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This interview is written by Book Dragon Louise Thermoz
ABOUT THE STORY
How do you find a killer when all the suspects know how to get away with murder? When the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society invites the world's best crime writers to a festival aboard the Ghan – the famous Darwin to Adelaide train – it’s a Who’s Who of crime writing royalty. And me! (The lowly debut author.)
But when one of us is murdered, six authors quickly turn into five detectives. We're all experts in whodunnits? Together, we should know how to solve a crime. Or commit one… Someone has to solve the case. But can I really outsmart the experts, and catch the killer?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author and stand-up comedian, Benjamin Stevenson writes crime mysteries in the vein of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. He is internationally recognized for both his books and his comedy. His latest book, ‘Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect’, reads like an homage to ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, and is set in his native Australia. The first book in the series is called ‘Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone’ (2023).
OUR LITTLE INTERVIEW
1. Did you always know that you wanted to write crime books?
I love puzzles and codes, and reading mystery fiction is the perfect addiction for that. I start every book with the challenge of 'can I solve it before the detective in the book does'? The thing is, eventually you learn all of the tricks - how the author is fooling the reader, how the book is 'built' so to speak - and once you know that, there's no going back. The only thing to do is to write them yourself.
2. As Ernest is a crime writer like yourself, and the book is written with a first person POV, I can’t help but wonder how much of yourself did you put in your character?
So much! Ernest is a chatty, witty first person narrator so I just funnel my thoughts straight into him. He's funny than I am (the benefit of editing), but he's probably a slightly worse detective. In this book, there is a page where he's struggling to write his new novel - and that was very easy to write.
3. The Ernest Cunningham series is characterized, amongst other things, by their anaphoric titles. How was the idea for the “Everyone” title born?
I'll admit I had to look up 'anaphoric' there... Basically I knew I wanted to write a whodunnit, and the key to the whodunnit is that everyone is a suspect and you have to find the murderer within a certain group. I decided it would be a fun riddle to try and find a murderer inside a group of killers, and the perfect group for that is a family. It's no accident that the book used killed and not murdered, as the act is very specific. So then I was thinking, 'how do you kill?', regular people on the street that I'm walking past, I wondered, 'some of these people probably have killed someone' - maybe not directly, maybe not deliberately, but there's something there in the everyday person moving on from something like that. So I had a list of perfect suspects, and ‘Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone’ was born.
4. The fourth question is always a bit different so here it goes: As a crime writer, if you could add a murder trope in any book, which book would it be and which character would be murdered?
I'd turn ‘Pride and Prejudice’ into a murder mystery: all the tensions and deceits are already there. The victim would have to be Mr Wickham, of course.
5. The release of the third Ernest Cunnigham in October (for which I am very excited), begs the question: do you have plans to keep the series going?
Yes! Ernest is a classic Golden Age detective, as long as murders keep happening around them he'll keep trying to solve them.
Bonus question: what are you reading at the moment?
A fantastic Australian book, ‘The Valley’ by Chris Hammer.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Buying a book because you thought the title was funny is not always a good choice… But in this case, it was a great choice! Reading this book felt like gossiping with my best friend: the complicity between the narrator and the reader is established with witty storytelling, unfiltered honesty, and the merciless mocking of everyone else. At no point did I guess who the killer was, and yet it made complete sense once it was revealed, which – crime readers will know – is the mark of a great crime mystery. I truly hope that more acquaintances of Ernest’s will be murdered!
Though it is the second book, I read it before the first one, and so I can confirm that it does not contain spoilers as to the first one, and is completely understandable this way.
Thank you Benjamin for answering my questions and for your clever contribution to the crime genre.
Author: Benjamin Stevenson
Publishing date (paperback) : 29.08.2024
Insta: stevensonexperience
Website : The Stevenson Experience