As I explained in a January post, ‘Louise Penny: Chief Inspector Gamache,’ no less a novelist than Lou Berney told me in 2016 that I had to read Penny’s Bury Your Dead (he was my MFA adviser, so the ‘had to’ had real force). It delivered the punch he promised: Penny’s planning gave her sixth Gamache novel a series of twists at the finish that left me dizzy for several days. I wasn’t the only one that was head spinning and marveling at her accomplishment; the novel won an Agatha Award, an Anthony Award, a Macavity Award, an Arthur Ellis Award, and a Nero Award the year of its publication.
What was so great about it and why should a serious reader of Rowling-Galbraith care? In brief, Bury Your Dead revisits the murder of the previous novel in the series, The Brutal Telling, while simultaneously solving another murder and slow-revealing the near-death experience Gamache suffered between the two novels as he struggled to prevent a terrorist attack in Quebec. That’s its greatness; you should read it (get the one volume edition of Telling and Dead if you can) if only to feel the mystery genre boundaries stretched by a master story-teller.
What’s in it for the Strike-Ellacott reader? As I hinted in January, I think Hallmarked Man is going to have Bury Your Dead echoing, at least with respect to the revisiting what you thought you knew for sure at the end of Running Grave — and finding out you were wrong. Penny’s one-two punch would be an excellent warm-up for that imaginative judo experience.
I have read twelve of Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache mysteries in the last forty days and enjoyed every one. I doubt I’ll re-read the series (should I manage to get through the remaining seven books in it – and, no, I won’t be reading the mystery she co-wrote with, egad, Hilary Clinton…) but I am a real fan of the ‘Three Pines’ cast of characters and an admirer of Penny’s craft.
What moved me to revisit the Canadian mysteries today was reflection on the eleventh novel in the series, The Nature of the Beast. It was nominated for an Anthony Award, an Agatha Award, and was the winner of Left Coast Crime‘s Best World Mystery when it came out, though it was perhaps the most preposterous of the Three Pines murder mysteries. Three Pines is a tiny town, lost to the world, on the Vermont-Quebec border with a population of about one hundred; making it the nexus of the international arms trade and a hide-away for serial killers and Vietnam era war criminals was quite the stretch even in Penny’s hands.
Two things about it rather startled me.
The first was the prominent place given in it to the Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelation. It is the prevailing image of Nature of the Beast, one referenced repeatedly and in great detail. I couldn’t help but think of the fifth Cormoran Strike novel, Troubled Blood, and the importance of that same biblical reference and occult symbolism in the last of Talbot’s ‘True Book’ pages, meditation over which inspires Bluey to solve the case.
Lots of writers and artists refer to the Whore of Babylon. It’s been part of the Super Bowl half-time show, after all, not once but twice. I shrugged it off as a coincidence.
But then Chief Inspector Gamache, in a last ditch effort to solve the crime, elects to visit the Special Handling Unit (SHU), Canada’s highest security prison and mental hospital, in order to speak with John Fleming, a psychopathic mass murder. All through Nature of the Beast, Fleming and his crimes, all of which involved the torture of his victims before their drawn out execution, are presented as other-worldly, as in ‘satanic’ and ‘demonic.’ I won’t spoil the story for you — but, if you’re a Serious Striker, you’ll be thinking again and again of Strike’s visit with Dennis Creed in Troubled Blood as Gamache tries to get the better of Fleming.
Beast was published in 2015 and Troubled Blood late in 2020. I’d guess that Rowling-Galbraith’s planning for the Strike-Ellacott series, to include the major plot points of all ten books, was done by 2013 and the publication of Cuckoo’s Calling. Troubled Blood, certainly the best of the Strike mysteries and perhaps the best single bit of writing Rowling-Galbraith has ever done, was not inspired by The Nature of the Beast.
But I wonder if the shading of Strike5 with respect to the Whore of Babylon card and the Strike-Creed meeting in a high security prison-psych ward wasn’t colored somehow by Nature of the Beast, a best selling novel in a celebrated mystery series published in the years running up to the drafting and writing of Troubled Blood. Give Beast a reading when you’ve finished Bury Your Dead (or read through the first ten Gamaches!) and let me know what you think!
