As an avid reader of detective fiction, and a great admirer of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey novels, I knew fairly early on in the process of editing this issue that I wanted to include a piece about modern detective fiction. The market is absolutely saturated with content today, and in my experience, precious little measures up to the standards set by Sayers and her “Golden Age of detective fiction” contemporaries. A review of a recent book seemed appropriate, especially if I could find one that is in some way continuing the great detective fiction tradition began by Sayers and her colleagues. I did find one (and it is even Christmas-themed for our advent issue!), and you may read my review of it shortly. But then I found a book that very much did not, and how it went wrong was, I think, fascinating.

I am not sure exactly why I, and apparently the rest of the world, love mysteries as much as I do. I think Anthony Horowitz’s book-editor-turned-detective Susan Ryeland touches close to the reason when she muses,

Whodunnits are all about truth: nothing more, nothing less. In a world full of uncertainties, is it not inherently satisfying to come to the last page with every i dotted and every t crossed? The stories mimic our experience in the world. We are surrounded by tensions and ambiguities, which we spend half our life trying to resolve, and we’ll probably be on our own deathbed when we reach that moment when everything makes sense. Just about every whodunnit provides that pleasure. It is the reason for their existence.1

Whodunnits are all about truth. Quite. But, to quote another famous investigator (of sorts), “What is truth?” 2

I recently picked up a novel from the mystery section of my local bookstore — I will call it The Red Book. I followed along as the protagonist-narrator, whom I will call Jane, happens upon a murder victim, becomes a — rather unlikely — suspect, and works to entrap the villain with a rag-tag band of heroes. I should have seen the ending twist coming, given the liberal use of the phrase “my truth” throughout the book.

Ever since the first chapter, Jane had known, and been suppressing, the true identity of the murderer. This was carefully hidden from the reader until the very end. Jane’s “truth” turned out to be an absolute falsehood. The man who was the murderer in “her truth” may have deserved punishment for his many evil deeds, but the murder in The Red Book was not one of them. Rather than engaging in a quest for truth with the protagonist, I had been led on a wild-goose chase in order to enact vigilante justice (or perhaps, more properly named, vengeance) on a patsy who had personally wounded (not insignificantly) Jane and her friends while the killer went free.

As a work of fiction, I won’t deny that it has a certain appeal. Jane turns the tables, turning from victim to powerful agent, and enacting revenge on her oppressor. There is something darkly satisfying in that — but as a search for truth, I found it utterly unsatisfying. I felt a bit betrayed by Jane, who had known the truth the whole time, but decided to promote an alternate “truth” instead. And in the end, the murderer not only went free, but benefited by the murder. The criminal justice system in The Red Book was shown to be fallible, and so Jane circumvents the system to make her own justice based on her own truth — but a system of personal “truths” and vigilante justice would certainly be flawed as well. I would predict it to be rather more flawed.

I think I was supposed to rejoice in the ending, that the heroine found her voice and spoke “her truth.” I could not rejoice. Justice had not been done, the truth had not been revealed, but both had actually been subverted. You have to have some faith in the justice system in order to have interest in bringing a criminal to justice; you have to believe in “the truth” in order to have interest in discovering it. I find it far less satisfying to discover “your truth” or even “my truth” than to uncover “The Truth.” And despite the many failings in human justice systems, without them, all we would have are vigilantes enacting their own agendas according to their own “truth.”

In a sense, The Red Book was about truth — about “my truth” — about the absolute chaos and meaninglessness that ensues when one buys into the notion that truth is a personal possession and not an absolute reality. In another, I would argue in a more real, sense, The Red Book was not about truth at all, and that is what was so utterly unsatisfying about it. Part of the fun of a whodunnit is trying to solve it before the big reveal, trying to discover the truth yourself — an impossible feat when the “truth” is actively suppressed in favor of an ephemeral “my truth” that has no relation whatever to “the truth.” Again, The Red Book was interesting and engaging, even if I fundamentally disagree with the worldview of the characters, but as a mystery, I found it to be disappointing largely because it did not play fair. I don’t think a book with the fundamental assumption that truth is relative ever could play fair. You have to believe in the truth in order to do so.

For me, no mystery parallels the “fair play” mystery for a truth-finding experience. In a “fair play” mystery, the author engages in a game or puzzle with the reader, where clues are set up so that the reader could potentially solve the mystery before the detective reveals the solution — it’s like a crossword puzzle with the answer in the back; you can fill in the solution yourself, if you are clever enough to decipher the clues. If you get stuck, you can just get to the end and find the answer provided there.

