Benjamin Stevenson’s meta detective Ernest Cunningham is back for a short holiday special – Everyone This Christmas Has A Secret. Much like the very popular preceding two books in this series – Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone and Everyone on This Train is a Suspect – this is a down-the-line golden-age style murder mystery in which the author/narrator “plays fair” with the readers so that they can play along and possibly work things out for themselves. This means (again) a lot of very deliberate reminders that somehow Cunningham’s real world life seems to conform with detective story rules. Although in this case there are seven more rules (given at the end) which are the rules for holiday specials.
The book opens on Cunningham secretly heading to the Blue Mountains where his ex-wife has been accused of murdering her partner Lyle Pearce. Pearce, the founder of a charity that helps rehabilitate drug addicts, was found stabbed and Cunnigham’s ex-wife Erin was found covered in blood although she cannot remember anything. To get the story into the holiday spirit, Pearce had scrawled the word Christmas in blood on the floor beside him. But the show must go on, and the fund raiser magic show that Pearce had organised is still going ahead, and it turns out most of the people involved in the show and its production had a reason for wanting Pearce dead. And that’s before the second (mid-point) impossible murder.
Reader’s patience with Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret will depend on their capacity to handle Cunnigham’s arch, winking narration. That, and the contrived murders which themselves hark back to simpler times and the even more contrived revelation section set on the Blue Mountains cable car purely for dramatic purposes. Which is not to say that this book is without its pleasures. Once you strip away the bells and whistles, Stevenson still delivers a pacey mystery full of possible suspects and red herrings. And the embellishments and meta commentary on the rules of detective fiction, do set this series apart from the classic, or even more recent, whodunnits.
But best of all Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret is short. Stevenson knows that what readers want is a quick, engaging read that they can be done with in a day or two. And as such he does not outstay his welcome.
Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret by Benjamin Stevenson
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