Australian author Benjamin Stevenson drew on the golden age of mysteries for new novel

“I think it’s vital to a good murder mystery to challenge the reader,” author Benjamin Stevenson says. “You’re saying — come out and play," says author Benjamin Stevenson.

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A couple of years ago, Australian mystery writer Benjamin Stevenson plunked himself down in a storefront window so that passersby could watch him composing his latest book.

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“I’d decided to pressure myself into writing in a different way, so there I was in this bookstore window in Sydney with my laptop connected to this gigantic television,” he says. The TV screen allowed gawkers to see what he was actually writing when they paused to check things out.

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“I was very nervous about it at the start because I’m quite a slow writer, and I wanted this to be exciting for people walking past.” However, he managed to speed things up sufficiently to produce about 11,000 words during his week on display, and most of them remain in the early chapters of his new book, capriciously titled Everyone In The Bank Is A Thief. His final verdict on the experiment? “It was really fun.”

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Everyone In This Bank is a Thief
Benjamin Stevenson
HarperCollins

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Stevenson, who is also a popular standup comedian in his home country, infuses his intricately concocted puzzlers with a mischievous sense of humour — and that includes an affection for quirky monikers that make his books stand out on the shelf. So this new one comes after three other attention-getting titles — Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect, and Everyone This Christmas Has A Secret.

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With this new one, Everyone In This Bank Is A Thief, Stevenson decides to hook the reader with his opening lines. That’s when Ernest Cunningham, his dogged but engaging series detective, informs us that he’s trapped in a vault and waiting to die.

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Stevenson, who’s chatting with Postmedia in the midst of a whirlwind North American publicity tour, presents an intriguing contradiction. He’s very much a 21st century guy — and the comedy routines that he does with his identical twin brother have an enthusiastic following back home and reflect his own fascination with the foibles of contemporary life. But he also has this old-fashioned passion for classic mystery fiction — especially the Golden Age of the 1930s when writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Ellery Queen reigned supreme.

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“I’m trying to show that a good old-fashioned murder mystery can be really fun,” Stevenson says. He also believes that the form’s conventions can still work in the modern world. He thinks that too much contemporary crime fiction “is all about the trick you’re playing on the reader.” In contrast, the golden age was more about “welcoming readers to clues in the mystery and then seeing if they can be fooled.”

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Back in the 1930s, every Ellery Queen novel paused near the climax with a “challenge to the reader” which stated that it had provided all the clues necessary for fans to name the murderer. In the case of Everyone In This Bank Is A Thief, Stevenson tried something similar with the prepublication edition available to early readers and the book club brigade. By Chapter 40, they would have all the necessary clues, he told them in a special author’s note — and he even provided a WhatsApp number so they could send him their solutions.