Still Life: The First Inspector Gamache Novel - Take One

I was not one of those lucky readers who discovered Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache books when the first one was published back in 2005. I, in fact, did not become acquainted with the inspector until 2010 when I somehow stumbled upon that year’s addition to the series (book number six) Bury Your Dead.I really liked that one, but I didn’t make the effort to check out Penny’s backlist or even to read book seven when it was published in 2011. And I never even realized that a Gamache novella, The Hangman, was published in late 2010. But then I lucked into an ARC of The Beautiful Mysteryin 2012, and that one was so good that I could not wait for the next Gamache to be published in 2013 – but I still missed it and haven’t read it to this day. 

I’ve done much better since my haphazard approach to the series first began, though, and have read The Long Way Home (2014), The Nature of the Beast (2015), A Great Reckoning (2016), Glass Houses(2017), and Kingdom of the Blind (2018) not long after each was published. So, although I feel like I know the good inspector and the residents of Three Pines pretty well at this point, I still have this huge gap in my reading: the first five books, the eighth book, and the novella. And just a few days ago, the fifteenth novel in the Gamache series, A Better Man, was published, so there’s that. So, what better time to go back and read Still Life, the book that started it all?

Louise Penny

I’m about 25% of the way through Still Life right now, and it’s settling into the murder investigation that comprises the novel’s main plotline. Reading this one so far out of sequence as I am is proving to be a bit like going back in time via a real life time-machine. It has been a such a great treat to see Gamache and the Three Pines residents all show up in the book’s first thirty pages that I found myself making notes about when they all first appeared and how Penny described them that first time. 

Some of the things I learned in the first fifty or so pages of Still Lifesurprised me, some didn’t:

·      Gamache was introduced on the book’s first page as being in his mid-fifties and suffering somewhat of a stalled career (I had wrongly assumed that he was a much younger man when the series opened and that his career would have been on a markedly upward path.)

·      The next two characters introduced are the artists Clara and Peter Morrow. (Knowing what comes much later for one of them makes this introduction seem a poignant one.) 

·      Ruth Zardo is the next to be mentioned, but only briefly. (She is my favorite of the Three Pines cast.)

·      Next up are the gay couple who run the bistro, Olivier and Gabri – who play a key role in kicking off the plot twists in Still Life.

·      Then comes bookstore owner Myrna Landers who is described as a colorfully dressed, heavyset, former psychologist who also just happens to be black (her race is thrown in almost as an afterthought; I liked that approach).

·      In what is almost a throwaway sentence, Penny makes reference to the source of Gamache’s career troubles, something called the “Arnot case.”

·      Gamache had never heard of Three Pines despite it being only minutes away from his Montreal home, and he would have never discovered its existence had he not been called there to investigate a murder.

·      Gamache has already been working with Jean Guy Beauvoir for ten years.

·      The origin of the Three Pines name is explained early on, although I remember it being repeated in at least one much later novel (which makes sense).

·      The first meeting between Ruth Zardo and Gamache is an absolute hoot, and in addition to what it reveals about both of them, it explains some of the good-natured verbal sparring between the two that happens in succeeding books.

·      Gamache has had the same rank for the past twelve years but it really doesn’t bother him all that much. He is a happy man, and he and his wife have a very special relationship.

It will, of course, be interesting to watch all of these characters and their various interpersonal relationships develop but going back to this “origin story” is really fun. It makes me wonder if I would have even noticed half the things I’ve noted here if I had not already read half of the series. So, I guess my takeaway from this experience (realizing it may not work this way for everyone) is that if you come to a long series somewhere in the middle of it, or even later, don’t despair because that might be a good thing in the long run. It certainly has been for me in the case of the Inspector Gamache books.