Everyone on this Train is a Suspect (2024) by Benjamin Stevenson

I have been super excited about this book from the moment I heard about it, as I really loved the first book in the series, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (2022). In this first novel the plotting, pacing, writing style, cluing and characterisation were all top notch. Today’s reviewed title is a sequel, with Ernest Cunningham once again narrating the tale and directly engaging with the reader.

Synopsis

‘When the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn’t pan out.

The program is a who’s who of crime writing royalty:

the debut writer (me!)
the forensic science writer
the blockbuster writer
the legal thriller writer
the literary writer
the psychological suspense writer.

But when one of us is murdered, six authors quickly turn into five detectives. Together, we should know how to solve a crime.

Or commit one…’

Overall Thoughts

In Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone the writer and the narrator, in the spirit of fair play, directly engage with all but one of Ronald Knox’s Decalogue. In Everyone on this Train is a Suspect (2024) I was interested to note that at the start of the book the author quotes the ninth rule from S. S. Van Dine’s ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’ (1928):

‘There must be but one detective — that is, but one protagonist of deduction — one deus ex machina. To bring the minds of three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives to bear on a problem, is not only to disperse the interest and break the direct thread of logic, but to take an unfair advantage of the reader. If there is more than one detective the reader doesn’t know who his co-deductor is. It’s like making the reader run a race with a relay team.’

I wondered how the story would interact with this rule and I will leave you find out how it does.

In Golden Age style we get a map of the train and where each character’s sleeping quarters were, among others, and the story includes a copy of the programme for the writing festival the narrator is taking part in. I like this use of different text types and true to form these pieces of information do include important clues. The festival programme provides a brief intro to each writer involved as a speaker, revealing how these core characters embody a variety of different crime writing backgrounds.

Last summer I made a decalogue of my own for crime writers and commented on the role of prologues and how they can become rather generic and uninteresting. So, it was brilliant to read the prologue here, which is and is not a prologue, as it is an email from Ernest Cunningham to his editor at Penguin about how he won’t write the prologue suggested:

‘It’s a hard no on the prologue […] I know how to do it, of course, the scene you want me to write. An omniscient eye would survey the cabin’s destruction, lingering on signs of a struggle: the strewn sheets, the upturned mattress, the bloodied handprint on the bathroom door […] It just seems overly pointless to me to replay a scene from later in the book merely for the purpose of suspense. It’s like saying, “Hey we know this book takes a while to get going, but it’ll get there.” Then the poor reader is just playing catch-up until we get to the murder.’

Nevertheless, the email does indeed foreshadow what is to come and creates suspense, particularly in the multiple postscripts at the end. I like how this author takes a well-used element of the crime fiction novel and does something fresh and new with it. This is something we need to see more of in modern crime fiction.

This is a fictional story, but I enjoyed how both books in the series have a protagonist who is narrating events in the form of a dramatic memoir, which makes an interesting variation:

‘So I’m writing again. Which is good news, I suppose, for those wanting a second book, but more unfortunate for the people who had to die so I could write it.’

The opening of the book directly mentions the rules for writing a sequel, and in a humorous way looks at some of the expectations readers can have of them:

‘Besides, everyone hates sequels: they are so often accused of being a pale imitation of what’s come before. Being that the last murders happened on a snowy mountain and these ones happened in a desert, the joke’s on the naysayers: a pale imitation this won’t be, because at least I’ve got a tan.’

This attention to the art of writing gives the novel a pleasing metafictional hue/tone. The metafictional component adds not just comedy to the narrative, but it also contributes to the overall puzzle:

‘If you think you don’t already know the rules to writing a murder mystery, trust me, you do. It’s all intuitive. Let me give you an example. I’m writing this in first person. That means, in order to have sat down and physically written about it, I survive the events of the book. First person equals survival. Apologies in advance for the lack of suspense when I almost bite the dust in Chapter 28.’

The reader wonders why they are being told this, as it seems like a bold move to declare this at the beginning of the tale. Is the narrator trying to wrongfoot us with deceptive honesty? I like how the narrative assumes an intelligent readership.

Similar to the first book, Ernest Cunningham is a helpful and reliable narrator for the puzzle-solving reader. From the get-go Cunningham tells us:

‘I’ll tell you that I use the killer’s name, in all its forms, exactly 106 times from here […] And so I promise to be that rarity in modern crime novels: a reliable narrator. You can count on me for the truth at every turn.’

