Category: Louise Penny
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Canada-U.S. Relations and Louise Penny’s Fiction
Borders and citizenship have been on my mind. In the current climate, it feels more necessary to attend to the relationship between the two countries than I had intended to do in my book project. My teaching materials on Canadian cultural nationalism and sovereignty and American cultural imperialism are getting a dust-off for revision in…
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Louise Penny’s Still Life: A Milestone Anniversary
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 She famously couldn’t find a publisher until she placed second in what was then called the Debut Dagger contest for unpublished mystery writers, a UK-based prize now termed the Emerging Author Dagger.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…
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Ann Cleeves: An Appreciation
I’m interrupting my set of four posts on academic mysteries to reflect on how brilliant Ann Cleeves’s Vera novels are, in particular. No shade to her other series, which are engaging and innovative as well. This past fall I was due to go to Knowlton, Quebec to see Louise Penny interview Cleeves, at a public…
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Three Pines: Adapting Louise Penny’s Gamache Novels
Adaptations of Canadian mystery fiction are sometimes ephemeral or short-lived. I’ve been unable to track down copies of the series of TV films based on Gail Bowen’s Joanne Kilbourn novels, although it sounds like there were significant changes. For instance, IMDB describes the character in The Wandering Soul Murders–one of Bowen’s grimmest novels, featuring a…
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Baguette et Chocolat: Reconsidering Louise Penny’s Bury Your Dead as Trauma Literature
This morning I am breakfasting on the traditional after-school snack of the French schoolchild: squares of chocolate tucked in to a crispy baguette so that they will melt into the hot bread. A kind of DIY chocolate spread. Louise Penny’s Bury Your Dead is one of her more complex novels, following multiple story and time-lines.…
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Worst New Year’s Eve Party Ever: Louise Penny’s The Madness of Crowds
I have never liked New Year’s Eve parties, but 29 years ago I went to a friend’s party, under protest–literally dropped off at the door by another friend, with whom I’d had dinner, and ordered to stay for at least half an hour. And I met somebody quite lovely, and talked about Jane Austen for…
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Pamela Bedore’s Routledge Introduction to Canadian Crime Fiction
I’ve been drafting a sometimes sprawling book project, adding and subtracting chapters too frequently. It’s been such a big help to have a model and guide for my work, in the form of Pamela Bedore’s 2024 book on Canadian crime writing. In a crucial way, I’m writing in dialogue with Bedore–and with a few other…
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Louise Penny: Cooking the Books
It’s been eighteen months of lots of teaching and creative writing, so the book project has ticked along much more slowly. But it’s also Christmas, and a perfect time to write about Louise Penny’s Three Pines Cookbook–available free online–The Nature of the Feast. While the title alludes to one of Penny’s most violent and disturbing…
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Louise Penny and the Landscape of Canadian Women’s Crime Fiction
I’ve been working on a book project (tentative title above) on Canadian women’s mystery and detective fiction. Some of the authors I’m covering, like Penny, Gail Bowen, and Ausma Khan, are well-known to a wide range of readers; others may be less familiar. Here are a few of my research questions: As I explore these,…
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 