September 30th will be the 20th anniversary of Penny’s first novel, Still Life. She famously couldn’t find a publisher until she placed second in what was then called the Debut Dagger contest for unpublished mystery writers, a UK-based prize now termed the Emerging Author Dagger. (The image above is AI-generated with the prompt “Louise Penny Still Life.” Not bad! Except the food looks inedible, which is very Not Penny.)
To mark this anniversary, Penny recently noted on social media that her publishers are preparing a special edition, as well as a short video.
Canadians, as we embrace our latent patriotism, should be especially proud of Penny. She’s not going to appear at the Kennedy Centre because of all of the nonsense south of the border.
Penny has also been extraordinarily generous with her advice to other aspirants.
The success of Still Life has been generously credited by Penny to a host of supporters, chief among them her late husband, Michael Whitehead. He was a pediatric oncologist who, in his belief in goodness, became the model for Gamache.
But Penny is also profuse in her thanks to her communities in Knowlton and Sutton in the Eastern Townships. While Three Pines is fictional, it’s also very much the product of a particular place that inspired the author, with its rolling ski hills, quaint coffee shops, fluent bilingualism (and limited language politics tension), and summer and leaf-season tourism waves.
Visiting Knowlton a couple of years ago was a jump-start for my research. We saw the church spires and the extraordinary Lac Brome Books, the museum (exterior only, because it was still closed for the season) and the waterfall near the mill.
I marvelled at how fundamentally tiny it is: not quite as small as the green with a dozen houses and businesses dotting it that is depicted in the Gamache novels, but really very small (albeit with neighbourhoods stretching in a couple of directions, including towards Lake Brome, of the famous ducks).
And we saw this outdoor painting, which I’ve recently been puzzling over, because I neglected to take a photo of the label explaining it–but I’m pretty sure it was Penny-adjacent. Must go back and check.
During the same trip, we spent a few days in Montreal, and we visited the cemetery where my travel companion’s ancestors and close family members, going back several generations, are buried, high atop a hill.
We came across Leonard Cohen’s grave, which was a pleasure, because he is important to me–and to Penny. You’ll recall that a Penny novel is title How the Light Gets In; several others reference Cohen.
Two photos: the latter is from a curtain that hangs in a Victoria bakery’s bathroom, amusingly. When I asked if I could take a photo, they were very gracious, so let me just add that the James Bay Imagine Studio Cafe is a social enterprise that does a lot of good and also makes fabulous pastries.
I’m looking forward to longer days and more light–and next fall’s anniversary celebrations for a truly lovely book.
A friend just read it for the first time (yes, I do buy copies in triplicate) and enjoyed it a great deal. With this novel, Penny has, as she herself notes, given her readers a haven by making them vicarious members of the Three Pines community.
We all need that right now.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 
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