Literature / Chief Inspector Armand Gamache

aka: Three Pines

"[Beauvoir] dealt in facts. Collected them. It was the Chief Inspector who collected feelings. In each murder case, Gamache followed those feelings, the old and decaying and rotting ones. And at the end of the trail of slime, Gamache found the killer.
While the Chief followed feelings, Beauvoir followed facts. Cold and hard. But between the two men, together, they got there."

Armand Gamache doesn't look like a detective; he's an elderly man with a kind smile and gentle disposition who possesses a seemingly unending amount of patience. And yet, he is also the Sûreté du Québec's head of homicide. Alongside his second-in-command, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache and his team have managed to bring many a murderer to justice.

Much like the Chief Inspector, the village of Three Pines is more than it seems. So small and remote that it doesn't appear on any maps, a number of quirky characters call the village their home. There's Clara and Peter Morrow, a pair of married artists with opposite artistic leanings; Myrna Lander, a former psychiatrist turned bookstore owner; Olivier Brulé and Gabri Dubeau, a couple who owns and runs the local bistro and bed and breakfast; and Ruth Zardo, an elderly woman whose bitter personality and sharp tongue belies a cunning knack for poetry. For many years, the residence of Three Pines have enjoyed an undisturbed and quiet life in their quaint little village.

Of course, nothing can stay peaceful forever. As Chief Inspector Gamache well knows, the root of all murders are hurt feelings that were left to fester, and not even the tiny village of Three Pines is immune to such darkness. It's up to Gamache, Beauvoir, and their team to track down these malicious emotions and the murderers who let them grow.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache (also known as Three Pines) is a series of mystery novels by Louise Penny. A majority of the novels are set in or near the fictional village of Three Pines. While Gamache is the main character, other characters (such as Jean-Guy and Clara) get their own storylines that may or may not have anything to do with the main mystery.

The first novel in the series received a 2013 live-action film adaptation titled Still Life: A Three Pines Mystery.

A live-action TV adaptation titled Three Pines premiered on Prime Video in December 2022. The series received one season that was eight episodes long.

This series includes the following titles:

Main series:

1. Still Life (2005)
2. Dead Cold (2007)^*Titled A Fatal Grace in the US.
3. The Cruelest Month (2008)
4. The Murder Stone (2009)^*Titled A Rule Against Murder in the US.
5. The Brutal Telling (2009)
6. Bury Your Dead (2010)
7. A Trick of the Light (2011)
8. The Beautiful Mystery (2012)
9. How the Light Gets In (2013)
10. The Long Way Home (2014)
11. The Nature of the Beast (2015)
12. A Great Reckoning (2016)
13. Glass Houses (2017)
14. Kingdom of the Blind (2018)
15. A Better Man (2019)
16. All the Devils Are Here (2020)
17. The Madness of Crowds (2021)
18. A World of Curiosities (2022)
19. The Grey Wolf (2024)

Other books:

• The Hangman (2011): a novella written at a third grade level for emerging adult readers, as part of the GoodReads Canada program. Set between Bury Your Dead and A Trick of the Light.
• State of Terror (2021): a novel cowritten by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny. The story and setting doesn't have anything to do with the series, but it does include a cameo by Armand Gamache.

