Summary: Inspector Gamache and his wife may be on vacation for their anniversary, but murder still follows them.
I am a big fan of the Inspector Gamache series, but I have not re-read any of the books until now. I am contributing to a series of essays in celebration of the series for the release of the 19th book, so now I have a reason to re-read. I did not pick up A Rule Against Murder for a reason other than it was the earliest book in the series available at my library. I checked out all of the early books from the library and only started purchasing the later books. About halfway through the book, I noticed that the early books in the series had been added to the Kindle Unlimited library. I think I will re-read the next book in the series and then go back and start the series from the beginning.
It has been about seven and a half years since I first read A Rule Against Murder. Most of the books I have listened to as audiobooks. And I again picked this up as an audiobook, although I finished the last hundred pages in print. Ralph Cosham was an excellent narrator for the series, but he passed away between books 10 and 11, and Robert Bathurst has narrated the books since that point.
I never really know how to write about fiction. With fiction, especially the mystery/thriller genre, there is value in not knowing much about the story before you read it. I tend to read authors I trust without knowing anything about the books. I am far enough away from the first reading that although I remembered the basic storyline, I did not remember who did it until the book revealed the killer. I am not a reader that attempts to figure out the mystery before it is revealed. An author can choose to misdirect or reveal beyond my skill, and so I tend to allow the book to unfold on its own.
A Rule Against Murder did remind me of a few of my irritations about Louise Penny’s writing. More than anything else, the background seems to expand and contract not based on a fixed setting but on the author’s need. For instance, A Rule Against Murder is set in an old lodge commissioned by the robber barron class around the turn of the 20th century and built out of original raw timber by the Native Canadians in the area. It was the site of the Gamache’s first-anniversary trip, and they have been coming back since. It is built up as a glamorous rural retreat.
But the staff number is unclear. The owner has been managing the lodge since Gamache, and his wife first came and is now in her 80s. The maître d’hôtel is the restaurant’s and hotel’s staff manager and supervisor. There is a chef, and I believe there is only three other named staff; one is a gardener who finds the body. And one is primarily a waiter, but it appears that many staff works both in the kitchens and as housekeepers. Another is named because she is the one that cleaned the room of the victim. But the Gamache’s were told that the only room available was a smaller room at the back of the lodge and that the rest of the rooms were full. The only guests that appear to be at the hotel are an extended family and the Gamaches, so a total of 11 guests. So it is suggested that there are at least three servers and at least three kitchen staff, including the chef. Again, only one gardner is mentioned, but the size of the grounds suggests that there probably are more. And the maître d’hôtel and owner means that there is no less than nine staff, probably more.
The cost for a 1-to-1 ratio of staff to guests would mean that it is likely that the rooms are at least $500 a night, probably more. So the inspector and his wife, while they do have reasonably high-paying public service jobs, are paying in the range of $5000 a week or more for an annual trip. The economics of the lodge does not seem to make sense. But, of course, that is not required for a good mystery series. But it is a common issue in Penny’s writing.
The village of Three Pines, which happens to be about 45 minutes away, also has a similarly expanding and contracting population. While it is supposed to be out in the middle of nowhere and be tiny, there is a grocery, a bakery, a B and B with a restaurant, a book store, eventually a second high-end boutique hotel in an old mansion, a church and a former train station that has been converted into the volunteer fire department. The village is not large enough for a police station or school or even to show up on maps, but it has a kids hockey team and enough people that there are always new characters when required to expand the story.
A Rule Against Murder is filled with unlikeable characters. The unlikeableness is a mix of misdirection and fodder for showing us that Gamache can understand them and love them enough to get to the bottom of the murder.
Because I have been reading Trauma in the Pews: The Impact on Faith and Spiritual Practices as I read this, I thought about the role of trauma in the lives of the characters of the story. The main focus is four siblings, three of whom have spouses (one of the couples is in the midst of a divorce and the husband is off the screen in jail), the mother and stepfather, and a single grandchild who is the child of the only sibling that is unmarried. The family exudes dysfunction. But it is hard to tell if it is trauma in the clinical sense. The mother is distant and detached; we learn later that she is in constant pain from a skin disorder that makes it so that she cannot be touched without pain. The deceased father attempted to love the children, but his love was often misinterpreted, and the wife never told him (or the children) about her pain. The pain of everyone seems to get expressed in cruelty. None of this works well with a trauma lens.
The phrase “hurt people, hurt people” seems to be the model for the family. There is no grace or forgiveness, only the heaping on of more pain as a response to the pain they have received. As is so often the case in this series, it is the psychological skills of Gamache, gained by his pain from his parent’s deaths when he was a child and other matters, that he was able to process and deal with to understand the world around him. It is not that Gamache is perfect. He blows up at his son because he has not healed from one aspect of his father’s death. And he has a phobia about heights that will come to play at the climax. And having read the rest of the books, his shortcomings will sometimes haunt him. But Gamache’s strength is his ability to address his weaknesses by looking at them squarely and seeking to learn, maybe not to overcome, but to see where his pain can give him the perspective to understand and love others.
The characters are not developed as well in this early book as they will be later. A Rule Against Murder starts a process that will play out over a couple of later books when a character cannot address their weaknesses and ends up hurting many around them. But that is also true of Gamache. His willingness to address his weaknesses does not mean that those around him will not suffer from the repercussions of his weaknesses and humanness and trauma.
A Rule Against Murder by Louise Penny (Inspector Gamache Mysteries #4) Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook