Are You Afraid of the Dark? Queer Guilt and Olivier in A Brutal Telling

On lies and life in the closet

Hi friends,

Amazon released the trailer for “Three Pines,” it’s eight-episode adaptation of Louise Penny’s books, last week.

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This week’s essay is from Aya Martin-Seaver, the co-editor of this project and writer of Can You Stand Her?, a newsletter about Anthony Trollope’s 1856 novel Can You Forgive Her.

“To discover that one has been lied to in a personal relationship, however, leads one to feel a little crazy.” Adrienne Rich “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” 

When I started reading Penny’s books with Still Life I was surprised to find a queer heart at the center of Three Pines in the form of Olivier’s Bistro. For all the queer advancement in literature, it’s still rare to find a book with meaningful queer characters that isn’t marketed as a “queer book” and Still Life, published in 2005, in many ways was ahead of the curve.  Still Life itself is actually a rather queer book with tender portrayals of the town defending Olivier and Gabri from homophobia and a storyline about the terrors of queer young adulthood. But when I read book five, A Brutal Telling, published four years later in 2009, and it ended with Olivier’s arrest for murder I found myself slightly heartbroken — betrayed even. The gay antique dealer kills a mysterious, lonely hermit to get more antiques? While Penny spends book six proving Olivier innocent, I remained irritated and mistrustful. 

So when I had a chance to write about Louise Penny for this project, I set out to understand Olivier’s initial “fall from grace” with more nuance. I wanted to redeem A Brutal Telling in my own eyes but also understand my own reaction and bring greater complexity to my own reading of queerness in Three Pines. Obviously, I could not write off all books where something sad happened to queer characters as bad books — and in general, I don’t. If I was going to continue the series I needed to understand what had set me off. 

Olivier’s lies are a central theme of A Brutal Telling. To try and keep them straight I made a chart:

When Inspector Gamache realizes how much his friend Olivier is lying to him — and as we can see from the graph he lies to Gamache possibly the most — he certainly feels frustrated.  Penny writes about Gamache’s “frustration at a witness who was behaving like his six-year-old nephew accused of stealing cookies.” He may even, as Rich says, “feel a little crazy.” But is Olivier lying like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar or is there something else going on — something queer? 

In The Queer Uncanny Pauline Palmer writes that “Secrecy, and the significant role it frequently plays in the lives of lesbians and gay men” and Rich’s “Some Notes on Lying”, bears this observation out. As queer writers have shown time and again secrecy is a central theme of queerness. But secrecy is also a theme of murder. In A Great Reckoning, Gamache says, “​​every homicide I’ve ever investigated started as a secret.”   What Gamache does not reflect on is that under the gaze of compulsory heterosexuality —  the assumption by society that everyone is straight and queerness is the aberration — every queer person also starts out as a secret too. I wondered if Gamache understood the complexity this layered into Olivier’s lying or the cross purposes this would automatically put the two of them at.  

A Brutal Telling pairs this theme of secrets and lies revealing a series of secrets and lies throughout the book: the Hermit’s existence, the asshole saint Vincent Gilbert’s life, and the art critic Denis Fortin’s homophobia just to name a few. But should every secret see the light of day? Within a queer context Olivier must keep some secrets — we learn, for example, that he isn’t out to his family —  but I wondered if Gamache understood the painful coercive power of secrets in queer life. That secrets, for reasons of safety or practicality, are essential to existence and aren’t always a matter of choice. Furthermore, sometimes a secret is a kindness and a method of protection.

In my first reading, I thought absolutely not. After all, Gamache does not reflect on Olivier’s closeting within his relationship with family and he doesn’t reflect on Olivier’s queer identity at all. But reading for this essay I found out that Gamache thinks of lies as victims of the investigation, not little trophies but victims. He thinks:

some of the first victims of a murder investigation were people’s lies. The lies they told themselves, the lies they told each other. The little lies that allowed them to get out of bed on cold, dark mornings. Gamache and his team hunted the lies down and exposed them. Until all the small tales told to ease everyday lives disappeared. And people were left naked.

To me, this quote suggests that Gamache understands some lies are better left untold-- some things should not come to light. But his lack of patience with Olivier’s lies towards the end of the book gives me pause. It’s a reminder — proof, even — of Gamache’s fallibility. Detractors of Louise Penny’s books often claim the detective is perfect, yet A Brutal Telling is an entire book devoted to the consequences of Gamache’s blind spots. 

And one of his biggest oversights is seen in his treatment of Olivier especially in the arrest scene. Then, Gamache fails to appreciate that Olivier’s habit of lying comes from the necessity of staying in the closet as he grew up –  an emotional necessity many queer people still face. If the natural progression in Gamache’s mind is to go from lying about the cookies to telling the truth, the passage from childhood to adulthood —queerness halts this passage and makes lying the destination, not the origin.