Yet one of the many things this author is good at, is using an honest and upfront narrator to still get us looking in the wrong s and to misdirect us because we are on such high alert for clues. Furthermore, the fact we have a narrator who tells us so much beforehand, does not hinder the armchair detective, but instead it galvanises them into action.

I have touched upon the puzzle solving aspect of the book several times now, but this is no dry academic exercise to figure out. The characters are not simple ciphers to be decoded and emotions play their part in how events play out and how the ongoing situation is perceived. One aspect I was interested in was Cunningham’s complex feelings of being an imposter as a writer. Wrapped within these emotions is the trauma Cunningham went through in solving the case in the first book. The narrative does not become bogged down in such issues though. The first death in the book is not treated officially as a murder to begin with and Cunningham is rather on his own in wanting it to be murder. His motivations for this are ambiguous. Part of him wants it to be murder so he has a story to write for his second book, but there is always a drive within him to quickly resolve this situation so that the death rate does not escalate like it did in his first experience of solving a crime. I felt this mixture of motives made him more likeable as the selfishness is ameliorated to a degree by his concern and vulnerability.

Cunningham’s girlfriend also brings in another interesting theme into the narrative – that of the dangers of treating life like a detective story, as it can have damaging effects on relationships. In this novel the egotism of the amateur sleuth creates an interesting thread throughout the plot, increasing emotional investment, and importantly it does not derail the plot. At one point Cunningham writes:

‘A Golden Age detective doesn’t really need characterisation or motive, so to speak: intellectual curiosity is their raison d’etre. It’s enough for them to scratch an itch, to solve a puzzle simply because it’s there to be solved. I’d started in that place, merely curious at the piecing together, not invested in what the answer might mean. My motives had broadened – I’d wanted to build my book out of it – and then, Wyatt’s death being so much more violent than McTavish’s, plot-seeking had given way to fear. But all these motives – curiosity to cashing-in to safety – are selfish ones. It’s exactly what Juliette had said about whose story I thought this was. Mine.’

I don’t know if I would wholly agree with the sentiment voiced in the first sentence. I think there are examples from the interwar years which would disagree with it. The narrative arc presented in the quote above has been done before in crime fiction. However, the framing of the crime investigation, as shown at the end of the passage is interesting. It brings out the idea of how amateur sleuthing can have its self-centred aspects.

Throughout the book Cunningham directly addresses the reader and one of the topics which crops up frequently in these moments is reader expectations. I think this is a topic that the writer engages with well and in an amusing way too, as the example below hopefully shows:

‘This may be a surprise, but everyone survives the night. I know that’s not how things usually go in a mystery. There’s the night before, in which halves of conversations are overheard (check) and the complex motives and backstories of everyone are introduced (check), then everyone retreats, as if Broadway choreographed, to their rooms, doors clicking in unison, only for dawn to rise on a tussle in the night, a blood-stained cabin and a victim. Alas, not here. Not yet.’

Moreover, like in John Dickson Carr’s The Nine Wrong Answers (1952), reader theories and assumptions are openly anticipated:

‘Here’s what you’re thinking: [A] is your current primary suspect, by virtue of her being the only person who’s been remotely nice to me so far on this trip. Her lack of incrimination is, ironically, incriminating. She was also the only person not in the room during [B’s] death. [C] is currently lowest on your list of suspects, given that he is the kind of reprehensible cockroach who normally winds up the victim in these books, and you consider him too obvious as a murderer.’

[I replaced character names with letters to avoid giving readers more info than they might like.]

Nevertheless, this mystery is not just a mental duel between the author and reader (although this feature is prominent). It also includes much drama and peril, even though at times the conventions surrounding activities such as dangerous stunts (of a Tom Cruise nature) are subverted for comedic effect. Unlike the first book I was hopeless at solving this second case. I did manage to figure some bits out though. Not that my ineptitude dented my reading enjoyment. Like the first book in the series this is a book I can heartily recommend. It is being published on the 29^th February 2024, so don’t forget to make a note in your diary. I look forward to Stevenson’s next book!

Rating: 4.75/5

Source: Review Copy (Michael Joseph via Netgalley)