Background

Louise Penny was born on July 1, 1958, in Toronto, Ontario.

Education

Penny earned a Bachelor of Applied Arts (Radio and Television) from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University) in 1979.

Career

Upon receiving her Bachelor of Applied Arts in Radio and Television Arts from Ryerson Polytechnic in 1979, Louise Penny began a lengthy career as a radio host and journalist (see Journalism) with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Through her work, she honed her public speaking skills and the ability to relate to others, skills that would later serve her well as an author.

In 2004 Penny met her future husband, Doctor Michael Whitehead, then Chief of Hematology at Montreal Children's Hospital. He encouraged her to abandon her broadcasting career and write the novel she had always promised herself she would write. Penny's mother had introduced her daughter to such classic crime writers (see Popular Literature) as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and George Simenon. After a false start in which she attempted to write the novel she thought others expected of her, Penny refocused her efforts and produced a story that she submitted for the British-based Crime Writers Association for their Debut Dagger Award. It placed second in a field of 800 entries. Picked up by a British literary agent and published as Still Life (2006), her debut novel featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Quebec Sureté (see Quebec Provincial Police) became an instant hit with readers around the world.

The widespread appeal of Penny's Gamache series can be traced to several aspects of her books, not least their setting. Rooted in the scenic Eastern Townships of Quebec with their rich historical background, her novels spectacularly put to rest the publishers' canard that stories set in rural Canada will not appeal to readers. Second, Penny's tales are character-driven. The author swims against the literary tide, eschewing a tragically flawed protagonist with a history of troubled relationships. Instead, Armand Gamache is everyone's favorite uncle, or perhaps grandfather, in a loving relationship with his wife, Reine-Marie, and is genuinely caring about the members of his team.

Third, the atmosphere plays an essential role in her tales. The mouth-watering descriptions of sumptuous meals enjoyed by a panoply of engaging and eccentric characters provide readers with an enchanting world in which to spend a few enjoyable hours.

Finally, there is a noticeable absence of gratuitous or graphic violence in Penny's stories. Reflecting Penny's own fascination with the classic Agatha Christie tales, the Gamache novels focus on a puzzle, the solution of which will only be revealed at the very end. Despite the necessity of building her stories around the act of murder, the violence is very much off-stage, her tales reflecting the literature of a gentler, more civilized age.

Achievements

• Louise Penny is currently considered as one of the best mystery writers in Canada. She has won numerous awards, including a CWA Dagger and the Agatha Award (six times), and was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. In 2017, she received the Order of Canada for her contributions to Canadian culture.
  
  The novel won other awards, including the Arthur Ellis Award in Canada for a best first crime novel, the Dilys Award, the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best First Novel in the United States.

Works

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  • Kingdom of the Blind

    (When a peculiar letter arrives inviting Armand Gamache to...)

    2018
  • How the Light Gets In

    (Most of his best agents have left the Homicide Department...)

    2013
  • The Beautiful Mystery

    (No outsiders are ever admitted to the monastery of Saint-...)

    2012
  • The Cruelest Month

    (When some villagers decide to celebrate Easter with a séa...)

    2008
  • A Trick of the Light

    (Found among the bleeding hearts and lilacs of Clara Morro...)

    2011
  • A Fatal Grace

    (When Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, of the Sûreté du Que...)

    2007
  • A Better Man

    (It’s Gamache’s first day back as head of the homicide dep...)

    2019
  • Still Life

    (Jane Neal, a local fixture in the tiny hamlet of Three Pi...)

    2005
  • The Long Way Home

    (Together with his former second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beau...)

    2014
  • The Hangman

    (On a cold November morning, a jogger runs through the woo...)

    2011
  • The Brutal Telling

    (Everybody goes to Olivier's Bistro - including a stranger...)

    2009
  • A Rule Against Murder

    (The Finney family - rich, cultured, and respectable - has...)

    2009
  • The Nature of the Beast

    (Hardly a day goes by when nine-year-old Laurent Lepage do...)

    2015
  • Glass Houses

    (Through rain and sleet, the figure stands unmoving, stari...)

    2017
  • A Great Reckoning

    (Tattooed and pierced. Guarded and angry. Amelia is more l...)

