59 pages • 1 hour read
A Rule Against Murder
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Background
Series Context: The Gamache Series
Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache series burst onto the mystery scene in 2005 with her debut novel, Still Life. In it, she introduces two iconic features of the series: Armand Gamache and the village of Three Pines. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is, in some ways, a classic detective in the style of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.
With Three Pines, Penny has created a village that has become a favorite among her readers. The village is idyllic and isolated from the world, seeming to exist outside of normal space and time. In A Rule Against Murder, even though the main action of the novel doesn’t take place in Three Pines, Penny takes the reader there with a mailman who sets the scene: “It always amused him to imagine that Three Pines, nestled among the mountains and surrounded by Canadian forest, was disconnected from the outside world. It certainly felt that way. It was a relief” (5). Throughout the series, whenever a character visits Three Pines for the first time, they respond with an immediate sense of well-being and belonging. Many books in the series take place in Three Pines, and Gamache always returns eagerly, considering the village a home away from his home in urban Montreal.
Another unique feature of Penny’s series is the fact that she layers long story arcs and themes throughout the series. Because Gamache is a thoughtful, insightful, open-minded man, he considers every mystery in light of its larger meaning. Through him, Penny addresses themes of grief, jealousy, and betrayal, often in the larger context of the way that these emotions can drive humans to murder. Counteracting these darker themes, however, are positive themes such as redemption, loyalty, and forgiveness. The Gamache books have quickly become recognized as classics in the mystery genre.
Genre Context: The Whodunit
Because Gamache is a chief inspector with the Quebec Sûreté, a reader might expect the Gamache series novels to be police procedurals: a mystery subgenre that focuses on the technical and forensic detail of an investigation. However, Gamache is a detective who relies on observation and assessment of the emotional states of his suspects and the relationship dynamics between suspects and victims. He casts a wide net that goes beyond forensic information, and Penny takes pains to divorce Gamache and his team from the technical aspects of policework.
The Gamache series falls more in line with one of the more traditional mystery subgenres: the whodunit. This is especially true with this text, which heavily alludes to Agatha Christie novels such as And Then There Were None (1939). A Rule Against Murder similarly features a large cast of characters isolated in a remote location—in this case, the Manoir Bellechasse, a lodge set deep in the forests of Quebec.
At the end of the novel, when Gamache gathers all interested parties together to reveal the results of his investigation, Penny uses a classic trope of the whodunit subgenre: the denouement speech. As is standard in such a scene, here Gamache answers all of the questions that the murder has raised, as well as explains the logic that led him to the solution. Because of the third-person omniscient point of view that Penny uses, the reader is already aware of many of the points he makes, but the other characters have not seen the investigation develop in the same way. With scenes like this, Penny draws parallels between the Gamache novels and whodunit classics from authors like Agatha Christie.
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By Louise Penny
