Ernest Cunningham #3
This amuse-bouche of a Christmas read features intrepid detective Ernest Cunningham. In the first book, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, murders piled up at a family reunion; in book two, Everyone on This Train is a Suspect, Ernest is on a train trip through Australia featuring mystery authors, when – you guessed it – bodies pile up. In the Christmas version Ernest is summoned by his ex who is sitting in jail, covered in blood, accused of killing her partner.
All of these books are clever in the Golden Age tradition, on steroids. They aren’t so much tongue in cheek, as Stevenson obviously loves the genre, but they are pretty funny, and as Stevenson himself is a stand up comedian, that only seems right. He also adheres quite rigidly to the rules of detective fiction laid out by the Detection Club back in the 20’s, and in this version, he has rules for Christmas mysteries as well.
Ernest takes off without quite telling his fiancée where he’s going, arrives to find Erin a complete wreck, and begins to delve into the crime, at her request. Erin’s partner was the head of a foundation that sponsored addicts through rehab and then tries, with much success, to give them a new life through theater. This particular theater is in the natural beauty spot of Katoomba, Australia, and the reason Ernest has given to his fiancée is that he’s seeing a headliner magician at the theatre who his uncle has booked for their wedding. Technically, true.
Ernest slips right in backstage, invited by the dead man’s business partner to see what he can discover, and everyone in the backstage world is pretty forthcoming. The book is structured like an advent calendar – each chapter and its clue are like one of the little doors. The clues are certainly there to solve the crime, but this is a very cleverly constructed book and while the clues may indeed be there, they are pretty tricky.
In golden age style, the puzzle in the main thing, but Stevenson also has a gift for laying down characters on a page in a few brief strokes, and it’s the characters that make the story stick (though the fiendishly clever solution might stick as well). It’s Christmassy mostly in that it’s set a few days before Christmas and the deadline of the 24th gives the story a ticking clock type structure. This was a really fun read, and even if you are good at figuring out endings, I challenge any reader to figure out just what happened here. — Robin Agnew