegetables, tend chickens, cook, maintain the buildings and grounds and––most important––worship God. Their days are spent in near-silence, except for the hours they spend in prayer and singing Gregorian chants. All of the Gilbertines have a gift for singing and most were recruited from other religious communities for their singing talent.

Singing brought the monks together, but it also tore them apart. The murdered monk was Frère Mathieu, the prior and choirmaster. His recording of the Gilbertines' chants became a surprise sensation, bringing in much-needed money to the monastery but, with it, attention and demands from the secular world. Mathieu thought the attention was, literally, a Godsend; they could use the public spotlight to benefit the monastery and spread the word of God. But this would require the abolition of their tradition of silence and the loss of their solitary contemplative life on the hidden island. Dom Philippe, the abbot, and Mathieu's closest friend in the monastery, decided that these losses would destroy the Gilbertine order, and he ruled that there would be no further recordings of the chants and no public appearances by the monks. But what started as a difference of opinion between two friends grew to an enmity that split the community.

The crime reminds Gamache of the story of King Henry II and Thomas á Becket. Becket was Henry's Chancellor and, in that role, supported Henry's imposition of taxes on landowners, including the Church. Henry welcomed Becket's nomination to become Archbishop of Canterbury, assuming that his old friend would continue to back Henry's primacy. Instead, a years-long, escalating battle for church/state supremacy began that led to Becket's murder by four of Henry's knights.

Gamache remembers that, shortly before the murder, a frustrated Henry burst out to his men, "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" and that it appeared Henry's men took that as a command––or at least a suggestion––to kill Becket. Gamache wonders if something similar happened with the Gilbertines. Did one of the monks on the abbot's side of the schism decide that Frère Mathieu had to be eliminated to save the order?

What Gamache doesn't at first recognize is that there is a parallel to the monastery's schism much closer to home. For several years, there has been a venomous animosity between Gamache and Sylvain Françoeur, the man who is now the Superintendent of the Sûreté. The poison of their relationship has spread within the police force, causing rancor and distrust among colleagues.

Gamache and Beauvoir must stay at the monastery to investigate Frère Mathieu's murder. They fall into the rhythm of life at the monastery. More important than the monks' work is each day's prayer sessions. This is when the mesmerizing sound of the chants fills the chapel and seems to work a physical and emotional change in the listener. The book's descriptions of the chants and their history compelled me to listen to some as I read. (You can do it, too, by going to Pandora.com and searching for the Gregorian Chant music channel.)

In their quiet, deliberate way, Gamache and Beauvoir investigate on their own, without the rest of their team, with no internet access or forensics lab, without their families or any intrusion from the outside world. It's as if they are themselves cloistered monks, which makes it almost a peaceful time––until the investigation takes a turn and the plot's pace accelerates, building to a stormy climax. This intense closing promises much more drama to come in the next book for Gamache, Beauvoir, their colleagues and loved ones.


The Beautiful Mystery will be issued by Minotaur Books on August 28, 2012. Macmillan Audio will publish an audiobook on the same date, read by the incomparable Ralph Cosham. My advice is to clear your calendar, go find the Gregorian Chant channel on Pandora, and settle down to yet another compelling entry in the Armand Gamache series.




About the Armand Gamache series

In the Armand Gamache series, there are Three Pines novels, set in the small Brigadoon-ish village in southern Québec, and those set elsewhere in the province. Author Louise Penny must realize that if she set all of the series' murders in Three Pines, the villagers would flee like something out of a Godzilla movie. But, whether set in Three Pines or elsewhere, all of the books in the series have something in common. Each is set in a small community: from a village (Still Life, A Fatal Grace, The Cruelest Month, The Brutal Telling), to the Anglophone community of Québec City and its Literary and Historical Society (Bury Your Dead), to a remote country resort (A Rule Against Murder), to the circle of Québec's artists, dealers and critics (A Trick of the Light) and, now, a monastery.

There are benefits to a small community, like fellowship and support. But when something changes, that can disturb its equilibrium and cause problems that seem inescapable precisely because of the closed nature of the community. As Gamache notes, "murder happens because something changes." Gamache's job is to figure out what has changed, and which member of the community was so unable to cope with the change that he or she saw murder as a solution. Sure, Gamache and his team use traditional methods of examining physical evidence and alibis, but he believes that the murders he investigates were committed for very human reasons that must be unearthed to solve the crime and begin healing the damage caused to the community by the crime.

