Ponder: Still Life

Still Life by Louise Penny ©2005 is the first book in a series of murder mysteries featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Quebec. Normally murder mysteries are not my favorite book genre but I enjoyed Still Life much more than I anticipated. The plot line was engaging; a murder existed, of course, but it was not gruesome. Description of the corpse contained enough detail for purposes of investigation but did not wallow in grisly minutia for the sake of shock value. The dead body was quite tidy actually. A concise overview of the storyline from Amazon reads

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Québec and his team of investigators are called in to the scene of a suspicious death in a rural village south of Montreal. Jane Neal, a local fixture in the tiny hamlet of Three Pines, just north of the U.S. border, has been found dead in the woods. The locals are certain it's a tragic hunting accident and nothing more, but Gamache smells something foul in these remote woods.

What I enjoyed most from this book was the character of the chief investigator, Armand Gamache, who was competent, experienced, psychologically savvy, and observant but above all kind and stern and strong at turns when each demeanor was required. In training new agents, Chief Inspector Gamache  tells them the four sayings that can lead to wisdom – four sentences his own mentor taught him. They are: "I was wrong, I'm sorry, I don't know, I need help". The crime takes place in Montreal and I gained more insight about the culture there. Having recently visited Montreal in October of 2016 as a tourist (hmm... on second thought maybe that is not so "recent") I was oblivious to some subtleties of the spoken language there and the book enlightened me. In Canada, being by law a bilingual nation, there is, in Montreal, an undercurrent of resentment between the francophones and anglophones. Apparently bilingualism is not the panacea of compromise I was led to believe. I learned that a surêté means the criminal investigation department of the French government. Quebec's interference in Montreal's local affairs was not welcomed with open arms. Although these of patches friction peeked through, they were not overall influences on the general ambience of the setting, but did give it dimension. Little dabs of local humor were injected throughout. One example is the village being described as crime free, where neighbor trusts neighbor, and the only time folks lock their door is during the peak of harvest season to prevent unwanted baskets of over abundant zucchini being dropped inside their home. The website GrowaGoodLife.com accompanies the following photo with the phrase.

Ah zucchini… It’s the crop that just keeps on giving.

The small village of Three Pines is an artist community and I absorbed some information about painting, art judging, and shows. I also became aware of the double entendre of Still Life, the title of the book. We typically think of still life as "a painting or drawing of an arrangement of objects, typically including fruit and flowers and objects contrasting with these in texture, such as bowls and glassware". In Chapter Seven, Myrna, a former psychologist, gives a different interpretation. She states her observation that a minority of her clients got better quickly because they worked at it, wanted to change. They were not her patients for long.

"The others said they wanted to get better, but I think, and this isn't popular in psychology circles," – here she leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially – "I think many people love their problems. Gives them all sorts of excuses for not growing up and getting on with life." Myrna leaned back in her chair and took a long breath. "Life is change. If you are not growing and evolving you're standing still, the the rest of the world is surging ahead. Most of these people are very immature. They lead 'still lives', waiting".

I think the previous passage is also a cleverly-worded and discretely-placed clue as to "whodunnit". I struggled a bit in the early chapters because so many characters were introduce among the villagers and I felt my own paranoid need to commit each and every one to memory. I had to, right? Otherwise how could I meet the challenge of solving the mystery and discerning the killer before the novel revealed who it was? But the characters' personalities came out as I continued to read, and my initial concern lapsed into a comfortable knowledge and recognition of each, including their quirks, strengths, and weaknesses. The plot held together, the clues were solid and doled out at a reasonable pace, and the ending was satisfying. Still Life: A Three Pines Mystery was a 2013 made-for-TV movie based on the book. It has an IMDB rating of 5.4 out of ten, not stellar; but I am still curious enough to seek it out and watch it. The list of awards for Still Life the novel is long and impressive. 

• New Blood Dagger (annual award given by the British Crime Writers' Association (CWA) for first books by previously unpublished writers)
• Arthur Ellis (an annual award from the Crime Writers of Canada that recognizes excellence in Canadian crime writing)
• Barry (a crime literary prize awarded annually since 1997 by the editors of Deadly Pleasures, an American quarterly publication for crime fiction readers. )
• Anthony (literary award for mystery writers presented at the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention since 1986)
• Dilys (presented every year from 1992 to 2014 by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. It was given to the mystery title of the year which the member booksellers have most enjoyed selling)

For a good sample of the author's style, the entire first chapter of Still Life is on Louise Penny's website. Still Life was close to 300 pages long with fourteen chapters. Since I tend to use a chapter end as a natural breaking point, reading seemed a long time between breaks. My paperback version was printed in what I think must have been 9 or 10 point font. It took me a while to get through the book. I give Still Life 4 stars in my rating system with translates to Really good; maybe only one weak aspect or limited audience. I liked this author's style. I have requested her second novel from the library and am on a wait list. Louise Penny so far has published fifteen Chief Inspector Armand Gamache murder mysteries. The order of the Gamache books, from first to most recent, is as follows:

1) Still Life ©2005, 2) A Fatal Grace/Dead Cold (same book, different title), 3) The Cruelest Month, 4) A Rule Against Murder/The Murder Stone (same book, different title), 5) The Brutal Telling, 6) Bury Your Dead, 7) A Trick of the Light, 8) The Beautiful Mystery, 9) How the Light Gets In, 10) The Long Way Home, 11) The Nature of the Beast, 12) A Great Reckoning, 13) Glass Houses, 14) Kingdom of the Blind, 15) A Better Man ©2019.

I will not be whizzing through her list of fifteen anytime soon but it is comforting to find an internationally best selling author whose works I can intersperse with my other "Books to Read" choices.