Rule Against Murder (Penny)

A Rule Against Murder (Inspector Gamache series, 4)
Louise Penny, 2009
St. Martin's Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312614164


Summary
It is the height of summer, and Armand Gamache and his wife are celebrating their wedding anniversary at an isolated, luxurious inn not far from the village of Three Pines. But they’re not alone.

The Finney family—rich, cultured, and respectable—has also arrived for a celebration of their own. As the heat rises and the humidity closes in, some surprising guests turn up at the Finney reunion...and a terrible summer storm leaves behind a dead body. Now it’s up to Chief Inspector Gamache to unearth long-buried secrets and hatreds hidden behind polite smiles. The chase takes him to Three Pines—into the dark corners of his own life, and finally to a harrowing climax. (From the publisher.)

See all our Reading Guides for Chief Inspector Gamache novels by Louise Penny.

Author Bio
• Birth—1958
• Where—Toronto, Canada
• Education—B.A, Ryerson University
• Awards—Agatha Award (4 times) "New Blood" Dagger Award;
   Arthur Ellis Award; Barry Award, Anthony Award; Dilys Award.
• Currently—lives in Knowlton, Canada (outside of Montreal)


In her words
I live outside a small village south of Montreal, quite close to the American border. I'd like to tell you a little bit about myself. I was born in Toronto in 1958 and became a journalist and radio host with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, specializing in hard news and current affairs. My first job was in Toronto and then moved to Thunder Bay at the far tip of Lake Superior, in Ontario. It was a great place to learn the art and craft of radio and interviewing, and listening. That was the key. A good interviewer rarely speaks, she listens. Closely and carefully. I think the same is true of writers.

From Thunder Bay I moved to Winnipeg to produce documentaries and host the CBC afternoon show. It was a hugely creative time with amazingly creative people. But I decided I needed to host a morning show, and so accepted a job in Quebec City. The advantage of a morning show is that it has the largest audience, the disadvantage is having to rise at 4am.

But Quebec City offered other advantages that far outweighed the ungodly hour. It's staggeringly beautiful and almost totally French and I wanted to learn. Within weeks I'd called Quebecers "good pumpkins", ordered flaming mice in a restaurant, for dessert naturally, and asked a taxi driver to "take me to the war, please." He turned around and asked "Which war exactly, Madame?" Fortunately elegant and venerable Quebec City has a very tolerant and gentle nature and simply smiled at me.

From there the job took me to Montreal, where I ended my career on CBC Radio's noon programme.

In my mid-thirties the most remarkable thing happened. I fell in love with Michael, the head of hematology at the Montreal Children's Hospital. He'd go on to hold the first named chair in pediatric hematology in Canada, something I take full credit for, out of his hearing.

It's an amazing and blessed thing to find love later in life. It was my first marriage and his second. He'd lost his first wife to cancer a few years earlier and that had just about killed him. Sad and grieving we met and began a gentle and tentative courtship, both of us slightly fearful, but overcome with the rightness of it. And overcome with gratitude that this should happen to us and deeply grateful to the family and friends who supported us.

Fifteen years later we live in an old United Empire Loyalist brick home in the country, surrounded by maple woods and mountains and smelly dogs.

Since I was a child I've dreamed of writing and now I am. Beyond my wildest dreams (and I can dream pretty wild) the Chief Inspector Gamache books have found a world-wide audience, won awards and ended up on bestseller lists including the New York Times. Even more satisfying, I have found a group of friends in the writing community. Other authors, booksellers, readers—who have become important parts of our lives. I thought writing might provide me with an income—I had no idea the real riches were more precious but less substantial. Friendships.

There are times when I'm in tears writing. Not because I'm so moved by my own writing, but out of gratitude that I get to do this. In my life as a journalist I covered deaths and accidents and horrible events, as well as the quieter disasters of despair and poverty. Now, every morning I go to my office, put the coffee on, fire up the computer and visit my imaginary friends, Gamache and Beauvoir and Clara and Peter. What a privilege it is to write. I hope you enjoy reading the books as much as I enjoy writing them.

Chief Inspector Gamache was inspired by a number of people, and one main inspiration was this man holding a copy of En plein coeur. Jean Gamache, a tailor in Granby. He looks slightly as I picture Gamache, but mostly it was his courtesy and dignity and kind eyes that really caught my imagination. What a pleasure to be able to give him a copy of En plein coeur! (From the author's website with permission.)

