annashay 
David L. Wallace is a professor of English at Long Beach State University, and he has published a number of articles about the effects of closeting on queer people. He lives in West Hollywood, CA, where he spends as much time as possible swimming laps, hiking, running, cooking good food, reading mystery novels, and joining friends for happy hour. Here he shares his experience with a series that has captured the hearts of many: the Three Pines mysteries by Louise Penny.
I found best-selling author Louise Penny’s village of Three Pines about fourteen hours after I gave up looking for it. To be honest, the conceit of a village tucked away in a hard-to-find valley between Montreal and Vermont that is not on any map and has no cell service always struck me as a bit fanciful. But I have been willing to suspend disbelief because I like the village Penny created and the quirky characters with which she populates it.
As I drove unpaved back roads in the Eastern Townships to see the sites that inspired the Old Hadley House, Sarah’s Boulangerie, and the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-Les-Loups I kept losing cell service and hoping the directions stored in my GPS program would get me to the next village on my Three Pines itinerary. The third time my cell status declared itself SOS deep in the Quebec woods, the notion of a quaint village cut off from most of civilization just over the next ridge seemed completely plausible, and I couldn’t help but wish that it would find me worthy of revealing itself to me.
I began to understand how Penny constructed Three Pines at my third stop in the village of Sutton where I sat in a gazebo in the little town square eating a marvelous cheese and raspberry pastry from the local boulangerie. To be frank, each of my stops had been a little disappointing: The Old Hadley house is a pink Airbnb now; the long hallway of the abbey was interesting but lacked the trick of light Penny describes in The Beautiful Mystery, and the store that inspired Sarah’s Boulangerie was more a specialty grocery store with no flakey croissants at three in the afternoon.
As my teeth sunk into the pastry and I fished the Gamache mystery I was currently reading out of my backpack, I began to understand that one of Penny’s many skills as a writer is to glow things up—to take inspiration from a physical place and then add elements either imagined or from other places, making Three Pines the best of everything she has culled from the villages of the Eastern Townships.
I saved Lac Brome/Knowlton for the last stop on my tour as the fan sites identified it as the village in which Penny lives. My GPS found enough bandwidth to direct me to my hotel, and just after 5 pm I started exploring the village, crossing a stream that might be the Riviére Bella Bella, noting that I would have to come back in the morning because the cool bookstore that inspired Myrna’s new and used bookshop had just closed, and spotting a coffee shop for my next-morning writing session.
I hadn’t expected to find three tall pine trees in the square or to see a grizzled old poet walking around with her pet duck, but I had hoped that one of the two bistros in town would be something like the Olivier’s bistro with its two fireplaces and would serve a reasonable facsimile of the amazing food Penny describes in the books.
Both bistros were disappointing; I had mediocre fish and chips at the pub version (although the sangria and the view from the patio were nice). I went for a glass of wine and dessert at the other, and was one of eight customers lost in the large space. As I sipped my wine and ate very disappointing carrot cake, I realized that the aspect of Three Pines I had been hoping for was village life—the sense of familiarity and community that is a constant presence in Penny’s fictional village no matter how many times a murder threatens to tear the community apart.
After my wine, I walked along the little river, noting an abandoned building with a big exhaust fan that I decided could have once been Olivier’s bistro and house nearly overgrown by trees and shrubs that I tried hard to make into Clara Morrow’s cottage. I concluded my walking tour by climbing up a small rise to a bench overlooking the village green and imaging the retired Chief Inspector Gamache sitting there reading his father’s copy of The Balm of Gilead. I turned back toward the green and thought that just maybe I saw Myrna peeking out of a window from her apartment above the bookstore.
I gave up finding Three Pines and went back to my hotel and settled in with The Nature of the Beast, entering the Three Pines in which a nine-year old, tall-tale-telling boy is murdered because no one believes that he saw a gun bigger than a house in the woods with a monster.
I found Three Pines the next morning when I entered the coffee-breakfast-lunch-wine shop and thought immediately, “Oh, Olivier closed his bistro and opened this place.” My café au lait was served (sadly) not in a bowl but a mug, but my raspberry/cheese pastry was every bit as good as the one from the day before.
As I settled at a little table against the wall and set up my laptop to work on a scene from my own fledging murder mystery, I stopped to watch the dozen or so people who had pushed four tables together in the middle of the room. Their conversation was in French so I couldn’t figure out why they were meeting, although they each had a binder from which the flipped pages. Whatever the meeting or activity was, it broke up about twenty minutes later, and I watched as members of the group chatting in twos and threes. And there it was—Three Pines—the kind of neighborly familiarity that Penny uses as the backbone of her fictional village’s society.
An hour later I had finished sketching the scene in which all my suspects are present at a happy hour in a fictional gay bar in Los Angeles and decided it was time to visit the bookstore. As I entered the bookstore, I saw a tall woman with glasses standing to the side of the front counter and wondered, “Could it be?” I wandered through the large inviting space pretending to browse as I stole looks at the tall woman, comparing it to a picture of Penny on a poster, and decided that, indeed, it was her. When the people she had been talking to left, I plucked up my courage and thanked her for the books, and then I found Three Pines for a second time.
Penny was absolutely gracious, introducing herself even though I clearly knew who she was and laughing when I described looking for the big gun in the woods as I walked down the hill to the bookstore. When I mentioned that I was writing a piece in which I used a line of poetry attributed to her character Ruth Zardo, she walked over to a corner of the bookstore and pulled a book by Margaret Atwood off the shelf and flipped to a page so I could read the whole poem. When I mentioned that I had been working on a scene from my own murder mystery at the coffee shop, her eyes lit up and suddenly we were two writers talking about the pleasures of plotting a murder mystery. I was a bit star-struck as I floated out of the bookstore and realized that I had not thought to buy one of her books and ask her to sign it. I turned to go back but changed my mind and continued on to my car because Three Pines had found me for a couple of hours, and I didn’t want to do anything that would spoil its magic.
