It’s the Australian Mystery Writers’ Festival and debut author Ernest Cunningham is one of the participating writers. Cunningham arrives at the festival—hosted on the Ghan, the famous train that goes from Darwin to Adelaide—following the publication of his memoir Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (also, the title of author Benjamin Stevenson’s novel that first introduces Cunningham) and is, having signed a six-figure advance, now stuck trying to find an idea for a novel.
He’s not stuck much longer. Soon there’s a murder on the train, and with all the festival participants and guests stuck on the Ghan, Cunningham gets to work to solve the murder and get the material he needs for his next book. As Cunningham narrates:
Seven writers board a train. At the end of the line, five will leave it alive. One will be in cuffs.
Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect is Stevenson’s pacey and entertaining follow-up to his first Cunningham novel. While Stevenson, via Cunningham, notes that all of the conventions of the genre will be followed, Stevenson breaks the fourth wall from the opening page and maintains his meta, direct-to-audience style throughout. Early in the novel Cunningham introduces his structural notes for when certain events need to have occurred, including that by 10,000 words the characters, victims and suspects need to be introduced. Stevenson then writes:
If you’re wondering, we’re a smidge over six thousand words thus far, which leaves me three and half to ensure you’ve met everyone you need to: victims, killers and suspects.
Just before the murder happens, Cunningham narrates:
It’s a staple of mystery novels that, just before the murder happens, certain conversations overheard in the deep of night. This is to be the case here.
While an earlier tour of the Ghan includes:
Beside the door on each carriage were a series of rungs, a ladder that led to the roof. I’d love to tell you I get through the book without ascending these, but we both know Chekov’s gun applies to both mantelpieces and ladders.
The approach —quick, conversational and clever—pays off, as does the nod and respect to the classics of the genre. Stevenson, also a stand-up comedian, writes with humor and a fresh wit that carries across the novel.
His take on the crime novel conventions (Stevenson is also an agent at Curtis Brown Australia) is matched by the conventions of writers and of literary festivals. A one-star review on Goodreads by one of the fellow festival authors increases Cunningham’s anxiety that he doesn’t deserve to mix with the festival’s other writers, while his agent—aboard for another client—tasks Cunningham with writing 5,000 words by the time the train arrives in Adelaide. There are old wounds and scores to settle, along with the customary debate between literary and commercial fiction. Too much alcohol is matched with big egos and bigger aspirations. All which Stevenson deftly integrates with the murder and with his narrator’s errors and successes along the way.
The close quarters of the Ghan and the expanse of the Australian outback also make for an ideal setting. Named from the shortening of the Afghan Express, the Ghan, Stevenson writes is “a tribute to the camel-riding explorers of Australia’s past, who traversed the red desert long before steel track and steam engines.”. That there are few stops, few people and vast stretches without mobile reception only adds to Stevenson’s choice.
Cunningham writes that his publisher has advised him that “sequels are tricky”, but Stevenson has skilfully found a way with his fun and fast-paced follow-up.