Does that sound awfully touchy-feely for a murder mystery series? Well, maybe it is, but one of the things I most appreciate about Louise Penny is her respect for murder; for the horror it visits on the community it touches, the damage it inflicts on the soul of the killer, and the ways the community finds to heal and move on after the wound of the murder. The people and situations she describes seem very real. So real that when I finish one of her books, it's as bittersweet as the end of an annual trip to visit friends, when I savor the pleasure of our time together and feel the pang of knowing that all the seasons will pass before we meet again.

Louise Penny

Notes: I received a free review copy of the book and audiobook. Many of the images in this post are taken from Louise Penny's website.

Find that village!

Earlier this week, I was reading a feature about the 16 most picturesque villages in the world. Several interested me, including Bilbury, in England's Cotswolds and Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario. I'd like to visit those places, but the feature got me to thinking of some of the villages I've enjoyed spending time in while I read some of my favorite village mysteries.

St. Mary Mead

St. Mary Mead is home to Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple, though only three of the books (The Murder At the Vicarage, The Body In the Library and The Mirror Crack'd) take place there––and, to be fair, some stories. Still, when you think of Miss Marple, you can't help but think of St. Mary Mead.

I decided to see what Agatha Christie had in mind when she dreamed up St. Mary Mead. It turns out that's a bit of a controversial topic. Some devoted fans were outraged when the Granada television's 2004 production of The Murder At the Vicarage showed stationery indicating St. Mary Mead had an Oxfordshire location, which they howled was way too far from the sea. Despite the location on the stationery, this episode was filmed in the village of Hambleden, on the Thames in Buckinghamshire, which has often been used for filming village locations, notably in the Midsomer Murders series based on the Caroline Graham books.

Hambleden Mill

Hampshire, many insist, must be where St. Mary Mead "really" is. There are a lot of location clues in the books. It's supposed to be only 25 miles from London on a rail line that arrives at Paddington Station, on the west side of London, and it's 12 miles from the sea. Fans of Miss Marple suggest that Market Basing, the nearby market town described in the books, could be real-life Basingstoke, and Danemouth, a seaside resort town, could be real-life Bournemouth. There is a village in Hampshire called St. Mary Bourne, but nobody seems to think Christie had it in mind.

Outdoor scenes in the Miss Marple series starring Joan Hickson (my favorite Jane Marple) were filmed in the delightfully-named Nether Wallop, in Hampshire. This name doesn't refer to a whack on the rear end, despite the way it sounds. "Wallop" is apparently derived from old English words meaning valley and stream. "Nether" means further down. I'd definitely like to visit Nether Wallop, no matter how silly the name sounds or what it might mean.

Nether Wallop, Hampshire

Nether Monkslip

Speaking of Nethers, the new Max Tudor series by G. M. Malliett is set in Nether Monkslip, another fictional English village. Periphera talked about the book back in October, including the fact that the author's website includes a nifty interactive map of the village. Check it out: Interactive Map of Nether Monkslip. Having a map of the village in a village mystery is such a pleasure!

Bishop's Lacey

When precocious 11-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce has pushed things a little too far at home at her family's country house, Buckshaw, she hops on her bicycle, Gladys, and heads into the village of Bishop's Lacey to see what kind of trouble she can get into there. Since it's the early 1950s, with rationing still in effect, there are real limits to the appeal of this particular village. Still, the countryside is lovely and there is always something entertaining going on in town, like a touring magic show that everyone turns out to watch. It's an electrifying experience, as you'll learn if you read The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag. The whole village also turns up at Buckshaw for a Christmas show put on by a visiting film crew in I Am Half-Sick of Shadows.

St. Denis, France

These English villages are all well and good, but sometimes you might be in the mood for more sun, more wine and good French food. That's when you should head for Martin Walker's St. Denis in the Dordogne, home of Bruno Courrèges, Chief of Police. It seems like the sun shines constantly, and you can relax at a café table with a glass of Ricard and water, watching the old-timers playing petanque.

St. Denis is a small village of fewer than 3,000 residents, but its main street has its wine shop, boulangerie, fromagerie, charcuterie and just about any -erie you could want to live the good life. The weekly open-air market is where you'll stroll around, picking up delicacies and the freshest foods to make your meal a celebration. Bruno is great at warning the stall-keepers when the EU food inspectors are on the prowl, so you'll be able to get the real home-grown thing without interference by the persnickety hygiene squad.

