Everyone on This Train is a Suspect (Ernest Cunningham, #2)

by Benjamin Stevenson

A sequel is an admission that you’ve been reduced to imitating yourself. Don Marquis

In any case, asking a writer how their book’s coming along is like spotting lipstick on their collar. There’s really no point asking: no one ever answers truthfully.

Most people who read my first book are surprised we’re dating. “I was so sure she was the killer!” they say. I think she’s quite proud of that.

She’s a stickler for rules: her star sign may as well be School Principal.

My therapist gave me a name for it: survivor’s guilt. You don’t really see it that much in Golden Age mystery novels. The protagonists finish one book and then live in stasis before it all just starts again on page one of the next. There’s no cumulative impact of the sheer volume of death and violence they see; every crime doesn’t embed in their psyche, eat away at them at night. For all my wishes to be like those famous fictional detectives, I am haunted in a way they aren’t, asleep between when their authors pick up a pen. Miss Marple doesn’t have nightmares, is what I’m trying to say.

“Hell, like you say, everyone’s got a motive. Maybe everyone did it.” “I think that’s been done before.” “Nothing beats a classic.” She closed the door behind her.

“Can everyone just shut up for one—” Royce took a breath. “This isn’t how it goes. Okay? I go around the room, I deconstruct your alibis and then I reveal the killer. There’s not normally this much heckling in a denouement.” “De-noo-moh,” Wolfgang and I said in unison.

“Out. Out. Out!” Aaron ushered us into the corridor and shut the door. “I can’t believe you’re making me say this, but could you not play games around a dead body?”

Simone was marking up a contract. She scanned my bloodied, dirt-caked self and then patted me on the shoulder and said, “Perilous third act, I see.”

“Haven’t you heard?” I said. “This is a writers’ festival. We’ve actually got one last speaking event. I’m announcing my new book. It’s called Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect.” Simone gave a little fairy clap of excitement.

Hatch cleared his throat. “Does it usually take this long?” All the crime writers in the room said simultaneously: “Yes.”

If a reader wishes to consider them a red herring purely based on the fact that they exist and haven’t done anything to contribute to the plot, that’s on them for reading too many books with unfair twists. I said at the start it wasn’t a butler-dunnit.

But legacy isn’t a stamp left by the people with ink. It’s not about leaving your fingerprints, it’s about having fingerprints left on you.