An Autopsy on Three Pines

what the show got wrong about Louise Penny's detective series (and Canada)

“The only reason doors were locked was to prevent neighbors from dropping off baskets of zucchini at harvest time.”

Louise Penny, Still Life

Louise Penny is the most successful Canadian detective writer of all time, and for good reason. Her novels about Inspector Armand Gamache and the fictional Quebec town of Three Pines are worldwide bestsellers, and garnered prizes from the jump—Still Life, her first, won the CWA’s Dagger award for best unpublished mystery.

When Amazon announced that it was adapting the Gamache series into Three Pines, starring Alfred Molina as Gamache, I figured it would run for twenty seasons. Finally Canada would have its own version of Vera or Morse. The creative team had a good pedigree; the showrunner, Emilia de Girolamo, had worked on several British crime dramas. The trailer looked solid.

I want Canadian detective shows to be better. Both selfishly, because the chance of me ever buying a house depends on Canada developing more good quality mystery shows. But as a fan, too. Canada should have crime dramas as good as the Brits and the Australians. We don’t really have equivalents to Mystery Road, Jack Irish, Cracker, Shetland, Mare of Eastown, True Detective or Happy Valley.

Three Pines was cancelled after one six-episode season. The reviews and ratings seemed good, and the New York Times praised it for “unflinching realism” (whatever that is). But for a lot of viewers, the show didn’t live up to its promise.

With all that talent and money behind it, why wasn’t Three Pines an instant classic?

In my opinion, and that’s all this is: it’s because the creative team took community-minded books and tried to make a socially-minded program from them.

Keep three things in mind:

First, the Gamache books were successful in the UK first. Canada doesn’t really get behind literary talent unless they strike big somewhere else. And Canadian settings are a tough sell in foreign markets. But the books found their audience.

Second, the creative team behind the TV show was British. This caused a minor furor among Canadian screenwriters, since the show was announced on a slate of “Canadian content” for Amazon, little of which was written by Canadians.

Third, the Gamache series had been adapted before, in 2013, starring Nathaniel Parker.

Community-minded books are about a group of people—a small town, usually—where personal relationships mean a great deal. Socially-minded crime fiction is about the impact of larger social issues. (Of course there’s overlap, but I think the intentions are different).

Thomas King, Craig Johnson, and Louise Penny are all brilliant practitioners of the community-minded novel. Not cozies per se, but books where the lives and friendships of the community form the background of the story, rather than social forces like late capitalism. It’s a different focus, and a different type of book.

The selling point of the Gamache series is this idyllic Quebec town where doors are only locked to prevent neighbors from dropping off free zucchini. That’s the heart of the stories—yes, social issues come into it, and Penny deftly weaves in philosophical questions and current events—but this is a community-minded series.

Did the producers not get the books? Did they not get Canada? Or did they not want to make the kind of thing they had on their hands?

Maybe all three, but I think especially the last. Even though the show was named after the town, Three Pines didn’t respect or care enough about that community.

A New York Times article reported that the showrunner wanted to make a socially-minded drama about missing and murdered Indigenous women, despite the misgivings of the author and some of the cast:

The Indigenous content was the brainchild of British screenwriter Emilia di Girolamo, the series’s head writer and executive producer. Di Girolamo said that her decision to reimagine Penny’s novels through a different lens had been solidified during a research trip to Quebec for the series in 2019, when she read headlines about murdered Indigenous girls…

“Louise Penny’s books are all about the dark and the light, and the mistreatment of Indigenous people is the dark in Canada at the moment,” she said.

Take another glance at that quote—“the dark and the light.”

How does one do “light” when the “dark” is genocide? How do you care about the foibles and quirks of your neighbors while also trying to examine evil on that scale?

Think of the narrative pitfalls in trying to insert a social issue of such complexity and gravity into a series like that.

• Do you make Gamache a white savior, solving racism?

• Do you make the community of Three Pines at fault, or blithely unaware?

• Are the citizens themselves complicit, turning a blind eye?

• Or do you sideline all these characters in favor of others?

Any of these solutions change the fundamental world of Three Pines for the worse. The books don’t even really acknowledge the bitter cultural divisions between Anglo and French, let alone Indigenous and white settler. That’s not their focus.

The Times article goes on about how the producers tried to incorporate Indigenous characters and creative team members into their vision. One of the actors (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, who made a great film called The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open) argued for changes to a scene involving suicide, claiming “it wasn’t an accurate image of the women I know.”

The showrunner responded by saying the scene “was a powerful moment to show what police are doing to Indigenous people and their failure to help.”

So who is this show for? Are viewers supposed to tune in for a nuanced and multifaceted portrait of smalltown life, or a reckoning with Canada’s original sins?

I like both those types of stories, and I’ve written both types, and I think both can be truly great art.

My argument isn’t about staying in one’s lane, but for the record, a team of non-Canadian, non-Indigenous writers tacking a social issue that straddles the fault lines of racism, colonialism, gendered violence, poverty, institutional neglect, police corruption and political compromise, is not ideal for treating that issue with nuance.

Penny’s books are about the interpersonal—how do these people live together? How does this group react to death in their midst?

It’s the difference between a Charles Dickens novel which rambles all across Victorian society, and a Jane Austen novel which takes a razor-thin slice of that society and examines its characters in detail. Who would care who the Dashwood sisters marry if Sense and Sensibility also shoehorned in the child labor exploitation of David Copperfield?

I really hope it’s clear that I’m not saying the show doesn’t have the right to deal with these issues—only that the vessel was wrong for the the approach they chose, and vice versa.

Quarterbacking after the game is easy, but if I had to suggest an alternative for Three Pines, I would have added Indigenous characters to the town, then let the stories and cases arise out of interpersonal conflicts—which is what Penny’s books do so well.

Iona Whishaw does this in Framed in Fire. Her Lane Winslow mystery series is set in King’s Cove, around Nelson, BC. In Framed, Lane meets Tom, an Indigenous war veteran who’s returning to his ancestral land. Tom’s arrival raises important questions about community, but he isn’t a character defined entirely by suffering and absence. He’s there to live, same as everyone else.

My novel Invisible Dead focused on one woman’s disappearance, and used that to sound the depths of a city’s complicity. You’re not supposed to like the community, just feel how deeply scarred it is by this absence and the forces that caused it. Not saying this is a better approach—certainly not a more lucrative one—but the intention was to show a rotten side of the city, and it’s true to that.

Da Vinci’s Inquest, a socially-minded show and the gold standard for Canadian crime drama, had an early storyline based on the serial killer Gilbert Paul Jordan. The storyline involved the brother of one of the victims coming to town to find and punish the killer.

On the other hand, Thomas King’s Dreadfulwater books, about the community of Chinook, puts social commentary in the background and focuses on the daily life of an Indigenous detective, his friends and family (and pets). They don’t ignore colonialism by any stretch—in one of the books the town tries to reinvent itself as a ‘wild west’ tourist spot, with all the characters dressing up or as cowboys and quick-draw gunfighters to give tourists an ‘authentic’ cultural experience.

Penny, Whishaw, King, and the creators of Da Vinci’s Inquest all know what kind of thing they write. Three Pines simply didn’t.

“Penny herself said she was disappointed that the village of Three Pines, “a central character in the books,” was a sideshow in the series,” the Times wrote.

It baffles me that the Gamache series has now been adapted unsuccessfully twice—but then, so was the Maltese Falcon before John Huston and Humphrey Bogart.

Maybe the third time’s a charm.

You can pre-order A Lonesome Place for Dying from your favorite bookshop.

You can also pre-order Ocean Drive from your favorite bookshop, too.