Dead Silence

Louise Penny’s Still Life is one of the most frustrating books I’ve read all year long. Damn it all, this book starts off so well!!! But the wheels fall off so abruptly in the final act, and we’re left with the most anticlimactic ending I’ve come across in a long time… probably the worst since Catherine Aird’s The Religious Body back in November of last year!!!

The quiet community of Three Pines is a small, peaceful village in rural Québec… and one morning, the community’s peace is shattered when Jane Neal is discovered dead, killed by an arrow. Was it an accident? Then why isn’t anyone coming forward? And where is the arrow? And for that matter, if it was murder, who could have done it? After all, Jane was well-liked by everyone. It sounds like a job for Chief Inspector Armand Gamache!

A Demon in My View

I have quickly become very fond of Margaret Millar, which is why I decided to make her books an integral part of my 2012 Vintage Mystery Reading Challenge. Only Gladys Mitchell and Ellery Queen appear more frequently on my list of books to read. I decided to get the challenge underway by starting with Millar, and soon settled on The Devil Loves Me (1942). It is the third and last of Millar’s books starring Paul Prye. This is my first book read under the theme Devil Take the Hindmost.

Paul is about to get married to Miss Nora Kathleen Shane, and the ceremony is taking place in the ever-so-exotic locale of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. However, the wedding is delayed when one of the guests, Jane Stevens, drops from atropine poisoning. Paul then discovers an anonymous letter addressed to him. Part of it goes thus: I have always been intrigued by the funereal aspect of weddings and the hymeneal aspect of funerals. It is high time someone combined the two.

Face-Off

Bon Cop Bad Cop is a very Canadian film. It is a mystery, a thriller, a cop/buddy movie and a comedy rolled into one, and it has two very Canadian things at its core. The first is the noble pastime of hockey, a truly Canadian sport. The second is the relations between English and French Canadians, which have not always been the most cordial. In October of 1970, it escalated into violence when members of the Fédération de libération du Québec (FLQ) kidnapped James Cross and murdered Pierre Laporte. It was the only time in Canadian history that the War Measures Act (ie marshal law) was imposed during peacetime.

There are a few reasons for this (all too brief) digression on Canadian history. Like I said, it’s important to understand that French Canadians and English Canadians have not gotten along well in the past, as this plays a key role in Bon Cop Bad Cop. But my other motive is simply a love of history in general, and the October Crisis holds a strange fascination for me.

The good ol' curling game...

I suspect that Louise Penny has joined the likes of William DeAndrea and Bill Pronzini (and possibly Peter Lovesey) as modern/recent authors who have done an excellent job keeping mysteries alive and breathing. In June, I read her book The Murder Stone a clever book with a good impossible crime which was neatly executed overall. I compared Penny to Agatha Christie, pointing out it was a modern-day country house mystery, complete with an eccentric family ruled by a domineering matriarch. After a very good introduction to the author’s books, I eagerly picked up the second book in her Armand Gamache series: Dead Cold (a.k.a. A Fatal Grace).

Once again, Louise Penny does an excellent job putting the Canadian spirit onto the page. It’s excellently done, this time through the sport of curling. I’m not a curler myself, and I don’t follow the sport (which makes golf look like an extreme sport), although I have great respect for curlers themselves. Louise Penny obviously likes the sport a lot, and through her descriptions, the game seems to come alive. It’s all done very well, and is in many ways part of the plot— descriptions of snow-covered landscapes are lovely, but snowdrifts can complicate the investigation process, no? But she balances everything nicely: the characterization, the Canadiana, and the plot play off each other very well, and it never seems overdone. For instance, a group of people sit down to watch a hockey game. (Hey, it’s Canada!) Canadian’ passion for hockey is often the source of jokes, the scene here feels very authentic, right down to die-hard fans screaming the goalie should be traded when he’s having a rough night.

The Canadian Statue Mystery

It seems that, in recent weeks, a bit of an international flavour has been thrown into the mystery blogs. I’ve reviewed Paul Halter, John has gotten a crack at the Boileau-Narcejac writing team, and TomCat has introduced us to Dutch authors like Libbe van der Wal. (An internet meme like the Alphabet of Crime Fiction could totally be inspired by this.) Then, I was asked the intriguing question of whether I knew of Canadian GAD-school authors. I couldn’t think of any, but John came to the rescue and offered a suggestion: Louise Penny.

It is very difficult to capture the Canadian spirit— although we’re similar to Americans, Canadians are very different in many ways. It’s a pleasant surprise when an author succeeds in writing Canadiana. In a mystery, it’s doubly pleasant: Canadians are sorely underrepresented in mysteries of the GAD school. Too often, the Canadian cousin is just a neighbour of the aforementioned cousin (probably deceased), trying to get a piece of the family fortune. Basically, Canada is too often used as an easy excuse for why Bob has been away or where outlaw Mickey Finn has been hiding out. (Canada is not alone in this club— Australia comes to mind as a country that plays a similar role a little too often.)