During the ‘Learn to Read Like a Writer’ first semesters of my MFA studies at Oklahoma City University, my tutor, novelist Lou Berney, recommended I read Louise Penny‘s Bury Your Dead for an experience of properly intensive planning. I had never heard of Penny or her procedural mystery hero, Chief Inspector Gamache, and not even Berney’s clues that I was in for a shock prepared me for the incredulity I felt at the end of that book.
No, I won’t spoil the surprise for you — beyond saying Bury Your Dead is the seventh of Penny’s Gamache or ‘Three Pines’ murder mysteries and you’ll get much more out of #7 if you’ve read #6.
My son Zossima lives in Oklahoma City and stops by several times a week to do his laundry, cook with his mother, and borrow some books from my library (I know he actually gets most of his books from the OKC Metropolitan Library downtown but I’m glad he comes in to ask me if I have a copy of Kate Atkinson’s latest or whatever). He told me several weeks ago that he needed to read Agatha Christie; “What one book do you recommend?” I gave him The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
He’s a novelist and a very serious reader who has been ‘reading like a writer reads’ almost as long as he has been reading. Still, I felt a little bit like Lou Berney may have felt in assigning Bury Your Dead as a book I had to review; I knew Zossima’s head was going to explode at the twist in the last pages of Roger Akroyd. I was also elated because at last I knew what to get him for the Feast of Theophany, our family’s gift-giving holiday. I ordered a copy of Pierre Bayard’s Who killed Roger Ackroyd? : the mystery behind the Agatha Christie mystery to give him when he returned the Christie title to my shelf.
Why?
Because as head-spinning as the end of Christie’s Ackroyd is, Bayard, a French psychoanalyst and literary critic, argues persuasively that the murderer who Poirot reveals at the end of that novel didn’t do it — and that Christie must have been disappointed that none of her readers understood what Poirot was up to in pinning the crime on the wrong person. [Bayard did this with Conan Doyle, too, in
I’ll leave it to you to figure out why that gift giving made me think of Louise Penny’s Bury Your Dead. I spent my monthly book allowance on a Theophany present for myself: a lot of the first twelve Chief Inspector Gamache procedurals I found on eBay and a special one volume edition of The Brutal Telling and Bury Your Dead. I’m guessing that Zossima will be interested in reading that once he finishes the Bayard.
I bring that up because (1) if, like me, you are not aware of Louise Penny, whose most recent Gamache, #19, is currently atop the fiction best seller list in Canada, you’re in for a treat, (2) I’ll be writing, I hope, about the twist I think we’re being set up for a la Bury Your Dead in Hallmarked Man, and (3) my initial foray into Penny’s books leads me to think they are largely about loss as the key element in human existence. “Loss” is a near constant in Rowling’s descriptions of what her latest book is about.
I finished Still Life yesterday and am well into A Fatal Grace today. More anon!
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