Q&A: Benjamin Stevenson, Author of Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Briefly tell us about your book.

Six crime writers are invited to a writers’ festival on the luxurious train that crosses the Australian desert: the Ghan. When one of them is murdered, the remaining authors put their skills in researching and writing about murders to the test to see if they can solve one in real life. Do crime authors have the skills to solve a real-life murder? Or commit one?

What inspired the idea behind this book?

I wanted to play around with the behind-the-scenes of book publishing, and take something fun (a writers’ festival) to its extreme. I knew that having crime authors as my characters would allow me to play around with the fun question at the core of this book: how do you find a killer when all the suspects know how to get away with murder?

What are you hoping the reader will take away from reading your book?

3 x gasps, 10 x laughs, 5 x snickers, 1 x jaw drop (not necessarily in that order).

What was the most challenging part of writing this book?

Plotting a mystery is always challenging, but this book had a large cast of suspects to juggle, as well as multiple codes, word puzzles, and anagrams – so keeping everything in the air towards what is hopefully a fun reveal of the solution was challenging!

If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring writers, what would it be?

Read, read, read. That’s common advice. But I’ll add that you should read both what you like (to aspire to) and what you don’t like (to think about why you don’t like it and how you’d do it better).

Buy a copy of Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect here.

Meet the Author

Benjamin Stevenson is an award-winning stand-up comedian and author. His first novel, Greenlight, was shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut Crime Fiction, and his second novel, Either Side of Midnight, was shortlisted for the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Original Paperback.

Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, his third novel, was a huge bestseller and has so far been sold in twenty-seven territories around the world. It will soon be adapted into a major HBO TV series. It was shortlisted for the Dymocks Book of the Year 2022, ABIA General Fiction Book of the Year 2023 and BookPeople’s Fiction Book of the Year 2023, as well as being named as one of The Sunday Times‘s best crime novels of 2022.

His new novel, Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect, was released in October.