Running out of steam

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This article was published 10/02/2024 (964 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you don’t yet know his name, you will soon. And it’ll be worth knowing.

That’s clearly the plan.

This is Benjamin Stevenson’s fourth novel. The Australian stand-up comic and burgeoning mystery novelist is on quite a roll.

His debut novel Greenlight — a kind of old-school legal/crime drama following a nosy, immodest, conflicted professional television producer/amateur detective, Jack Quick — dropped in 2019. Its sequel, Either Side of Midnight, arrived barely two years later. The third and fourth novels, with a new protagonist — clumsier but more charming — hastened afterwards, making Stevenson author of four novels in scarcely six years. There’s no being blasé about that torrid writing pace.

Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect comes hot on the heels of the smash that was 2022’s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone. The success of the former was sufficiently grand (and well-warranted) to land an upcoming series on HBO.

Train is loudly a sequel, almost aggressively twinned with its partner. Both Family and Train have more taglines than titles. Both star Ernest (“Ern”) Cunningham, our jaunty, breezy but pushy hero “detective” and nascent writer. Both assemble an almost obscenely complex supporting cast. And both are desperately “meta” — one might think that act is tired, generally speaking, but one would think a cheeky author gets one free pass on that score, not the here-demanded two.

Stevenson starts ruminating on the craft of writing mid-writing and ceaselessly bosses his reader around from the title of Train right through to its closing Author’s Note — a faux-as-faux-can-be apology. The smug tactic is not nearly as even-handed nor as artful as it was in Family, where it was quite amusing and, one had to begrudgingly admit, awfully charming. Here, it is more a fatigued and fatiguing habit, unbalanced to the point both of teetering and, worse, of outright annoying.

Family delightfully toyed with its reader, forcing them to dart not just suitably backwards but inappropriately forwards within the physical book. It made the reader laugh for the gleeful frustration born of the absurd jam they found themselves plopped into. It even concluded with what amounted to a welcome arrow, pointing directly back to its beginning.

Train tries — really tries — to pull the same set of tricks, but somewhere along the line runs out of steam, so to speak.

Ern is back, quite bushed from the wacky rigmarole of the snowy-mountain-retreat homicidal bonanza that was Family. He’s still not really a detective and still only really learning how to be an author. He’s very self-aware and more than willing to remind you of that; it is the trait he incessantly offers as the enchanting twinkle in his otherwise pedestrian set of character features.

Ern now has a bit of writing cred thanks to the “success” of the book he wrote about the winter warzone weekend that was Family. He had gone to that resort to write fiction, but had stumbled into a blizzard of marketable fact and so found himself author of not a novel, but of a true-crime jackpot.

(Ern Cunningham is, of course, Ben Stevenson, but he also isn’t. Ern is a fictional writer writing non-fiction. Ben is a non-fictional writer writing fiction. You get the idea — and if you don’t, don’t worry about it.)

Those book bona fides, it seems (key word), bought Ern invited passage on a kind of Mystery-Writers Extravaganza Festival on board the Outback’s equivalent of the Orient Express: the Ghan, an entirely touristy train that slashes the 3,000-kilometre belly of Australia, from northern stem to southern stern — Darwin, through Alice Springs, to Adelaide.

Would that it were so simple. (It ain’t.)

Several celebrated, soon-to-be-celebrated and wannabe-celebrated writers are aboard, along with a weary troupe of editors and agents as well as a gaggle of rabid fans blowing life savings for the presumed experience of a lifetime.

The roster of featured writers is not pithy, nor are their backstories: we have Ern repping true crime, Lisa the shooting-star blockbuster wonder, “SF” the requisite “psychological” tormentor, Alan the prolific “forensic pathologist,” Wolfgang the literary superstar and our elderly, drunken, grumpy, handsy lead, Henry McTavish, the “globally bestselling” pooh-bah who anchors the cast.

The first death takes far too many kilometres and pages to appear but, that seal broken, the gait picks up. The ever-moving locked house that is the train offers all sorts of compact “rooms” and “corridors” for boozy conversation, mean-spirited confrontation, involuntary exposition and unwelcome history upheaval as it herks and jerks along the interminable rail line.

Soon enough (finally?) we have two bodies, a surfeit of suspects, a deficit of weaponry and a wild bevy of theories — and, more intrusively, theorists.

It’s all too complicated to be much fun.

Whereas in Family Stevenson had us gleefully flipping back to its overture of itemized historical rules of mystery writing so we might invigilate fidelity to them, in Train he has us woefully, sleepily scrambling back to the dramatis personae up front, merely to remind ourselves of who is who and why that might matter.

In a very odd way, Train ends up as the sequel that reads instead as a very rough ancestor draft for Family, its actual progenitor. Things are that out of sorts.

There will certainly be more of Ern (and his dear, fabulous love, Juliette, the most tantalizing and least developed character in both novels). If Ern/Ben gives it a bit more Family and a bit less Train, all will be fine, and the plan will indeed come together.

Laurence Broadhurst teaches English and Religion at St. Paul’s High School in Winnipeg. He would eagerly teach Family, but not Train.