- Everyone in my family has killed someone, by Benjamin Stevenson. Penguin, $32.99.
The first thing to be said about this book is to explain the difference between the writer and the first-person narrator. The latter, the central character, is Ernie, the middle of three boys in the Cunningham family that were known in the Snowy Mountains area as "the Cunners". In this book, he is also a writer who places himself outside the action, referring to his "How-to-Guides" for writing detective stories. He tells us that in this story, he is adhering closely to Ronald Knox's Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction.
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In his role as narrator, Ernie is a member of a family well-known to the police. When his older brother Michael kills a former policeman, Ernie is the main witness for the prosecution, his evidence resulting in an apparently relaxed sentence of three years for Michael. As the story begins, that stretch in the Cooma Correctional Centre is just finishing and he is to join the family and in-laws for a get-together in a winter retreat above Jindabyne, high in the Snowy Mountains.
The remainder of the story is concerned with Ernie's attempts to work out what caused his brother to kill the former policeman. It turns out their father had killed that person's partner in a shoot-out that resulted in his own death also. Those events are revisited at different times in the story, more information being revealed each time. The former wives of the two Cunningham men appear in the story, as do their mother and her new husband. There are other characters, but mentioning them here would only add to confusion.
And confusion is the main reaction to the book. The story gets more and more complicated as the action proceeds and it requires no little endurance to persevere to the over-elaborate ending. The first half of the book is easy reading, with touches of humour and clever changes from narrator to writer.
In places, the author seems to violate his own How-to rules. "No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation," is one such. While he does not have poisons, he does introduce unusual ways of taking a life. Likewise the ban on "an unaccountable intuition" is broken more than once. But more than these is the convoluted mix of criminal events that take place over a period of time in the distant past and which are solved by the unusual skills of our hero. In a number of cases, this is done by recalling some apparently innocent comment made by one or other of the characters hundreds of pages earlier.
Even noting these criticisms, if the test of a book is whether you would want to read the author's next one, this reviewer will be in the queue.
