The Hangman - Louise Penny

Louise Penny’s novella, The Hangman, was part of the Good Reads project sponsored by ABC Life Literacy Canada. That project, funded in part by the Canadian government, was meant to introduce Canadian authors to a wider reading public. By the time Penny wrote The Hangman, she had already written six Inspector Gamache novels, so some booksellers list this 2010 novella as book number 6 ½ iThn that series. (With the planned September 2020 release of All the Devils Are Here, the series will have reached 16 novels.) The problem is that The Hangman is a shadow of any of the Gamache novels.

Gamache is called back to Three Pines to investigate a suspicious death after a morning jogger stumbles upon a dead man hanging from a tree. By all appearances, the man seems to have taken his own life, but after Gamache reads his rather cryptic suicide note, the inspector decides it is more likely that he was murdered. Now, Gamache and Inspector Beauvoir are going to have to figure out who the man really is, what he came to Three Pines hoping to find, and who decided to kill him.

Louise Penny

The Hangman is short even by novella standards, coming in at only 89 short pages of text, so there is not a lot of room in it for character development or setting description. Readers familiar with the Gamache series will recognize Three Pines, Gamache, Beauvoir, and a Three Pines character or two such as Myrna (the bookstore owner) and Gabri (the pub owner) from the village, but other than Gamache none of the characters are much fleshed out, and their previous relationships get only a quick nod from Penny.

But short as it is, Penny does offer a few insights into Gamache’s methods and a general observation or two about people and crime that, although not particularly deep, are striking. Little asides like:

            “People rich in money might belong at the Inn and Spa, but those rich in other ways belonged in the tiny village of Three Pines. Here, kindness was the real currency.”

Or this observation from Gamache:

            “Still Paul Goulet looked blank. Chief Inspector Gamache knew how difficult that was. A person’s face almost always had some expression on it.

            A blank face was a wall. Put there on purpose, to hide something.”

And, finally, this Gamache thought after a comment by Gabri:

            ‘“Arthur Ellis,” said Gabri, almost to himself. “He sounds so normal. Seemed so normal.”

            Gamache had to agree. But he also knew normal people were killed all the time. It was the murderer who wasn’t normal.”

Bottom Line: The Hangman is an entertaining mystery story, but it is a little too stark for readers who first met Gamache and Three Pines in the Inspector Gamache novels to really sink their teeth into. Gamache completists will definitely want to read it, but it is not likely to become one of their series favorites.