Three Pines, Québec

The village I'm most curious about is Louise Penny's creation in the Eastern Townships region of Québec province, near the Vermont border. When homicide detective Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Québec Sûreté goes there to investigate a murder, he notes that Three Pines doesn't appear on any maps. Most of its residents are Montrealers who found it by accident when they were looking for a place to start a new life––which they expected to find much further away.

And how fortunate Three Pines has been in some of those who found their way there. Myrna, a former psychologist, opens a bookstore. Olivier and Gabri open a B&B and a nearby bistro. Their businesses take their places around the village green with M. Béliveau's depannier (general store) and Sarah's boulangerie. Monks in the nearby countryside provide the rich, runny cheeses and the local farms the fresh produce and meat.

Villagers stroll across the green on a whim for a delicious meal or a drink at the bistro. In the winter, two fireplaces warm the room, and in the summer there's a sunny terrace with cheerful umbrellas where you can enjoy a fresh lemonade, a cold beer or a gin and tonic. So many of Sarah's freshly-baked croissants are eaten in this series that I sometimes want to bang my head in hungry frustration.

Villagers are shopkeepers, innkeepers, painters, poets, woodsmen and cabinetmakers. People with boring jobs seem to do them out of town. Or maybe they don't even live there. Well, wait. There is Billy Williams, who seems to be a jack-of-all-trades. I guess you have to have one of those.

Three Pines is so appealing that I've spent an inordinate amount of time poring over maps trying to figure out what village might be its model. Then I started reading Louise Penny's blog. She lives in a town called Sutton–––in the Eastern Townships. I could drive there in less than five hours. Get a grip, I tell myself. You're one road trip away from being a stalker.

Maybe I could cut the stalking trip short and just stop on the way in a Vermont village, Norwich, to visit another mecca of mine, King Arthur Flour.

At least there I could learn to make my own damn croissants!

* * *

Aside from their unnervingly high murder rate, don't these places sound like they should make a feature's list of most appealing fictional villages? Do you have your own favorite villages from mystery reading? Which fictional villages do you wish you could live in––or at least visit?

By the way, not that it really has anything to do with my theme today (other than general TGIF-ness), but I came across this "map" of funny (mostly sexual and scatalogical) place names in Britain and thought you might enjoy it. I wonder if there's a lot of pressure in Giggleswick to be cheerful all the time.

Have You Had Your Serial Today?

It must be a mixed blessing to write a successful mystery series. The benefits are obvious: a built-in audience for each successive title in the series, characters who can be explored at length and in depth, and a protagonist with name recognition who may even become an icon like Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey or Miss Marple.

But writing a series has its challenges. Readers may come to feel so invested in the protagonist and other regular characters that they are offended if the author wants to change direction. Previous descriptions of the protagonist's background restrict what the author can do with the protagonist later on. The author may come to feel the series' success is as restrictive as golden handcuffs.

Arthur Conan Doyle resented that the success of his Sherlock Holmes stories kept him from more important pursuits and he killed off Holmes in 1893, only to succumb to public demand and resurrect him in 1901. Agatha Christie's grandson says that she had many ideas for plots that were inappropriate for Hercule Poirot and wanted to create new lead characters. But Poirot was her most popular protagonist and her publishers and public demanded she continue to produce new tales featuring the little Belgian with the active little grey cells. So, despite the fact that she had come to view her creation as a bombastic, detestable creep within 10 years or so of his first appearance, she churned out her Poirot stories for more than half a century.

The challenge for the serial writer is keeping the story fresh and interesting within the boundaries created by earlier books in the series. How many series have you read that eventually appeared to be phoned in by the author, with the protagonist's character seeming to be preserved in amber and plots settled into well-worn ruts?

In the past couple of weeks, I've read three new books in successful and long-running series. These were all series I had on my must-read list from the start. How well their authors managed the challenge of sustaining interest varied.

Louise Penny's Chief Inspector Armand Gamache/Three Pines series could be a prime candidate to fall into dull repetition. After all, how much can you do with a series set in a remote, idyllic village in the forests of Québec's Eastern Townships region? How many villagers can be killed off before the town's residents would have to flee for their lives if they weren't completely nuts? Louise Penny tackles the inherent restrictions of her setting—and the incongruity of Three Pines being a place of art, friendship and hospitality and, at the same time, a locale with an appallingly high murder rate—with wry humor. In her latest book in the series, A Trick of the Light, local bookseller Myrna describes Three Pines as "a shelter[, t]hough, clearly, not a no-kill shelter."

