“Three Pines was not on any map and was only ever found by people who had lost their way.”
This was how Louise Penny described the fictional village of Three Pines in her mystery novel series to millions of readers who, for almost 20 years, have found themselves at home in Penny’s writing. After a year’s hiatus, New York Times Bestselling author Louise Penny returned with her 19th novel, “The Gray Wolf.”
Penny took to the Emerson Colonial stage on Nov. 1 as part of her book tour. The event was hosted by Harvard Book Store, which supplied every ticketed guest with a copy of the novel.
The event’s moderator, Tim Ehrenberg, president of the Nantucket Book Festival and host of the popular podcast “Tim Talks Books,” welcomed her by taking a picture with the crowd holding up their books in the air, dotting the packed theater with the familiar blue-and-white cover.
The novelist, speaking in a warm French Canadian accent (she later joked that she didn’t think she had a discernible accent), regaled the crowd with her wit and honesty. She recounted how a five year period of total writer’s block after she quit her job as a journalist at the Canadian Broadcasting Company led her to the place in which she found herself today.
After such a long struggle, Penny said, clarity broke through when she joined a group of various female artists after moving from Montreal to a small town in Quebec.
“They showed me that creativity is a process,” Penny said. “I never thought of it that way. I thought I had to get it right the first time.”
Once Penny achieved her breakthrough, she decided on the genre simply by looking at her bedside table and seeing the abundance of true-crime, thriller, and mystery novels stacked there.
“I wrote the novel I wanted to read,” Penny explained.
That first novel, “Still Life,” was released in 2005 and won the Anthony Award for Best First Novel in 2007.
Reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s classic Hercule Poirot, Penny’s novels center around Quebec-based detective Armand Gamache and his crime-fighting efforts within the tiny village of Three Pines. “The Gray Wolf” tells the story of a new mystery coming his way, beginning with a scene full of relentless phone calls that shatter his otherwise peaceful Sunday morning.
Penny spoke of how she modeled parts of Gamache on her late husband, Dr. Micheal Whitehead, particularly the character’s optimistic outlook on life despite the suffering he witnessed, an attitude that mirrored her husband’s. Whitehead worked as the director of hematology at the Montreal Children’s Hospital until his diagnosis of dementia, which he passed away from in 2016.
“I see it now as, Micheal is immortal,” Penny said.
She credits Whitehead with granting her the financial and emotional support she needed to do what she always wanted, which was to write. She remembered being enamored with the magic of the craft since she was eight years old, having gotten over her fear of spiders by reading “Charlotte’s Web.”
”If reading was that powerful,” she said, “then how amazing to be the writer.”
A self-proclaimed fan of the Latin American magical realism tradition a la Isabelle Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, she described how she tries to weave a certain degree of magic into everyday circumstances within her writing. She gave the example of the fictional setting of Three Pines, which, since it does not truly exist, is more of a state of mind: one of kindness, forgiveness, and goodness.
Those principles, coupled with the richly detailed character studies that pepper each novel, keep audiences engaged even all these years into Penny’s journey.
“It’s the characters really, that keep you coming back,” said longtime fan Rosalie Edes after the event. “The books aren’t all the same kind of mystery book.”
Penny said herself that she cannot write with the traditional mystery formula commonly expected in long-form series like hers, since she prefers taking risks in her novels.
Given the amount of books in the series, an audience member asked if Penny believed there were common themes running through the 19 novels.
Her books, she first explained, are about terror, but they are also about goodness, love, and friendship.
As a lifelong lover of poetry, Penny quoted a line from W.H. Auden’s elegy to Melville:
“Goodness existed, that was the new knowledge / his terror had to blow itself quite out to let him see it.”
The line appears in the first of the 19 novels, and the author described it as emblematic of the spirit of the Three Pines series as a whole, and the messages she hopes to imbibe through her work.
“If there’s one thing you take away from my books,” she said, “let it be that. Goodness existed.”
