A Waterstones Evening With Benjamin Stevenson PT 1

Benjamin Stevenson is one of the hottest writers around. An award winning stand up comedian as well as an author, his last book was the international bestseller ‘Everyone in my family has killed someone‘, and now he is back with a loving tribute to the golden age of crime, ‘Everyone on this train is a suspect’.

Last Thursday Benjamin made an appearance at Waterstones Birmingham to talk all about his new book.

Here are some snippets from that chat.

What is ‘Everyone on this train is a suspect’ about?

It’s about a writer’s festival, 6 writers on a luxury train (The Ghan) which is a bit like the Orient Express. One writer dies and the remaining 5 should be able to solve the crime, but are also able to commit the crime. My detective is Ernest Cunningham from ‘Everyone in my family has killed someone’, and the other crime writers are very knowledgeable about the genre. For instance, there’s a comment ‘Maybe everyone did it’ – response ‘it’s been done…‘

Why a train?

I love finding a place to lock a group of people and seeing where it goes. The train, The Ghan is the Australian luxury train and I loved the idea of setting a murder mystery there, but I sat on the idea for months thinking it must have been done, but it hadn’t – I think Agatha Christie had intimidated everyone else. But then realised it needed to be done before anyone else did it!

About the trainN

The Ghan stops everywhere, travelling through the most beautiful scenery. I was able to do the journey for ‘research purposes’. I needed to do this because people who love trains, really love trains, so I had to get it right. For instance, this is a sort of ‘locked room mystery’ but the doors on the Ghan have no locks on them, I was fascinated by this, so asked the staff which doors did lock and found the meat freezer had a lock on it. I realised I should’ve mentioned I was writing a novel before I asked that question,

When I did reveal this, the staff were really excited. They told me about cabin M11, as a place they would store a body, as it was the cabin that had been designated as somewhere a body would be placed if someone died on board the train. Not in case of a murder, but as the Ghan has lots of elderly passengers so this could naturally happen.

Why Choose Writers?

Well, who’s good at killing people? My laptop was off and I saw my reflection – I’m good at killing people!

Inspirations

No-one is based on a real person, but every character does need a motive for murder in order to be a suspect. I do have to keep saying it’s not based on anyone – for instance, I sent it to my agent ‘It’s not about you’, then to my publisher ‘It’s not about you..’.

But, although it’s not about any specific person, it does include things that have happened to me, things that I have overheard.

I was a stand up comedian for 15 years, so I do add humour to the story. BUT, there is a fine line between comedy and murder and I don’t want the book to spill over into farce. So this is more ‘golden age’ than farce and I try to follow ‘the rules.’ So, the plot is never allowed to be funny. The characters can be funny, the reactions can be funny, but not the plot.

Nobody can die in my books by slipping on a banana skin.

The characters

Each of the crime writers has to add their skills to the mix. They are experts because they know how a murder should work, but wouldn’t know the time of death etc.

My favourite literary writer is Wolfgang. I loved writing about him, didn’t feel bad about making him funny.

One theme of my book is ‘what do we leave behind through writing?’  A book doesn’t exist until it is read. I think Ernest is more ‘me’ than any of the other writers.

My view on Murder Mysteries

I view murder mysteries as fun and games and give you enough clues to solve the mystery for yourself. But even though I tell you how to solve it, I still think you won’t solve it.

I want 10% of people to solve this book.

Look out for part 2 of the Waterstones chat later this week.

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