Category: Louise Penny
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Louise Penny’s The Black Wolf
As The Black Wolf opens, Clara is struggling with the completion of her latest art project, a series entitled Just before something happens, which anticipates one of the key themes of Penny’s latest novel: how to portray the time that precedes a dramatic, or traumatic, event? How, even, to know if one is in the…
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Louise Penny’s A Trick of the Light: The Transformative Power of Sobriety
Louise Penny’s Three Pines/Gamache series features a cast of idiosyncratic local characters, with perhaps the most memorable being the redoubtable Ruth Zardo, Governor General’s Award-winning poet and an elderly, unrepentant drunk. Ruth covets other people’s alcohol; she emanates fumes of whisky. Put a glass down on the table, and Ruth will drink the dregs. I’ve…
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Bouchercon 2026 in Calgary: Early-Bird Registration Has Opened
I’m excited! I’ve just signed up to volunteer. Bouchercon is a “world mystery convention” that usually takes place in the U.S., although I did attend a Toronto Bouchercon once. Peter Robinson interviewed Ian Rankin, and they knocked back whisky while chatting in front of a delighted, standing-room-only crowd. The fall 2026 Calgary event has a…
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Louise Penny’s The Grey Wolf
I’m re-reading Penny’s most recent novel, in anticipation of next fall’s companion volume, The Black Wolf. On Instagram this morning, Penny shared the advance copy (very advance: publication is still six months out). And tickets are now on sale for fall book events in Toronto and Vancouver; the Ottawa book launch at the National Arts…
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Residential Schools and the Three Pines Adaptation of Louise Penny’s The Cruellest Month
This is not a loose adaptation: it’s more of an interpretation of the themes of Louise Penny’s fiction through a very different story that shares the same title. In putting together the first (and only) season of Three Pines, the producers made some interesting and important choices. One of the key ones was to capture…
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Adapting Canadian Crime Fiction: L.R. Wright’s Murder in a Small Town, and Adaptations of Louise Penny’s Gamache/Three Pines Books
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…
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The Murders in Great Diddling: Katarina Bivald Revises and Parodies the Cozy
The Edgar nominations were announced last month, and Katarina Bivald’s The Murders in Great Diddling is up for the Lilian Jackson Braun Award for best new cozy mystery. In the cozy, as the name suggests, the violence is off-stage and not off-putting. The victim may be widely disliked as in Bivald’s book, or the crime…
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Louise Penny’s The Cruellest Month: Literary Allusions, Easter, and the Near Enemy
“Nature’s in turmoil. Anything can happen.” Ruth Zardo, The Cruellest Month “Whan that Aprill with his shoures sooteThe droghte of March hath perced to the roote. . . .” Geoffrey Chaucer, General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales Penny borrows the opening line of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as the title of her third Three…
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Louise Penny’s A World of Curiosities, Donna Decker’s Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You, and the Fictional Portrayal of the Montreal Massacre
This week, a fellow seeking to be the next Prime Minister of Canada had to apologize to Nathalie Provost. A survivor of the Montreal Massacre, she has been a vocal advocate for gun control and is running for the federal Liberal party. Great non-partisan news! However, Mark Carney referred to the site of the violence…
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Raymond Chandler Evening
Last night was stormy, with rare rumbles of thunder and flashes of lightning. Appropriately, I was listening to “Raymond Chandler Evening” in a live-stream concert by Robyn Hitchcock: It’s a Raymond Chandler EveningAnd the pavements are all wetAnd I’m lurking in the shadows‘Cause it hasn’t happened yet That took me to the BBC radio adaptations…
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 