A second season of Fox’s Murder in a Small Town has started shooting on the Sunshine Coast, and locals are happy. The production has injected $4 million into the area’s economy, and while the series leads are not all from B.C., they are Canadian.
RCMP Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg is played by Rossif Sutherland, previously a credible Beauvoir in Three Pines. Vancouver-born Kristen Kreuk is Cassandra, town librarian, co-conspirator, and Alberg’s love interest. They’re both very strong. They are, of course, younger and much glossier than L.R. Wright’s novels suggest, but the series has developed thoughtfully over its first season after a slightly awkward start. A second one will be welcome.
And the economic investment is needed. British Columbia’s TV and film industry took a massive hit from COVID, and has still not fully recovered. To wit (from the article linked to below), “According to the Tourism Ministry, the B.C. TV and film industry contributed $2 billion to the provincial GDP in 2023 and employs around 26,000 full-time workers. Those numbers are down from 2022 when the industry employed close to 50,000 full-time workers and contributed $4.4 billion to the B.C. economy.”
Then there’s the long-running Murdoch Mysteries, with 18 seasons and counting. At this point, is there a major Canadian actor who hasn’t made a guest appearance? I enjoyed Megan Follows in a recent episode.
A growing scholarly literature accompanies the series, including some engaging recent work by Sarah Binnie on fandom, and a study of how the series deploys mythology. Next up for me is an article on how criminal investigation in the series is linked to national identity.
I’m working on an academic-ish article on the Three Pines adaptation of Louise Penny’s fiction and, a decade earlier, the stand-alone TV adaptation of Still Life: A Three Pines Mystery.
After re-watching, I prefer the more recent series, but it’s a pity that the first TV adaptation was infused with such a sense of menace. Penny commented that the producers misinterpreted her meaning, in making Three Pines hostile to outsiders. The more recent series, too, conveys the town as a place that is only selectively welcoming. As noted below, Penny is uncomfortable with that portrayal.
This Vanity Fair profile has some intriguing quotations:
“. . . she’d signed off on a TV Gamache once before, an experience that left her vowing she’d never ever do so again”, as “it just wasn’t, I felt, a true reflection of the spirit of the books.”
“As a Canadian, it’s so nice to see Canada being itself, in French, with curling. Do you think American viewers will go for it?
I know they will, and let me tell you why. It took me years to find an agent and a publisher, and part of the problem, [which] I heard over and over again, was that no one would be interested in a crime novel set in Canada. I knew that wasn’t true, but I couldn’t marshal arguments. Americans are very open to my books, which frankly sell better in the United States than anywhere else, including Canada. People like good stories wherever they are.”
“Can you give me an example of a battle you lost?
Sure, yes, I’ve been open and honest about this. The village is much darker than my village, the villagers aren’t open or welcoming. Everyone has dark secrets. My village is a sanctuary and my characters are a lot more accepting. That’s my Three Pines, but the show goes another route. That’s okay too, and I accept it.”
What Penny emphatically didn’t accept was that after one season, the series was cancelled. She described herself as “shocked and upset”, and encouraged fans to write to Prime Television Video’s head with their concerns (Facebook).
I’m wondering what L.R. (Laurali) Wright would have thought of Murder in a Small Town, whose casting was only possible because Three Pines didn’t get a second season.
Her daughters have helped sustain interest in Wright’s work since she passed away in 2001. I’ve been thrilled with the revival of her novels, and the re-publication of some that were hard to find. And it’s a delight to see a member of the Sutherland acting family connected to both L.R. Wright’s work and Louise Penny’s.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 
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