The Black Wolf
The Black Wolf
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Louise Penny on The Black Wolf
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A premise that outran the newsThe 51st-state idea had been sitting in Penny’s notebooks for roughly three years before the book reached shelves. She built the premise not around a headline but around a resource logic she considered entirely plausible: Canada holds what the United States is running out of, and certain actors on both sides of the border might one day decide that arithmetic settles the question.
One of the themes in it is what happens if certain elements within both countries, Canada and the United States, decide that Canada should become the 51st state. And it doesn’t happen out of the blue. There is a march of some rational thinking that gets us there, having to do with resources and how much Canada has and how little the United States is running out, which is all true. [paraphrased from audio]
Her worry while writing was not that the idea was too quiet or too familiar. She feared readers would refuse to follow her somewhere that felt genuinely implausible. Trump’s re-election resolved that anxiety in the most unsettling way possible.
I was afraid when I wrote it that I had taken it too far, that people simply wouldn’t follow me there, that it was unbelievable. As it turns out, I may not have gone far enough!
When the book reached bookshops and the political climate had caught up with its plot, Penny faced a second problem: that readers would assume she had written to the moment. She added an author’s note to establish the timeline, but the discomfort stayed with her.
I was worried that people would think that I’m simply following the headlines. And in fact, that’s why I did the author’s note at the beginning to let people know this was written before any of this happened. [paraphrased from audio]
The book’s title connects to a myth Penny had seeded in the series years earlier, in a novel set inside a monastery. An elder tells Gamache about two wolves at war within every person: one driving compassion, the other vengeance. The story waited across several books before this one was ready to resolve it.
The grandfather answers, it’s the one that we feed. And so we have The Grey Wolf, and now, unfortunately, Armand is facing The Black Wolf. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Notebooks, a border library, and a structure she had never triedPenny’s working method is built around ring-binder notebooks divided into five sections, where a word, a name, or a half-formed idea can wait for years until the right book arrives to claim it. She begins thinking seriously about the next novel around the midpoint of the one she is still finishing.
They’re ring binders, and they have separations, five separations, not three, not six, five. I write on them quotes, characters, plot. And as I’m considering a book, which generally starts as I’m about halfway through the previous book, I start seriously considering what the next book is going to be about. I just jot things down. [paraphrased from audio]
One name that had migrated through multiple notebooks before landing in this book belonged to Wilson Bentley, a Vermont farmer who spent decades photographing individual snowflakes in the late 1800s and proved no two are alike, a conclusion the scientific establishment ignored for years. Penny describes this kind of archival retrieval as the part of research she finds most satisfying.
I love doing exactly that, of finding these obscure facts and events and people who should not be obscure. And sort of dragging them forward, because for me they’re discoveries. [paraphrased from audio]
The Haskell Free Library and Opera House, a building that physically straddles the Vermont-Quebec border with its entrance in one country and its reading room in another, became one of the book’s central locations. The choice was made before the manuscript was finished. When Kristi Noem visited the Haskell after submission and stood on the painted border line declaring the 51st state, Penny was stunned by the target that had been chosen.
Who attacks libraries? Well, I’ll tell you ... petty despots attack libraries, a little village library that is symbolic of the friendship and the sacrifices that both countries have made for each other.
Structurally, The Black Wolf does something Penny had never attempted in eighteen previous novels. It and its predecessor, The Grey Wolf, form one continuous story divided across two books. She describes the decision as a deliberate act of self-imposed difficulty, a way of resisting the drift toward formula that she considers a constant hazard in a long series.
It’s two halves of a whole, which is very unlike me. You have to keep pushing a little bit and challenging yourself, because you don’t want to be writing the same book over and over by mistake, often it becomes formulaic, so I decided to challenge myself with this. [paraphrased from audio]
Penny ended the book tour at the Haskell itself, holding two simultaneous events with the audience divided by the border line, readers in Vermont on one side and readers in Quebec on the other.
The personal thread
The character she could not loseChief Inspector Armand Gamache, the moral center of all twenty books, is modeled on Penny’s late husband Michael Whitehead, who died of dementia in 2016. After his death she feared the character would become inaccessible to her, that grief would close off the very figure who had carried the series.
So now Michael is immortal. And I get to visit him every day when I write. [paraphrased from audio]
Three Pines, the fictional Quebec village where most of the series unfolds, operates in Penny’s thinking as something beyond a setting. She uses it to articulate what she believes the books are actually trying to offer readers, and the definition she reaches is not geographical.
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.
What she wants us to sit with
A wake-up call inside a story about goodnessPenny framed the book’s political argument through the lens of historical hindsight: the recurring experience of people who, after an invasion or a rounding-up, look back and try to locate the moment when intervention was still possible. The question she wants readers to carry out of the novel is whether they are living inside that window right now.
I don’t think that there is a country that’s been invaded, or a people who have been rounded up, or individuals who have been targeted, who haven’t looked back and said, ‘What did I miss? When was the moment when I could have done something, when I could have said something?’ So that’s what I’m hoping people might get from this: a bit of a wake-up call. [paraphrased from audio]
Penny’s decision not to tour the United States during the launch was understood by some as a commercial sacrifice and by others as a symbolic gesture. She was precise about what it was and what it was not, separating her view of the current administration from her feeling about American readers.
America is by far my biggest market but it’s important for me to make the distinction between the administration and my readers. This is not an attack on my readers, but just in support of Canada.
The urgency of the book’s political argument sits inside a series that has always insisted on a counterweight. Penny has returned repeatedly to two lines from W. H. Auden’s elegy for Herman Melville, which she says have governed all twenty Gamache novels. The lines give her the latitude to write about fear without abandoning the conviction that goodness is findable.
‘Goodness existed, that was the new knowledge. His terror had to blow itself quite out to let him see it.’ So the books are about terror, absolutely. But at the end of the day, they’re also about goodness. [paraphrased from audio]
She has described the crime plot, in this book and across the series, as a delivery mechanism for questions the genre rarely announces openly. The murder is not the point; it is what the murder allows her to get at.
The books aren’t really about the blood, they’re about the marrow. They’re about what it’s like to be human. The crime is the Trojan horse that allows me to look at all sorts of other issues. [paraphrased from audio]