Penny also knows it's best to mix things up a bit by moving her location on occasion. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is a detective stationed in Québec City, which opens up more possibilities. In A Rule Against Murder (also published as The Murder Stone), Gamache and his wife are on vacation at a resort when a murder occurs. Bury Your Dead takes place almost entirely in Québec City during its winter carnival.

For A Trick of the Light, Penny returns to Three Pines, though she opens the action in Montréal's Musée d'Art Contemporain, where Clara Morrow, one of the Three Pines regular characters, is about to enter a preview of a solo show of her work. Clara is 50, far beyond the age when most artists are discovered, but after working in her successful artist husband's shadow for decades, she has become an overnight sensation.

After the preview, Clara returns to Three Pines for a celebratory party with her village friends, and artists, gallery owners and artists'agents from Montréal. In the category of friends are Gamache and his second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Gamache and Beauvoir have become acquainted with Three Pines and its quirky residents during their investigations of several prior murders.

The celebratory mood is swept away when, early the next morning, the murdered corpse of a woman is found in Clara's garden. The woman is identified as Lillian Dyson, a childhood friend of Clara's who cruelly betrayed her while they were in art college. But what was Lillian doing in Three Pines when Clara hadn't laid eyes on her in over 20 years?

Traditional detection methods of examining means and opportunity still leave Gamache and Beauvoir with a wide field of suspects. They shift their focus to motive, which reveals a huge gap between the type of person Lillian is widely reported to have been 20 years earlier and how she is seen contemporarily by her new circle of acquaintances.

Gamache realizes that the question of Lillian's true personality is the key to the mystery, because only through understanding her nature can the investigators learn how she inspired murderous hatred and in whom. In the course of their investigation, Gamache and Beauvoir also confront the horrors they still live with as survivors of a deadly attack on their team the year before. The experience has affected Gamache profoundly, but it has not shaken his fundamental belief in people. Beauvoir thinks: "The Chief believed if you sift through evil, at the very bottom you'll find good.  He believed that evil has its limits. Beauvoir didn't. He believed that if you sift through good, you'll find evil. Without borders, without brakes, without limit."

Clara's new-found success and Lillian's murder also bring to a boil the problems of envy and lack of understanding that have plagued her marriage for several years. In fact, envy is a persistent theme in this book, as another deadly sin, greed, was in Penny's prior book, A Brutal Telling.

What Louise Penny does best, and what allows her to write a mystery series that stays fresh, is to focus on the human heart and spirit, nature and the small pleasures and concerns of life (especially food!), rather than on forensics, timetables, violent action or gimmicky personalities. She writes about envy, resentment and fear eating away at people, threatening friendships, marriages, partnerships and even lives, but also about love, forgiveness and redemption offering hope for change and a forging of new, stronger bonds.

A Trick of the Light was released on August 30 and if I were you I'd rush right out and get it.

What do you suppose is the longest-running mystery series among currently living authors? Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford series must be one of them. She started in 1964 with From Doon With Death and is up to her 24th in the series, The Vault (published in the UK August 4, 2011 and to be published in the US September 13, 2011). In addition to Inspector Wexford, Rendell has 35 non-series books and 13 more written as Barbara Vine. Just thinking about her work ethic makes me want to sit down and put my feet up.

In 2009, London's Telegraph newspaper reported that Rendell didn't want to write any more Inspector Wexford novels after that year's The Monster in the Box. I was worried that Rendell was fed up with Wexford and that The Monster in the Box would show it, but my concerns were unfounded. The book was a truly enjoyable wrap-up to the series, with Wexford tackling a case that took him back to his earliest days in the police force, and his mixed-up personal life at that time.

What a surprise to hear this year that there would be a new Wexford book. The Vault finds Wexford retired and splitting his time, with his wife Dora, between their longtime home in Kingsmarkham and the coach house of their actress daughter's upmarket home in London. Retirement is good for Wexford's physical health, as he spends hours a day taking long walks in the city, but he finds himself at loose ends without his work. He's relieved when Tom Ede of London's Metropolitan Police, an old acquaintance, asks him to provide consulting assistance in the investigation of four long-dead bodies found down an ancient coal-hole on the grounds of a house in quiet St. John's Wood.

