Benjamin Stevenson made a name for himself last year with his breakout debut, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, a crowd-pleasing, Knives Out-style Australian-set mystery in which protagonist Ernest Cunningham, must work out who is behind a recent slaying during a snowy family holiday, while also trying to piece his fractious family ties back together. Now he returns with the next instalment in the series, Everyone On This Train is a Suspect.
Everyone On This Train continues on from the first novel but is standalone too – a reader jumping in to Stevenson’s world can largely avoid spoilers (barring one key relationship) if they’ve not read the solid Everyone In My Family (even if this reviewer behooves you do so for the sheer pleasure of doing so).
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This second novel sees Ernest, the hapless aspiring writer from the first novel, now experiencing a bubble of fame as his account of the previous book’s events gains some acclaim. As a result he gets a prestigious invite – a luxury train ride-slash-publicity tour-slash-writers-conference bisecting Australia wherein Ernest and a group of other writers and their respective entourages and fans travel the country and discuss crime literature… and in the case of one of the writers, unexpectedly drop dead.
The mystery is classic Christie – an isolated setting (as isolated as a train hurtling through the Australian outback can be), a limited cadre of suspects, and a ticking clock – but Stevenson more than plays fair with the audience, establishing meta-textual rules on top of more rules, so that even seasoned mystery readers will find themselves eagerly turning the page or counting the times a character’s name is used. If the first novel spent its time exploring the complex family dynamics in its wintry whodunnit, Everyone On This Train never loosens the pace, hurtling towards its satisfying conclusion.
There are also a couple of pleasing strands woven into the mystery under Stevenson’s hands. The first is a vein of self-referential joy at the mystery genre, with each of the writers standing in for a particular breed of crime writer (the forensics enthusiast, the literary cypher, the grizzled detective scribe), and the works they create helping to shape the various twists and turns that Stevenson employs.
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The second thread is more of the heart than the head, belying a quietly moving, mature love story between Stevenson and his girlfriend, who joins the train party and finds herself an involved member of the proceedings. Their relationship is authentic and honest, yet tender and sweet. Stevenson has a gift for arch, dry humour, and much of this key relationship is filled with jokes and banter, even as they try and stop the mounting body count and fix the problems in their root-worthy romance, adding a pleasing layer to this well-considered whodunnit.
Incredibly inventive and supremely satisfying, Everyone On This Train is a Suspect manages to pull off the impossible and surpass Stevenson’s original whodunnit, crafting a story full of expertly-plotted twists, metatextual smarts, and a big beating heart underneath it all. Stevenson might have a hard time clearing the high bar this sophomore novel has created, but it’ll be a joy watching him try.
Everyone On This Train is a Suspect is out now from Penguin/Michael Joseph.
