Still Life
Still Life
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Louise Penny on Still Life
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A refuge built from fearPenny began writing ‘Still Life’ in 2001, the year after the September 11 attacks, at a moment when the ordinary texture of daily life had become threaded with dread. The book she started was not a response to current events in any journalistic sense. It was a way to construct, on the page, the safety she could no longer locate in the world around her.
The world, when I started writing Still Life, was suddenly a pretty scary place. 9/11 had happened the year before and more attacks seemed imminent and would almost certainly be completely unexpected. Suddenly places and activities that had seemed benign, safe, fun, were riddled with insecurity. I wanted to pull the sheets up over my head, stay in bed, and read.
The decision to write fiction at all had been deferred for years. Penny had spent nearly two decades at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, describing journalism as the route she took because she was too frightened to attempt the novel she actually wanted to write. Getting to the book required a specific kind of loss, not courage in the conventional sense, but the erosion of the self-protection that had kept her away from the page.
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.
Knowing the odds of publication were poor clarified rather than discouraged her. With no guarantee the book would find a reader beyond herself, she stopped making decisions based on what might appeal and started making them based on what she actually wanted. The result was a creative logic that was, by her own description, entirely self-serving.
Every decision I made in Still Life was selfish. I created it just for me. So I created Three Pines, and I created these characters that I would choose as friends... I created a main character who I would marry.
The main character she would marry is Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, modeled directly on her husband Michael, whom she describes as kind, thoughtful, generous, and open to love. The selfish logic produced one of the most warmly received detective figures in contemporary crime fiction.
How she wrote it
168,000 words, then half thatThe first draft ran nearly twice the length of the published book. What made the cutting possible was not a change in technique but a change in attitude. Setting aside the attachment to her own sentences turned out to be the same shift that had made writing the book possible in the first place.
My first draft was 168,000 words. I cut it in half and it made the book much stronger. Once my ego and pride was set aside I was able to kill my darlings.
Before the cutting came a foundational decision about how Three Pines, the fictional village in Quebec’s Eastern Townships where the murder takes place, would register for the reader. Penny wanted the setting to do more than provide atmosphere. She wanted it to produce a physical sensation of presence, so that a reader would feel like a person at a table rather than an observer looking through glass.
I realized that I wanted the location to be a character. And I wanted that very keen sense of place. And I thought the best way to do that was to make the books really sensuous, so that when you read the books it’s not just going into your brain, it’s going into your nose and your ears and you’re smelling the café au lait, and you’re tasting the ham and brie sandwich, you’re feeling the warmth of the fire after the cold outside. So I wanted to try to bring down that fourth wall so people would feel not that they’re voyeurs, but that they’re actually sitting in the bistro.
A peaceful village and a morally upright detective could easily become inert. Penny’s solution was to introduce pressure from two directions simultaneously: an external test in the form of a murder victim named Miss Jane Neal, and an internal one in the form of a difficult subordinate and a dark episode in Gamache’s past called the Arnot case, left deliberately unexplained in this first book.
But peace untested might prove an illusion. And so Three Pines is tested when Miss Jane Neal is murdered. And goodness might be shallow, situational. And so Gamache is given Agent Nichol to test him and, more insidious, the Arnot case. To see if he really is a decent man, or just pretending to be when things are going his way.
Leaving the Arnot case unresolved was a deliberate signal to the reader that these characters have histories the narrative is entering mid-stream. As Penny put it, they are coming in mid-life, mid-leap.
The personal thread
Loneliness, then belongingThe village of Three Pines began as a private solution to a private problem. The communal warmth that readers respond to was not designed as a literary effect. It was designed as a destination, a place Penny wanted to inhabit in some form because she knew what its absence felt like.
These books are murder mysteries, but they’re not about murder. They’re about love and belonging, about loyalty and choices. And the courage to be good.
Writing ‘Still Life’ was also Penny’s first sustained attempt to work in a form she had wanted to try for years but had avoided out of fear. The journalism career at the CBC was real work that she valued, but she has described it as a side road taken because the direct route felt too exposed. The book represented a late-career bet on herself, made at a point when she had, in her own account, lost enough and been forgiven enough to have something genuine to write about.
The crime is the Trojan Horse that allows me to look at all sorts of other issues and themes that are important. They’re also about belonging. They’re about friendship, about community. They’re about the fact that you can never guarantee physical safety, but you can guarantee emotional safety.
What she wants us to sit with
Goodness as a fact, not a wishPenny has returned again and again to a distinction between what the murders in her books are and what they are for. The village that feels like escape, the crimes that disturb it, the detective who investigates with patience and moral seriousness: all of it operates as a delivery mechanism for a claim she states without irony.
Three Pines isn’t a physical place, it’s a state of mind. It’s when you’re kind, when you’re decent, when you have friends, when you belong to a community, then you are within Three Pines.
Her governing framework for the entire series comes from two lines by W.H. Auden, from his elegy for Herman Melville: ‘Goodness existed, that was the new knowledge; / his terror had to blow itself quite out to let him see it.’ She writes those lines on a Post-it and sticks it on her laptop at the start of each book. The statement she wants readers to leave with is the same one Auden’s lines required Melville’s character to travel through terror to reach.
My books are about terror. That brooding terror curled deep down inside us. But more than that, more than murder, more than all the rancid emotions and actions, my books are about goodness. And kindness. About choices. About friendship and belonging. And love. Enduring love. If you take only one thing away from any of my books I’d like it to be this: Goodness exists.