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Olivier seems to understand the connection between lies and the closet he is still partially in.  He even links these when he thinks about his lies around the hermit’s death, “even to his own ears it sounded like a lie. I didn’t take the last cookie, I didn’t take the fine bone china cup, I didn’t steal the money from your purse. I’m not gay.” In this quote the dominos of lying lead to the root of the secrets: his queerness. The simple lies of childhood do not give way under queerness but spawn. For Olivier this secrecy seems safe — or at least safer than the truth —while for Gamache it represents murder. But Gamache misses this part of Olivier’s experience. This I think is why Gamache fails to understand a few paragraphs later why Olivier wasn’t afraid of walking into the dark forest.

“Weren’t you afraid of the dark?” Gamache asked it so simply…. “It’s not the dark I’m afraid of,” said Olivier. And he remembered the freedom that came only after the sun set. In city parks, in darkened theaters, in bedrooms. The bliss that came with being able to shed the outer shell of himself. Protected by the night. It wasn’t the dark that scared him, but what might come to light.”

This stood out to me immediately. Olivier’s clear, yet coded, imagining of the freedom of cruising and gay sexuality that can occur only in the dark escapes Gamache and his team who struggle to understand the complexity of queerness. Gamache, because perhaps he is so accepting of his friend’s sexuality, does not parse the upside-down world Olivier lives in. This ultimately means he cannot accurately read Olivier’s repeated attempts at secrecy. Where he sees secrecy as lying to cover up a crime Olivier is actually lying to cover up more secrets because he does not trust the truth. The tragedy of A Brutal Telling is that understanding is what Gamache does so amazingly and surprisingly well. He finds people and sees through the darkness. But Olivier is, perhaps, just too used to hiding for even a friend to find him. Gamache, so confident of his own abilities, doesn’t believe he could misread someone so badly. 

As I moved on to book six, Bury Your Dead, I had a hard time letting go of my resentment of book five.  Olivier, notably and understandably, doesn’t immediately forgive Gamache for not trusting him. I stumbled on an online review where a reader was annoyed at Olivier about this and I wondered —  was I being annoying? 

 It was writing this that helped me realize the fact was I also felt betrayed by Olivier. I hadn’t closed the loop. I could not believe my queer friend had betrayed me, stepped over the line, and acted so badly. Perhaps it wasn’t Gamache but me who was “driven a little crazy” by Olivier’s lies.  

In Notes on Lying Rich goes on to ask 

“Does a life “in the closet”--lying, perhaps of necessity, about ourselves to bosses, landlords, clients, colleagues, family, because the law and public opinion are founded on a lie-- does this, can it spread into private life so that lying (described as discretion) becomes an easy way to avoid conflict or complication? Can it become a strategy so ingrained that it is used even with close friends and lovers?” 

And I wondered similarly, did Olivier’s life of closeting himself influence his actions with the hermit? This perhaps was what I was really afraid of: that Olivier had killed the hermit because being in the closet had corrupted him somehow. Afraid too that my favorite new author had fallen into the trope where the gay character commits a crime because they’re gay. But Penny has more skill than that. Olivier isn’t accused of killing the hermit to stay in the queer closet but the Olivier closet. He’s built his own web of discretion and lies just like Rich describes in “Notes on Lying.”  

 In fact, the life Olivier lived before he met Gabri sounds like it’s right out of “Notes on Lying.” In A Brutal Telling he reflects that he had “ thought of himself and his friends as gay men. Discreet, elegant, cynical. Gabri was just queer. Common. And fat. There was nothing discreet about him.” Notable here is Olivier’s almost unspoken adherence to discretion around his sexuality and identity. So sharp is this loyalty that it is not even directly named until it is confronted with its exact opposite in the form of Gabri’s large, voluble, queer body. Olivier is terrified of being queer he longs to be only gay. The distinction here is clearly one of style and class. Queer is an insult in a way gay is not but queer is also obvious and open in a way gay is not. Gay for Olivier meant “discreet, elegant, cynical” probably it also meant thin and anxious and rich. In a way, a gay Olivier is in the closet still even if it’s a queer one. 

But what I was missing too was how Olivier had changed since he first met Gabri. He no longer would dismiss his partner as common. And in the first book, he kisses Gabri’s hand when children yell “queer” at them. A Brutal Telling begins further back in time before the Bistro was the Bistro before Olivier had grown his warm queer heart. Ultimately Olivier doesn’t lie because of the person he is now but because of the person he was then — scared and learning how to be kind. I had to go forward to the rest of the books accepting book five. After all if I wanted Olivier to have the happy queer life I imagined for him Olivier needed to be found out eventually: he certainly was never going to tell on himself. 

Aya Martin Seaver is a librarian in Washington D.C. Her newsletter Can You Stand Her? about Anthony Trollope’s 1856 novel Can You Forgive Her? runs bi-weekly. You can subscribe to Aya’s newsletter and find her on Twitter and Instagram. 

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Notes from Three Pines is a short-run newsletter run through Substack celebrating and exploring Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache books. Love Gamache or Ruth’s duck Rosa? Reply to this email, leave a comment or email notesfromthreepines@substack.com.

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