The Vault is a sequel of sorts to one of Rendell's non-Wexford novels, A Sight for Sore Eyes (1999). While it's not necessary to read the other book to understand The Vault, it might be a good idea, since it's bound to make The Vault more interesting. And that would be a good thing. While The Monster in the Box seemed to breathe new life into the Wexford series, The Vault is tired. Most of the witnesses and suspects are so one dimensional that it's hard to keep them straight. The secondary-story strand about the Wexfords' Kingsmarkham daughter, Sylvia, manages to be simultaneously lurid and dull. Some of the writing is sloppy and unclear as well.

Still, Rendell has Wexford make some interesting observations about his new role as a consulting detective with no official standing and how it affects his interactions with interviewees and the police. I wish I knew why Rendell decided to write another Wexford after The Monster in the Box made such a good series conclusion. Pressure, as in Christie's and Conan Doyle's cases? Or does she believe she still has something to say about Wexford and his cases? If it's the latter, I hope she exploits the possibilities in Wexford's new role to create a more fully dimensional and coherent book next time around.

And that brings me to the third new series book, Laurie R. King's eleventh and latest in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, Pirate King (to be published September 6, 2011). I loved the first book in the series, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, and have read every book in the series as soon as it was published.

I was delighted from the start of the series when the young bluestocking, Mary Russell, met up with Sherlock Holmes. Their partnership was filled with erudite and witty repartee, and they traveled the world together sleuthing in ingenious disguises and using elaborate ruses to escape peril. But then something strange happened. King began separating Holmes and Russell. At first, the books would describe each of the partners' doings, which were bookended with scenes of them together. Later on, though, their time together became strictly limited and Mary's separate role was emphasized.

Pirate King takes this trend even further. In this book, Holmes is entirely absent for a good two-thirds of the book and the pair are together for very few pages. I would estimate that scenes of the two of them together total only about 20 pages or so out of more than 300 pages.

Mary is persuaded by Holmes and Inspector Lestrade to go undercover as a director's assistant with Fflytte Films as they head to Lisbon and Morocco to make a silent film about Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. "How can there be a silent film about an operetta?," I hear you ask. It turns out the project is about a film crew trying to make a film about The Pirates of Penzance. The play-within-a-play conceit becomes ever-more elaborate, as Mary works with actors playing the parts of pirates, constables, British officers and coquettish daughters, and many of the actors turn out to be something other than what they seem.

Mary's task is to see what she can find out about Fflytte Films that might explain why crime seems to follow its films in ways related to the subject matter of each film, and why the previous director's assistant disappeared before the crew left England for Portugal. A series of minor disasters besets the cast and crew in Lisbon, but real danger begins as their sailing ship approaches North Africa. In this third part of the book, Holmes has joined the cast incognito, as an actor playing the Major General, and he and Mary must rescue the party from grave danger. This third part of the book, which takes up a little over 70 pages, has all the derring-do, action and spirit that are lacking in the rest of the book. It is cleverly written in a way that I could imagine as a script for a silent-film adventure story.

I'm puzzled why Laurie R. King has altered this series to de-emphasize the Russell/Holmes collaboration almost to the disappearing point. Having so much of the book devoted to Mary working alone forced it into an awkward first-person narrative that reads like a well-educated and earnest young businesswoman's travel diary. I wasn't particularly interested to read in detail about her dealings on behalf of and with the cast and crew, her seasickness, rehearsal travails and the like. (And I'll admit I was a little miffed by Mary's scornful attitude toward my beloved Gilbert & Sullivan.)

Though the book returned to the series' old form at the end, I couldn't help noticing that the subjects of Mary's investigation were mere afterthoughts in the resolution of the story. It made me wonder about the utility of so many of the previous pages detailing Mary’s sleuthing.

Has Laurie R. King come to feel so restricted by the Russell/Holmes partnership that she separated them? Is the weight of Sherlock Holmes's legendary persona so burdensome that she wants to cut him loose? She's the creator and, of course, she's free to do that. But I'm one of those pesky fans who don't like to see a change in a winning formula.

Note: I received The Pirate King and A Trick of the Light as free review copies. Also, portions of the reviews in this post appear in book reviews posted on the books' product pages on Amazon, under my Amazon pen name.