The authors of detective fiction during its “Golden Age” (think Agatha Christie, G.K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, and, the lady of the hour, Dorothy L. Sayers) allowed certain rules to guide their craft. The rules are summed up nicely in the membership oath of the Detection Club (members included all of the above): “Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?”3 Or as Benjamin Stevenson sums up nicely in the mouth of his detective, Ernest Cunningham, “it boils down to this: the Golden Rule of the Golden Age is play fair.”4The rules ensure that the reader has a fighting chance of solving the mystery along with the literary detective. The rules also demand a certain amount of work from the writer to create an interesting story and complex but solvable puzzle within the bounds of the rules. I have, incidentally, found very few mysteries written today that meet the standards of the Golden Age writers — but I suppose that is why that age of detective fiction is so golden.

Playing fair requires a detective, and narrator, who are reliable — someone you can trust to tell you the truth (incidentally, not the narrator of The Red Book.) On the other hand, the author is creating a puzzle, so he or she cannot just come out and say exactly what is going on; it’s a mystery, after all, so some things need to be concealed or even misleading, like crossword puzzle clues. So, you want a detective and narrator who is earnest and honest, but who is also clever . . . or, shall we say, cunning.

A Review of Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret

And that brings us to Ernest Cunningham. I knew I loved Ernest from the very first page of his first book. Honestly, it’s pretty easy to earn my affections — all you need to do is mention Chesterton. Just ask my husband. But I could also tell that I would like Ernest as a detective because he was going to play fair. Here, finally, (I thought) is a detective in the vein of the Golden Age detectives. He says so on page one of Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone:

Everyone in my family has killed someone . . .

I’m not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth, and when I was faced with writing this down, difficult as it is with one hand, I realized that telling the truth was the only way to do it. It sounds obvious, but modern mystery novels forget that sometimes. They’ve become more about the tricks the author can deploy: what’s up their sleeve instead of what’s in their hand. Honesty is what sets apart what we call “Golden Age” mysteries: the Christies, the Chestertons . . . I won’t bore you with the details here but it boils down to this: the Golden Rule of the Golden Age is play fair.5

This is a far cry from Jane in The Red Book, where the author completely relied on the big truth twist at the end for intrigue. This is exactly the kind of mystery that I love.

Ernest Cunningham is an expert on Golden Age detective fiction who finds himself inexplicably thrust, time and again, into murder mysteries that unravel perfectly — and humorously — according to the “fair-play” rules. Stevenson’s first two Ernest adventures (Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone and Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect) delighted and surprised me with their cleverness, humor, and fair-play. In them, Stevenson sets up engaging puzzles that are a pleasure to solve, all seen through the eyes of the very human and amusing Ernest Cunningham and set in beautiful Australia. Stevenson remains hilariously steadfast in following the fair-play rules — hilarious, because at times he squeaks by on technicalities and word play, which he good-humoredly owns up to.

The most recent Ernest book, Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret: A Festive Mystery, is not exactly the third installment of Ernest’s adventures. Following the rules of a “Christmas Special,” as well as the Golden Age rules for Detective Fiction, Ernest goes on a holiday-themed side-quest between official installments of the series. It’s a shorter volume, clocking in at just under 170 pages, but, as they say, good things come in little packages. Everyone This Christmas is a mystery-lover’s advent calendar of clues and suspects, neatly wrapped up in Christmas-theme paper. And that’s not just metaphor: it is actually laid out as an advent calendar, with a clue or suspect in each of its first 24 chapters and the solution in chapter 25 (followed by a 26th chapter and epilogue in order to tie up loose ends.) As Ernest says in the prologue, “If you start on December first and take a chapter a day, you’ll have it all solved by Christmas Eve.”6 I found the mystery to be a worthy puzzle. The advent calendar format might make it seem too easy for mystery experts who are much better than me at solving mysteries, but it was just the right speed for me to almost solve the whole thing as Ernest does.

With the setting, Stevenson invites the reader into a Christmas in the Blue Mountains near Katoomba for a holiday in the blazing heat. The book’s atmosphere feels, like the other two Ernest books, very Australian, which is (at least to an American like me) exotic and intriguing. Stevenson does a good job of bringing the character of the landscape into his stories, so that the very Australian-ness of the setting is not just set dressing, but rather actually impacts the plot. The same goes for the Christmas-ness of the story. It isn’t just thrown into things so that they can market it as a Christmas book. Christmas (the word and the holiday) is actually integral to the mystery.

