How can anyone resist a title like Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone? Benjamin Stevenson is a stand-up comic turned novelist and this is his third crime novel. I heard Stevenson speak about his book at my local library in Sydney. On a high stool flanked by two other writers, Stevenson gave an animated and amusing performance. I found his writing just as entertaining.
Ernest Cunningham, the narrator/investigator of Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone, is true to his name. With a self-depreciating earnestness, he presents the sometimes-historical circumstances in which his family members came to kill people. At the same time, he narrates the story of a snowed-in family reunion at an Australian mountain resort. The novel is an example of Agatha Christie-like crime in which a group of people is thrown together in an isolated location and a series of deaths ensues. In the final scene, the investigator gathers the remaining people together to show how all the clues fit together and reveal the killer’s identity.
While the detection puzzle itself is intriguing in Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone, the true pleasure of the book for me lay in the humorous comments by the narrator, especially those about the crime genre itself. The one-liner jokes come at a fast and regular rate, providing laugh-out-loud moments throughout.
By making the narrator a relatively unsuccessful writer of how-to books for aspiring crime writers, Stevenson constructs a device to joke about tropes in the crime genre. In this way, the reader enters the mind of the author, enjoying a ‘meta’ level of humour. For example, Ernest alerts the reader early on to the pages in the book in which a death occurs, something Stevenson apologises for in the Acknowledgements. All of this makes for an hilarious read and one which does not disappoint in terms of the big reveal at the end.
Stevenson’s next crime novel is due for publication later in 2023. With a similarly amusing title, it is called Everyone on this Train is a Suspect. Just as Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone links with Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None, Stevenson’s new book promises to mirror Murder on the Orient Express but in an Australian setting. I can hardly wait.
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