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This series provides examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Cecilia de Poitiers likes to ignore the existence of her daughter, Crie. When she can't do that, she'll find some way to put down Crie, usually by nagging her about her weight. The years of verbal and emotional neglect turns Crie into an emotionless doll.
• Ambiguous Gender: Bean is the child of Peter's sister, Marianna. Since Bean's birth, she's kept Bean's gender identity a secret from her family out of spite, knowing that not knowing annoys her mother. She knows that Bean's sex/gender will eventually be known, either because puberty will make it obvious or Bean will eventually spell it out. Luckily for Marianna, Bean's appearance remains androgynous as the child grows up and the child doesn't seem in hurry to tell anyone.
• Asshole Victim: Cecilia "CC" de Poitiers, the victim of A Fatal Grace, was a haughty, selfish egoist who was emotionally abusive to her daughter, cheated on her husband with a lover who didn't really like her, and tried to peddle a self-help, spiritual philosophy that would do more harm for one's mental health than less. Given all this, it comes as no surprise that someone hated her enough to kill her.
• Author Appeal: Louise Penny is a huge fan of poetry, and her love for the craft is evident in each novel. Gamache reads a lot of poetry and will often quote it, much to the annoyance of Jean-Guy. Ruth Zardo is a famous poet whose poems are often referenced and quoted. Her poems aren't the only ones, of course, with multiple quotes from many sources scattered throughout each one. Most of the time, the poems quoted are important either to the plot or theme(s) of the novel they're included in, but sometimes it doesn't.
• Eccentric Artist: Clara and Peter Marrow are a married couple who are both artists with opposite artistic leanings. Peter paints intricate, highly detailed paintings about close up shots of mundane objects, while Clara paints portraits of that show not so much as the surface of a person but of who they are underneath. It's mentioned a few times throughout the series that one of Clara's earlier peices was a series of statues (or something like that) titled Warrior Uteruses.
• Famed In-Story:
  • Ruth Zardo is a talented poet and one of Gamache's favorites. One of her most acclaimed poems includes the lines "Who hurt you, once, so far beyond repair? That you would meet each overture / with curling lip?". It isn't until his first visit to Three Pines that he meets Ruth in person and finds out that she's batty and foul-mouthed and hates hearing her own poems quoted to her.
  • Post A Trick of the Light, Clara Marrow gains critical acclaim within the art world for her unusual approach to painting portraits. The one that made her famous was a portait of Ruth Zardo as an elderly Virgin Mary, forgotten and bitter, with the tiniest dot in both of her eyes capturing the moment when despair turns to hope. Clara's career has it's ups and downs, but that particular painting remains her most successful.
• From the Mouths of Babes: Jean-Guy and Annie's first child, Honoré, are horrified when his first word isn't either "mom" or "dad", but "fuck". The foul-mouthed poet Ruth Zardo, the woman he most likely picked up the word from, finds this nothing short of amusing. A few years later, other village children start to pick up on his usage of the word, though the parents are quick to cut any attempts short.
• Fun with Acronyms: Ruth Zardo titled one of her poetry books I'm FINE, where FINE is an acronym for "Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Egotistical." This meaning isn't lost to the inhabitants of Three Pines; it becomes a running joke throughout the series that when someone says they're fine, someone else may ask if they mean fine fine or FINE FINE.
• Happily Married:
  • Armand and his wife, Reine-Marie, have been married for a few decades by the time the series begins and they love each other just as much as they did when they first became a couple. They're supportive, open about their wants, needs, and general feelings, and have nothing but respect and trust in one another. The factory raid detailed in Bury Your Dead shows that Armand got struck down and, thinking that he wouldn't live to see another day, he says his wife's name, wanting those to be his last words.
  • Jean-Guy's second marriage to Annie, Armand's daughter, proves far more successful than his first marriage to Enid. In one of the books, the narration explains that Jean-Guy married Enid for her looks and little else, while he genuinely fell for Annie. Much like Armand and Reine-Marie, Jean-Guy and Annie have a loving and supportive relationship.
• Heroic Sacrifice: The climax of The Long Way Home has Peter shielding his wife, Clara, from a knife that was intended for her. As he bleeds out, Clara hurries to his side, telling him a little story of him arriving in Three Pines and walking into their home, comforting him in the only way she can until his last breath.
• Hobbes Was Right: Jean-Guy doesn't believe that people are inherently good or that anyone can truly change who they are.
• Rousseau Was Right: Gamache believes in the inherent goodness of people, that buried deep underneath even the darkest reaches of humanity is some light.
• Sadist: John Flemming enjoys the misery of others, even going to great lengths to ensure their suffering.
• Story Arc: Underneath the mysteries there is a larger subplot about corruption within the Sûreté that takes shape, starting off in the background in Still Life then coming to forefront in How the Light Gets In, especially in its second half.
• Undying Loyalty: Jean-Guy has the utmost respect and admiration for Gamache, due in no small part to the Chief Inspector taking him under his wing when Jean-Guy's previous superiors relegated him to guarding evidence.
• Who Murdered the Asshole: Cecilia de Poitiers, the victim of A Fatal Grace, is self-obsessed, emotionally and verbally abusive to her husband and daughter, and universally loathed, including the man she's having an affair with. Possible motives are not hard to come by, which makes Gamache's search for the murderer that much harder.

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