    2016

Views

"I always wanted to be a novelist and the journalist was the side road, because I was too scared to try. I think I was a combination of I was too afraid to try to write, in case I realized I couldn’t and then I would lose the dream, and also I was very fortunate in my upbringing in that nothing bad ever happened to me. It was lucky from a personal point of view, not so lucky from a novelist point of view. I was fairly callow. There’s a line from Auden in his elegy to Yeats where he says Ireland hurt him into poetry. What a great line. I had to be hurt into novel writing. I had to get to a certain stage. I had to lose enough people, I had to have a lot of ego pounded out of me and pride, I had to learn compassion. I had to do enough vile things that I hated myself, and then was forgiven, so that I had something to write about that wasn’t about how other people perceived me."

Quotations: "When I write, I write with a stack of poetry books (her recurring character Ruth Zardo is a poet) and a stack of cookbooks. One great way to evoke the (Quebec) setting is through the cuisine, through the food, which changes season by season. What I’m always striving to do, and I’m not sure I always succeed, is drop that fourth wall."

“My characters can’t feel anything I haven’t felt. I know about jealousy, bitterness, self-hatred, anger; I own all that.”

“The great blessing in my life is that I know that goodness exists. But I know, too, that the happiest people in the world have been through hell and come out the other end.”

“My books are love letters to Quebec - the language of my characters is French, and I wanted my characters to live in that language.”

“I was close enough that I could still feel the vestiges of the terror. But I was also feeling that incredible awakening of hope. Of how beautiful the world is and how beautiful people are.”

“What I mean is the outlook on the world, the sense that people can’t change. And that's one of the themes in the books too. People do change, for the worse, but they change for the better too.”

"Fear lives in the head. And courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other."

"No good ever comes from putting up walls. What people mistake for safety is in fact captivity. And few things thrive in captivity."

"Where there is love there is courage, where there is courage there is peace, where there is peace there is God. And when you have God, you have everything."

"Life is change. If you aren't growing and evolving, you're standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead."

"Life is choice. All day, everyday. Who we talk to, where we sit, what we say, how we say it. And our lives become defined by our choices. It's as simple and as complex as that. And as powerful. so when I'm observing that's what I'm watching for."

"My books are about many, many things, probably least of all murder. They're about life. They're about choices, and taking responsibility for what you do. But really, I think at their heart, they're about love and friendship."

Personality

From the ages of 21 to 35, Penny was an alcoholic. “I was very cynical, very bitter; the sort of person who, when I joined the CBC, I hoped I wouldn’t have to work with,” she says now. “Well, I wasn’t just working with her. I was living with her. I was her. I try very hard now to be a decent human being because I’d been an indecent one for a while and I know the difference.” She also added: “I went through a period in my life when I had no friends, when the phone never rang, when I thought I would die from loneliness. I know that the real blessing here isn’t that I have a book published, but that I have so many people to thank.”

As of today, Louise Penny is a person who overcame self-loathing, who published her first book at age 46, who still carries around that universal self-doubt and shares it generously, always with a sense of humor, as well as the occasional expletive. Here is what she has stated about her love of poetry: "Poetry for me is a lot like music. I listen to music because it allows me to get to places emotionally in myself that I couldn’t normally access. Music makes me feel, and the same with poetry. Emerging writers, if they ask for any advice from me, and often even if they don’t, I give them advice to read poetry. I don’t care whether it’s Winnie the Pooh or a greeting card or Yeats and Auden or anyone else. I think poets manage to achieve in a couplet what I struggle in an entire book to achieve."

Interests

• food, poetry, traveling

• Writers

  Wystan Hugh Auden, Agatha Christie, George Simenon, Josephine Tey

Connections

Louise Penny was married to her late husband, Michael Whitehead, a former head of pediatric hematology at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, for almost 21 years. He was the one who coaxed her to quit her job and fulfill a lifelong dream of writing a novel. Penny lost her husband, who was diagnosed with dementia, in September 2016.

husband:

Michael Whitehead

died on September 18, 2016

Friend:

Rhys Bowen

Janet Quin-Harkin (born 24 September 1941, Bath, Somerse) is an author best known for her mystery novels for adults written under the name Rhys Bowen.

References

• List of Books by Louise Penny: Chief Inspector Armand Gamache Series and list of all Louise Penny Books
  2019
• LOUISE PENNY - SERIES READING ORDER
  2015
• Louise Penny Quotes and Believes and Books Quiz: Get to know better this proud Canadian, creator of Inspector Gamache
  2017
• Author Louise Penny's Official Website