Sleuth locked in a safe makes for fun, familiar fodder

When does a really good gimmick become too fatigued to merit extension?

Already-prolific Australian author and comic Benjamin Stevenson is on a determined pursuit, it seems, to uncover the answer to this question, having churned out more than 1,200 pages in his suspect little quest.

First was 2022’s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, a delightful meta-mystery romp that introduced us to lovable, flawed, goofy but brilliant Ernest Cunningham, full-time deliberate author and some-time accidental “detective.” Ern and his secretive family are on winter vacation. They’ve all done terrible things. Worse, seemingly inexplicably (but actually explicable), things keep happening to them.

The very busy sequel, Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect, followed fast and furious in 2023, announcing that a series (or gimmick) was perhaps indeed afoot. Train is functionally a moving locked-room mystery, here a mobile chamber full of — wait for it — mystery writers. You can guess: it is deeply, playfully mystery-meta once again. It is also breathlessly action-packed — downright draining, to be honest. Are we tired yet?

Just beating out the end of 2024, Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret arrived suitably seasonally, much less bulky than its forebears but no less sparkling.

Arranged imaginatively as a kind of literary advent calendar, Christmas tasted as a delightful Stevenson sorbet, distracting us into forgetting some of the possibly taxing patterns of Family and Train.

Just nicely into 2026, Everyone in This Bank Is a Thief nonetheless resumes not just the heft but many of the specific tropes of the initial novels, forcing us to wonder whither all this is going.

The title typically declares near all.

The formula seems to be: standard story locale + habitual activity germane to that locale + ironic culpability.

We’ve had a ski resort (Family), we’ve had a train (Train), we’ve had a magic show (Christmas) and now we have a bank. What’s in the queue? Everyone in This Church Has Been Excommunicated? (Too snooty.) Everyone on This Campus Is Academically Dishonest? (Too cumbersome.)

In Bank, adorable Ern finds himself once again at the intersection of his two (well, three) loves: chronicling a story, solving a mystery and romancing his fiancée, Juliet. She’s a little bit like these books: cynical but charming, striking but abiding.

Ern here is in (of course) a bank, rather in middle-of-nowhere Australia. But he’s not just trapped in a bank: no, he’s locked in a safe in said bank. Not a roomy vault. A cramped safe.

He’s therefore running out of several things, even as he smugly informs us, from the very opening pages, that he’s got this complex, multi-perp crime-fest already figured out. But he’s in a frightful spot, running out of time, air and ink.

Conscious, as always, of the canon of “rules” of mystery writing (the supernatural is verboten! Only one secret passage allowed! No snarky detective who turns out to be the dastardly culprit!), Ern sets out to explain, presumably with his final breaths, what has gone down in the bank in the last 24 hours.

There’s not a lot of death in this one. In fact, there’s hardly any violence at all. (Although there is, alarmingly, a reprise of a gross Stevenson favourite: spontaneous bodily combustion.)

Rather than about murder, Bank is about heists by thieves (not burglars) — no fewer than 10 heists, all coalescing in those 24 crazy hours at this lone bank.

There’s a pretty sizable cast of characters, enough that reader notes might need be taken: an unknowingly fetching receptionist; a naïve, smitten security guard; a peripheral but misplaced teller; two bank-owning brothers who are overtly and aptly compared to Statler and Waldorf; a mute priest with an iPad; a video-game obsessed teen with an attitude; a sickly granddaughter with a too-gruff-to-be true (and too-tattooed to be guilty) grandma; a pushy, chatty TV producer; and an off-site actor who is in dire straits because he is too good at playing his character. Whom is he playing? Why, Ern of course.

Meta. Much meta.

Have no fear: Bank wanders seemingly lawlessly, but does not make the reader’s brain spin into a state of physical pain. The roamings are instead, in the end, entirely mappable.

It is, however, a lot to take. Its untiring cleverness and resolute self-awareness might wear thin, teetering right on the cusp of tormenting its engaged but haggard reader.

Ern is sufficiently charming and wily. Juliet has him sufficiently in thrall and check. The casts are sufficiently motley and amusing. Stevenson has sufficient chops and chuckles.

And the titles write themselves.

Laurence Broadhurst teaches English and religion at St. Paul’s High School in Winnipeg.