Does guessing whodunit ruin a whodunit for you?

It usually doesn’t for me unless it’s so obvious and unless there are no other pleasures to be found in the writing.

In any case, about halfway through Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, I realized who the culprit had to be, and in the end I was proven to be correct. That doesn’t mean I figured out all the ins and outs and the whole logical chain of evidence that led to the unveiling, it just means that I know my Agatha Christie very, very well and I noticed a faint similarity in the plotting to one of her stories, a trope that she had used, actually to more than one. I probably wouldn’t’ve done so in this case, but instead of reading the book straight through in a day or two as is my wont, I was constantly interrupted and forced to parcel it out in dribs and drabs over the course of five days, so I had plenty of time to think about it.

No matter. Stevenson’s novel has lots of other things going for it besides the battle of wits between the author and the reader. There is the delightfully complicated plot, for example, and the incredible Cunningham family that lies at the center of it. And there’s a wonderful unexpected surprise in the final pages that I truly did not see coming.

I don’t like to reveal too much about the plot; it’s much better to let the author dole it out bit by bit in whatever order is deemed best. Suffice it to say that when the narrator, Ernest Cunningham, claims that he is a reliable narrator, don’t believe him. Oh, he does describe the events truthfully, but he does so in the same way that every Watson has always done—with an eye to maximize the reader’s distraction.

And I should point out that it takes place in Australia, in a winter resort at the highest point on that continent during a snowstorm. And writer Stevenson knows his whodunit history very well. He even reprints Ronald Knox’s 10 Commandments (though he glosses over number five), and makes frequent mention of Christie along the way. He even makes a reference to Hitchcock’s MacGuffins.

By the way Benjamin Stevenson’s day job, or perhaps it’s his night job, is a stand-up comedian, and the whole novel almost reads like it could be a stand-up comedian’s routine with all its digressions.

I’ve read that HBO has bought the rights and will be producing a TV version in the near future, and Stevenson has already published a sequel: Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect.

Oh yes, everyone in Ernest Cunningham’s family family did kill someone. Provided one uses a rather expansive definition of “kill”.

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