Peter Moss might never have landed the rights to adapt Louise Penny’s Three Pines/Inspector Gamache crime novels for the CBC if he didn’t holiday near the perfect and quaint Quebec country village in Penny’s mystery series that is so apparently thick with murder.

Moss, who co-founded PDM Entertainment this week with Brian Dennis and Phyllis Platt, first alerted Dennis to Penny’s Three Pines novels, which drew a major readership in the UK and the U.S. before finding a Canadian following.

“Brian read the books, liked them, and we saw no one had made a play for them,” Moss tells Playback Daily, of optioning the crime novels set in Quebec’s Eastern Townships for TV treatment.

That wasn’t entirely true, because Moss and Dennis learnt Penny had been approached by eight separate Canadian producers eager to turn her Chief Inspector Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec, and his deputy, Jean Guy Beauvoir, into TV drama characters.

And each time Penny said no.

But Moss and Dennis, who had been talking about working together on a TV project, weren’t quick to give up, and one day Moss was holidaying in the Eastern Townships and decided to cold call Penny at her home.

“I asked her, ‘what’s the part that’s difficult for you, can you ever imagine doing this, or do you just hate TV?'” he recalls questioning the mystery writer.

It turns out maintaining the integrity of her characters had Penny shy about TV.

So Moss had an idea.

He’d seen the BBC air separate TV dramas, Wallander, based on the Scandinavian Wallander detective book series by Henning Mankell, and Zen, based on British writer Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen detective novels, as stand-alone TV movies and not as on-going one-hour series.

“They did them as a package, shot all three movies and released all three movies in the first year,” Moss recalls.

So Moss and Dennis proposed to Penny doing an initial two TV movies based on the first of the Three Pines novels.

Penny agreed, and so too did the CBC, which came on board with a development deal.

And by now, Platt, the mastermind behind the CBC’s 1990s primetime schedule, had ended a year-long stint as the acting executive director of arts & entertainment at the public broadcaster.

So Platt joined Moss and Dennis, with whom she had often collaborated in the past, to form PDM Entertainment.

Veteran screenwriter Wayne Grigsby is on board to adapt the first two Penny crime novels as movies.

Given the popularity of the Three Pines book series in the UK, PDM is eyeing a likely Canadian-UK co-production for the project.

And the producers will eventually line up a U.S. broadcaster, likely after the TV movies have been produced to ensure 100% Canadian-content for the CBC.

Also in development at PDM, and again with the CBC, is The Best Laid Plans, a six-part mini-series based on the political satire by Terry Fallis, a former Liberal Party strategist turned writer.

Moss remembers the Fallis book landing in his hands through his participation in a book club.

“I laughed my head off,” he recalls after reading the comic novel about a reluctant first-time politician who is unexpectedly elected to Parliament.

Veteran screenwriters Susan Coyne (Slings and Arrows) and Jason Sherman (The Listener) will pen the TV scripts for The Best Laid Plans.

“One of the nicest things about Canada is we love to make fun of our politicians,” Moss says.