‘Everyone in my family has killed someone’ by Benjamin Stevenson

Notwithstanding my recent dalliance with Robert Galbraith, I am not a great fan of murder mystery fiction- as I have said many times before. But if someone’s going to take the mickey out of it while writing it, then count me in.

The book starts with the real-life Ronald Knox’s 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction from 1929, namely:

1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. No more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story. (although Stevenson omits this one because of its culturally outdated historical wording)
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.
8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

He then introduces his narrator, Ernest Cunningham, aficionado of crime novels, who proceeds to tell the reader the page numbers on which deaths will occur. He promises the truth, and “only one plot-hole you could drive a truck through”. For a genre in which the writer is the invisible puppet-master, Stevenson through his narrator Ernest Cunningham, is front and centre.

In best ‘big-house’ detective fiction tradition, he sets his novel in an Australian ski-resort, which provides the requisite isolated location and circumscribed number of protagonists. He devises a number of deaths through asphyxiation of fine cinder dust, some near misses, and even brings all the characters into the library to unveil the eventual murderer, which he does so clearly that even I understood it. The whole book is a spoof of the genre, and an extended exercise in metafiction, with frequent asides to the reader. I feel that this book is a bit of a one-off – this piss-take would be wearying carried onto other books – but I certainly enjoyed the ride far more than other detective stories with their cynical and inscrutable protagonists

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: the Little Library in Macleod Park

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle pick for July 2023.