Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect is a type of fiction referred to as metafiction. In Western literature, metafiction is most strongly associated with contemporary writing, especially Postmodern fiction and drama, but its roots go back to early works such as Chaucer’s 1387 work, The Canterbury Tales. Metafiction can take many forms, but at its core, it self-consciously examines the act of writing itself. For this reason, it’s sometimes referred to as “self-reflexive” or “self-referential,” meaning that it examines its own artificial nature. The goals of metafiction can vary: It might be intended to parody another work or a genre, to satirize some aspect of society or art itself, or to ask critical questions about the nature of truth and language.

Metafiction often breaks the “fourth wall,” explicitly drawing its audience’s attention to its status as a created work through techniques like allowing the author to appear and discuss their writing process, incorporating characters who know they’re fictional, or openly questioning its own truthfulness. Metafiction can also be more subtle, discussing topics like genre, other literary works, and the truthfulness of language without undermining the story’s pretense of reality. Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect is a hybrid of these two approaches. It uses explicit metafictional techniques such as discussing its own creation as a text, directly addressing readers, and commenting on genre conventions. However, the novel’s premise is that its protagonist and narrator, Ernest “Ernie” Cunningham, is a crime writer traveling with other mystery and crime writers when a murder occurs—and, furthermore, that the text Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect is the “true” story of these events as written by Ernie rather than by Benjamin Stevenson. Thus, the story incorporates metafictional elements while still playfully insisting upon its own status as “truth.”

Among the topics that Stevenson explores via metafiction is genre convention. Specifically, he’s interested in the traditions of the golden age of mystery and the rules for the genre put forth by the “Detection Club,” a group of writers that included such greats as Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterton, and Dorothy Sayers. Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect is in many ways a pastiche of Christie’s classic novel Murder on the Orient Express, paying tribute to one of the genre’s greatest novels while artfully examining some of the genre’s conventions. One of the Detection Club’s members, Ronald Knox, proposed a “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” to which Ernie, the narrator of Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect, directly refers. S. S. Van Dine proposed a similar set of genre rules in an essay called “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” Part of the book’s epigraph is drawn from this Van Dine essay, and Ernie explicitly refers to Van Dine in the narration. Since Ernie’s backstory involves an earlier career giving craft-related advice to mystery writers, he’s devoted to these genre rules, and many elements of the novel allude to the conventions of the golden-age mystery.

Stevenson offers a more modern take on this classic form of mystery by simultaneously promoting and undermining these conventions. Ernie assures readers that he’ll play fair, observing the rules of mystery by doing things like conveying all the information necessary to solve the mystery and consistently telling the truth at all times. Part of the fun of reading Stevenson’s work, however, is knowing that words can be “true” and misleading at the same time and that the rules can be used to confuse as well as clarify. In true metafictional fashion, this artful blurring of the boundary between truth and deception raises critical questions about the nature of both language and truth.