The story centers on the Pearse Foundation, a charity committed to rehabilitating addicts through engagement in theatre. “Passion creates change” is the foundation’s motto, and the staunch belief of the charity’s founder — and our murder victim — Lyle Pearse. Events unfold during a Christmastime fundraiser featuring a performance by world-famous magician Rylan Blaze. The event is facilitated by a number of graduates from Pearse’s program and employees of the Foundation. As Ernest investigates, he exposes rifts in the Foundation, revealing a darker side to charitable organizations. Greed and corruption have infiltrated the organization, showing that even the noblest endeavors and best intentions to help people may actually, in the end, lead to further suffering. Many in the book are beginning to question the very foundations, so to speak, of the Pearse Foundation: Does passion create change? Can people even really change at all? And who does a Benefit Performance actually benefit?

These are apt, however uncomfortable, questions to raise around Christmastime, where charitable giving is perhaps most highly encouraged and practiced. Whether charitable foundations do good despite the inevitable unintended consequences, or are hopelessly harmful despite intending good is a question left unanswered. It is maybe a bit dark for a Christmas story. Should you make that annual Christmas donation, even if your generosity is misapplied by greedy executives, or if those impacted by your generosity are victims of unintended consequences? Stevenson does not say, but by bringing up the subject, he invites you to think about it, and lean into the complicated twists and turns of charitable giving. It’s a mystery you have to solve yourself.

Ernest plays fair as he always does — which is to say, only mostly. That’s the thing about Ernest Cunningham, and it’s all in his name: he’s earnest and truthful, but he’s also cunning. He exposes the truth, and probably more truth than you bargained for, uncovering all sorts of sins in his investigation (including his own), but he does it with his own humorous, tongue-in-cheek flair. He gets away with telling you the truth in a way that could mislead you if you don’t stay on your toes. In this way, he can dole out what would usually be called ‘spoilers’ so that you are yet none the wiser to upcoming events.

The truth about detective fiction is that spoilers are a bit of a myth. Not that a mystery can’t be spoiled — it most certainly can. What I mean is, knowing what happens or who does it does not necessarily spoil a good mystery. We may, as readers, get overly excited about certain details that do not actually impact the enjoyment of solving the mystery, and those details may even include the answer to the perennial question, Whodunnit? Sayers herself said it well: “Personally, I feel that it is only when the identity of the murderer is obvious that the reader can really concentrate on the question (much the most interesting) How did he do it?”7 Ernest Cunningham does not reveal the murderer right away, as Sayers did in Strong Poison, but he does play fast and loose with some of the details. At first glance, the reader might feel as though something has been ‘spoiled’, but that is not so. Through humor and wordplay, Stevenson has found a way to ‘play fair’ that’s probably more play than it is completely fair — it’s a teasing which makes for a delightful mystery experience, if you appreciate both humor and murder.

And isn’t the mystery genre a bit like comedy anyway? Both rely on unexpected twists and connections, hidden meanings suddenly revealed, things seeming to be one thing and turning out to be completely different. Both draw attention to foibles and flaws in people, in society, albeit comedy asks you to laugh at the incongruities, while mystery usually takes a more serious approach. Stevenson manages to balance both his comedic elements and the graveness (forgive the pun) of murder in a way that feels natural and honest — not overly serious, but not as a complete farce.

This balance of comedy and gravity is possible, I believe, largely because Ernest is so human. He is flawed. He is compassionate. He makes mistakes and makes amends. He follows hunches that don’t pan out (at least not at all how he expects). In my experience, this is an unusual type of detective. He is not morally superior, he is no genius or prodigy — he just follows ‘the rules’, albeit imperfectly, and this makes him more relatable than many other detectives I could name.

Overall, I found Everyone This Christmas to be short, but satisfying. I savored the heat of an Australian Christmas, laughed out loud at Stevenson’s verbal antics, and solved the mystery in part, while still managing to be pleasantly surprised by the dénouement. If you love a good fair-play mystery, as I do, Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret (and the other Ernest books) are definitely worth a read.

Notes:

1 Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders (2016; repr., New York: Harper Perennial, 2018), 183.

2 Pontius Pilate, John 18:38 (ESV).

3 Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (2022; repr., New York: Mariner, 2024), first epigraph. Stevenson also includes Ronald Knox’s “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction” in the second epigraph, reproduced by permission of United Agents LLP on behalf of Lady Magdalen Howard (they appear below for the reader’s benefit as they do in Stevenson’s book, including his redaction of rule 5):

  1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
  2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
  3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
  4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
  5. Author’s note: Culturally outdated historical wording redacted.
  6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
  7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.
  8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
  9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
  10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

4 Stevenson, Everyone in My Family, 1.

5 Ibid.

6 Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret(New York: Mariner, 2024), x.

7 Dorothy L. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist, ed. Barbara Reynolds (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), 312.