Book Reviews
With its small-town hominess, the Canadian village of Three Pines draws the reader into its quaint traditions. Who wouldn’t be charmed by the dramas of a community where Easter egg hunts and socials at the bed and breakfast are the most exciting events? Yet it is Penny’s fastidious, cultured, and smart Inspector Gamache who makes [The Cruelest Month] impossible to put down.
People


Penny’s plotting has been compared to Agatha Christie’s...in these wonderful books full of poetry and weather and a brooding manor house, and people who read and think and laugh and eat a lot of really excellent food. Move over, Mitford.
Charlotte Observer


(Starred review.) Murder interrupts Chief Insp. Armand Gamache and his wife's annual summer holiday at Quebec's isolated, lake-front Manoir Bellechasse in Agatha-winner Penny's intriguing, well-crafted fourth mystery (after 2008's The Cruelest Month). Irene Finney, the matriarch of a large eccentric family having a reunion at the Manoir, marks the event by having installed in the lodge's garden a statue of the long-dead father of her middle-aged children. When the massive statue falls and crushes one of the daughters, Gamache investigates and discovers no love lost among the surviving offspring. Also in the suspect pool are Bellechasse's owner, chef and maître d'. Despite the scorn the snobbish Finneys heap on Gamache's sleuthing efforts as well as his own infamous family tree, the inspector treats them all respectfully as he seeks to bring a killer to justice. Seamless, often lyrical prose artfully reveals the characters' flaws, dreams and blessings.
Publishers Weekly


The Quebecois village of Three Pines (first introduced in Still Life and Fatal Grace) is once again the scene of a perplexing murder, and Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his team have caught the case. Madeleine Favreau, a cheerful and well-liked village resident, collapsed and died at an impromptu seance at a local house thought to be haunted. The cause of death is pronounced a high dose of ephedrine and fright. But Madeleine wasn't dieting, so who slipped her the ephedrine? Gamache is an engaging, modern-day Poirot who gently teases out information from his suspects while enjoying marvelous bistro meals and cozy walks on the village common. His team is an unlikely troupe of departmental misfits who blossom under his deft tutelage, turning up just the right clues. Penny is an award-winning writer whose cozies go beyond traditional boundaries, providing entertaining characters, a picturesque locale, and thought-provoking plots. Highly recommended. —Susan Clifford Braun
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Readers who haven’t discovered Louise Penny and her Armand Gamache series yet are in for a treat.... Suspects abound, naturally, and Gamache sorts through them with aplomb. One of the best traditional mystery series currently being published. —Judy Coon
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. Louise Penny has said that she initially set out to write A Rule Against Murder as a classic mystery, a tribute to Golden Age writers such as Christie and Tey and Sayers, masters of the hermetic environment.  She wanted to take that form and bring it into the 21st century.  As the story unfolds, in what ways does it follow—or diverge from—the conventions of traditional crime fiction?

2. In the course of the Finney reunion, numerous parent-child relationships are explored: between Charles Morrow and his children when they were young; between Irene Finney and those now adult children; between Pierre Patenaude and his father and the staff he regards as surrogate sons and daughters; even between Gamache and his father and son.  What sorts of things go wrong in those relationships, and what goes right?

3. What about other family relationships?  How do you view the interactions, past and present, among the Morrow siblings?  Consider the various marriages in the book—for example, between Armand and Reine-Marie Gamache, Clara and Peter Morrow, and Bert and Irene Finney.  What makes them happy or otherwise?

4. What do you think about the character of Bean?  How about the mother, Marianna?

5. How does Louise Penny plant clues to the murder throughout the story?  Which ones did you pick up, and what conclusions did you draw?  Did you, like Gamache—who tells Bean he made a massive mistake—miss anything important?

6. If you have read other novels in the series, how does it feel to step away from Three Pines?  How does it change your view of Clara and Peter?  What about Gamache, who functions much more as a private citizen here than in other books?

7. The title of the book is taken from a conversation that occurs after the murder:

“What happened here last night isn’t allowed,” said Madame Dubois.
It was such an extraordinary thing to say, it stopped the ravenous Inspector Beauvoir from taking another bite of his roast beef on baguette.
“You have a rule against murder?” he asked.
“I do.  When my husband I bought the Bellechasse we made a pact.... Everything that stepped foot on this land would be safe.”

In what ways does the Manoir Bellechasse succeed at being a refuge from the harshness of the world?  How and why does it fail?

8. What roles do courage and cowardice play in the story?

9. “We’re all blessed and we’re all blighted,” Bert Finney tells Gamache.  “Every day each of us does our sums.  The question is, what do we count?”  Do you agree with Bert?  What sorts of things do you count?

10. “Paradise lost,” says Gamache at the end; “to have it all and to lose it.  That’s what this case was about.”  What is paradise in this story, and how is it lost?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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