A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma Wrapped in a Joke: EVERYONE ON THIS TRAIN IS A SUSPECT (2023)

Originally posted June 5, 2024.

“I’m not seriously a suspect?” Juliette said.
“I mean, everyone’s a suspect.”
“Are you?”
“Well… no.”
“Why not?”
“I’m the narrator.”

My conclusion about Benjamin Stevenson’s previous novel, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, was that it was best treated as a sort of practical joke on the reader. While the title might make you think it’s something like Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), an elaborate tale of family treachery and literal backstabbing, the actual story was a fairly standard mystery where most of your attention is on deciphering the truth about what you’ve been told you will be told. A self-proclaimed “reliable narrator,” Ernest Cunningham promises to be upfront and honest about the truth, then proceeds to bamboozle you with exact-words trickery in the manner of a particularly unfair cryptic crossword.

So while I wasn’t sure what to expect of Stevenson’s follow-up, Everyone on This Train is a Suspect, I went in with my mental sword drawn for battle. How does the sequel compare? As Ernie would say: Let’s get started!

In the aftermath of the fatal family reunion in the previous novel, Ernest Cunningham and his girlfriend Juliette have both published memoirs, leading them to be invited aboard a mystery writers’ retreat aboard the Ghan, a luxurious train that crosses Australia north-to-south. Ernest is dealing with both PTSD and writer’s block: his contract requires him to produce a second book, but seeing as the first one was based on real life, that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen unless he’s unlucky enough to encounter another string of murders.

Naturally that’s precisely what does end up happening. The writers on the retreat all have personal and publishing beef with each other, and eventually the pressure cooker boils over as one of the guests is murdered. (Everyone on This Train leads you down the garden path about just who it’s going to be thanks to a game of hot potato with an identifying personal item.) The writers seem to be perfect suspects—including Ernest, who several characters point out could have forced lightning to strike twice. That said, Ernest isn’t directly connected to the group this time, so you might question how he’s going to get up to his narrative tricks, considering that he really is investigating as the novel goes along. As it turns out, that is the main narrative trick in this instalment, as he’s clear that he has started writing on the train, meaning his status as “narrator who clearly survived the events” is not so much of a given. Otherwise, it’s more of a conventional whodunit than its predecessor.

Which isn’t so say that nothing else of the metafiction has carried over—a lot of it is what you’d expect, though more on the puzzle side. There’s a running tally of how often the murderer’s name is used in text. There’s a plot-important anagram and a secret code. I’ve said before that metafiction (at least the kind that speaks to you directly) only works as well as as its ability to predict the potential thoughts of the reader, so in that respect, chapter 11.5 made me laugh when it mostly-accurately summarized my deductions and suspicions towards the different characters. Very well, chapeau. _{(Still figured out the code, though.)}

“Hell, like you say, everyone’s got a motive. Maybe everyone did it.”

“I think that’s been done before.”

“Nothing beats a classic.”

The plot, and Ernest’s suspicions, shift their spotlight between each of the writers and their respective sub-genres, which lends itself to a dry satire of the publishing industry. What sells. Who sells. The sections of the book are all named after genre marketing trends. This satire ends up going to some pretty dark places, relating to industry misogyny and nepotism as well as the Me Too movement. The early throw-away goof that literary darling Wolfgang beat legal novelist Lisa Fulton for the “Justice in Fiction Award, Women’s Prize” despite not having written a, y’know, crime novel, is tongue-in-cheek foreshadowing of what’s to come. It’s nothing too graphic, but heed the content warning in the not-prologue.

We feel certain things so keenly—love, sure, but also hatred—that we are practically designed to implode. Murder, it seems to me, is about as natural a cause as it gets.

At one point Ernest tells us that, unlike the golden-age detectives of yore, he isn’t just an objective outsider. I didn’t completely agree with this assessment. In Everyone in My Family, Ernest’s unreliable narration dances around family trauma and relationship dysfunctions that he doesn’t want to confront. Some of the “reveals” would not be nearly as surprising if he hadn’t gone to extreme lengths to hide them. There are certain points that seem too painful for him to put down in words at all. As much as the book was comedic, this gave him a sympathetic touch that humanized the proceedings. Everyone on This Train is not Ernest’s story, which is a deliberate part of the plot but also something I found a bit of a shame. What with genre expectations and all, there isn’t a way to catch up with the remaining Cunninghams without spoiling the previous one for newcomers. What we’re left with is a cameo and a focus on Ernest’s relationship with Juliette, which was an element I was… lukewarm on.

Ernest is majorly falling into old relationship patterns here. I mean, good god man. Juliette quite rightfully rakes him over the coals for it, but I still felt dissatisfied. Maybe part of it is that, while for the most part the female characters are well-written, Juliette herself is not rendered in sufficient detail to carry this kind of Scott Pilgrim-y “your girlfriend’s a person, too!” plot. Ernest’s ex-wife Erin was, in the previous book—flawed but sympathetic. I don’t even know Juliette’s last name, let alone how her book differed from her boyfriend’s.

Oh well. Book three is coming out soon, so here’s hoping we can see more of her as an actual “co-author.”

So I wasn’t as invested in Ernest’s personal relationships this time around. The mystery was solid and pretty funny, though. Method remains wackadoo, but less so than Everyone in My Family. Probably easier to figure out, too. It’s difficult to transition from a book that is clearly a single, self-contained idea into an ongoing series—not only is that the in-universe dilemma, but Everyone on This Train‘s epigraph even directly jokes about it—and it’s always the second book that’s hit hardest. It keeps up all the same humour as the first book, so while it’s not as tight, in some ways, it’s certainly not a bad entry in the series and proves that it can be a series. Stay tuned for when Ernest does the “Christmas Mystery” with a menagerie of magicians.