Murder most fun

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This article was published 25/03/2023 (1123 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This book makes you do things.

It takes charge of your reading. It beckons you to turn the page quickly just as often as it commands you to scurry backward and leap forward. It is all so beautifully exhausting.

Australian stand-up comedian Benjamin Stevenson delivers here his third novel, all mysteries. His first, Greenlight (2019), and his second, Either Side of Midnight (2021), were both shortlisted for crime/thriller awards. All three are notable for their humour, their elegance, their intricacy and their tormenting flair.

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone aggressively trots out two enticing items by way of preamble. First, the 1930 “Membership Oath” of the historical but secret “Detection Club,” a group of celebrated early-20th-century British mystery writers who were attempting to establish a reputable canon of detective-fiction rules. Second, the group’s actual decalogue, including #2 (“All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course”), #3 (“Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”) and, crucially, #7 (“The detective must not himself commit the crime”). There is literally a dotted diagonal line and an imperative “Fold here” in the top right of that cornerstone page, all but ordering the reader to vandalize the novel they are about to begin.

Ernest Cunningham, our insufferably snarky first-person narrator and wannabe detective, then seizes control of the book and starts pushing his reader around. This delightfully over-confident storytelling bully, a two-bit writer by profession, has the gleeful gall to enumerate for us — on page 2, no less — the precise page numbers of the coming roster of murders that he will “detect” for us. And there are quite a few of them, as the book’s title announces.

If one were able to resist dog-earing that epigraphical list of rules, page 2 will not go unaltered. “Ern” defies his reader to proceed without marking that prophetic page. Every single reader of this book will likely submit.

The mystery itself rolls out as pretty standard one-site, family-gathering, murder-done-soon-and-others-loom fare. The setting is a rather luxurious ski resort (yes, a ski chalet in Australia). This is not quite the level of opulence of The White Lotus nor of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, but it has the same feel: over-privileged folk with too much time, too much money and too many secrets on their hands.

There is an early opening corpse, an outsider, appearing out-of-the-blue-and-into-the-white overnight; a bumbling cop showing up both too quickly and too slowly; an unending barrage of horrific verbal abuse amongst blood relatives and in-laws; the possibility of a fabled, monikered serial killer in their midst; some (in)convenient weather; a sequence of probably consequent homicides; more weird weather; a wayward coffin; a snow-crawler right out of The Shining; a stash of cash totalling an odd sum that must be reckoned; a bit of drinking; a bit more of drugs; vomiting; fainting; a spectacular crash through the ice; and a real estate deal gone south. And there is snow. Lots of snow. And fire. Lots of fire. Leaving ashes everywhere.

Toss in what seems an impossible-to-remember, meandering family-tree full of numbingly mundane names.

Now, make Ern an unreliable narrator.

More, make him probably complicit in the labyrinthine crime he waddles his amateurish way through.

And riddle him with an irrepressibly charming sense of humour and ridiculous panache.

All of that is at once desperately dizzying and utterly enchanting.

In short, Stevenson is unquestionably aware of the criticisms of his first two books: delightful, yes, but too complex, too bewildering and too challenging. We know he knows this because here he revels in it. He wears it as a badge of honour, spurring him on toward more confusing heights.

Throughout, Ern teases his reader, demanding that the reader’s right hand and its cloaking of the still-big-gap-to-the-end be constantly borne in mind. This can’t be the key reveal, he’ll say: there are too many pages remaining behind your right thumb!

But when that gap is finally fully uncloaked, all, of course, does work out and the title does hold true, and Ern’s boyish play does win the day. Even so, one can immediately feel Ern insisting that your left hand flip the book back to that dog-eared doorway to begin again.

At the moment, there are more than 200 holds on just 10 copies of this book in the Winnipeg Public Library. (Sadly, there are zero copies of Stevenson’s first two. Surely this will change soon.)

That’s a long queue. It might be best not to abide the wait: you will want to own the copy of Everyone in My Family that you read because you will be mangling it, you will be riddling it with sticky notes, you will be brutalizing its spine as you flip back and forth.

And then you will do it again.

Because this book makes you do things.

Laurence Broadhurst teaches English and Religion at St. Paul’s High School in Winnipeg. He cherishes books and despises defacing them. He is therefore angry at Benjamin Stevenson for what he made him do.