Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson

Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect by Benjamin Stevenson was narrated by Ernest Cunningham, the same character who narrated Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone. Except this time, Ernest is riding high on the success of his ‘memoir’, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone.

The story is a locked room mystery, although in this case, the room is a train, specifically, the iconic ‘Ghan’ which runs between Darwin and Adelaide. Ernest and his girlfriend Juliette, who met during the events that inspired his previous book, were on board for the Australian Mystery Writer’s Festival, 50th Anniversary celebrations. As a fledgling author, Ernest was chuffed at having been invited, although he was slightly intimidated by his fellow authors, whose books won awards, sold better and attracted better reviews than his book had.

Ernest had accepted an advance for a second novel and was now suffering from writer’s block. Everyone joked that a murder on the train would inspire him to start his second book and sure enough, when Henry McTavish, the best-selling crime writer died on the train, Ernest’s story was off and running. By the time a second murder occurred, Ernest was in the mix as the possible murderer.

I liked Ernest very much and appreciated his hints to his readers about who the murderer might be. His fellow characters on the train included a handful of writers, who were generally jealous and unsupportive of each other, publishers and agents, readers and super-fans of the various authors.

There are plenty of twists and turns in the story and I suspected everyone (incorrectly, as it turned out) at some point or other.

I liked the Ghan as a setting and enjoyed travelling along the train tracks with Ernest and the rest of the festival-goers, with stopovers to visit Katherine Gorge, Alice Springs and romantic dinners under the stars in the back of beyond. All was eventually resolved, with the story racing to an exciting finale. The story was fun and I would be happy to spend more time with the meta-fictional Ernest in future – may I suggest a murder mystery set on a luxury cruise?

My purchase of Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect continues my New Year’s resolution for 2024 to buy a book by an Australian author during each month of this year (May). I purchased Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect at The Bookshop at Queenscliff.

Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson

Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Australian author Benjamin Stevenson was the most fun I’ve had reading in ages, and not just because He Who Eats All of Our Leftovers looked at the cover and asked, a little anxiously, if the book was a How-to guide.

I laughed and assured him that the story was a novel but later, when I was helping HWEAoOL to remove excess concrete from a new structure, I looked at the jackhammer he was holding as I crouched down in front of him and thought, hmm, I could be a victim here!

After we finished the job I asked HWEAoOL if he knew what a great murder weapon a jackhammer could be and he looked at me as if I was crazy and said that it hadn’t even crossed his mind.

Anyway.

I knew that Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone would be terrific when I saw the first preface was the Detection Club’s membership oath from 1930, where the members of the secret association of mystery writers including Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers promised that their stories would not include unfair plot devices, then on the second preface page, Ronald Knox’s 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction from 1929 were listed (noting that one of these rules had been redacted due to cultural insensitivity).

The narrator, Ernie Cunningham, told his story directly to the reader according to the rules and promises from the book’s preface. He, along with the rest of his family, had been summonsed to a family reunion at a ski resort, where they were celebrating the release of Ernie’s older brother Michael from prison.

The Cunningham family were well known to the police. Ernie and Michael’s father had been shot after he killed a police officer while robbing a service station when the boys were very small. Their mother had also killed someone and so had Ernie’s wife, stepsister, sister-in-law, aunt, uncle and stepfather. Michael had also killed someone, which was why he had been in jail.

It wasn’t very long into the family reunion that the first murder occurred. The victim was a stranger who at first appeared to have died in a snowstorm, but was later found to have been suffocated with ash. Ernie, who authored How-to guides for writing murder mystery novels, took it upon himself to find out who the killer was.

Unfortunately the unknown stranger’s death wasn’t the last and of course, each of the Cunningham family members were suspects.

I really, really liked Ernie’s narration style. He told the story as if he was sitting in front of me saying what happened in his own words, although it wasn’t long before I started to wonder if Ernie was following the rules that he used in the prefaces, particularly after he said that he had a huge bag full of cash which he had gotten from his brother the night that Michael’s victim was killed, and that his testimony had put Michael in jail.

One minor criticism is that the story became quite complicated before the mysteries were solved.

However, the setting of a remote, snow-bound ski lodge was fabulous and completely in keeping with a Golden Age murder mystery, as were the characters, a disfunctional family group who loved each other underneath all of their secrets, faults and failings.

I laughed out loud during parts of this story and at other times, felt terribly sorry for characters whose backstories were tragic. The story is clever and wildly entertaining, and I am looking forward to reading other books in future by Benjamin Stevenson.