Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone
Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone
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Benjamin Stevenson on Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
The book he couldn’t find on the shelfTwo years of Australian lockdowns had soured Stevenson on the crime fiction that surrounded him. He turned instead to the Golden Age writers he’d loved, and the question that followed sent him toward a completely different kind of book than his first two.
I was getting a bit sick of how grisly crime books were getting (during the lockdown here in Australia I found them all so dark) so I found myself reaching for Golden Age detective fiction: Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Ronald Knox. I wondered how these books would work in a modern setting.
The formal experiment at the book’s center grew from a friend’s odd habit: seeking out film spoilers in advance so he could watch without the anxiety of suspense. That quirk lodged in Stevenson’s mind and became a structural dare to himself, one he then framed in terms of the trend he wanted to push against.
Modern crime fiction has a slew of unreliable narrators lately, and I wanted to do the opposite. So for inspiration, I set myself the challenge: can I spoil the entire novel on the first page and still surprise the reader? I hope I’ve done that.
The pandemic dissolved whatever caution he might normally have brought to a third novel. With no certainty about what publishing would look like when the world reopened, he made a decision that let the book’s most unusual devices survive: the fourth-wall breaks, the page-number predictions, the narrator who speaks directly to whoever is holding the book.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we didn’t really know what book publishing was going to look like at the end of the pandemic. So I had sort of a why not attitude to what I would put in this book.
Underneath all the formal play was a simpler motivation. Stevenson has described the book’s origin the same way in several interviews: he looked at what existed, didn’t find what he wanted, and decided the only solution was to write it himself.
I hit a point where I just wanted anything on the shelves that I thought was perfect for me to read. So, I decided to fill that gap myself. Really, I write for myself.
How he wrote it
Eleven murders and a narrator who counts pagesThe book’s premise, a family reunion at a ski lodge where every member is connected to at least one death, generated a structural problem that took two years to solve. The scale he set for himself was unlike anything in his previous two novels.
I had to solve 11 mysteries all at the same time, while the clues for each murder unspooled together. Adding to this, Ernest has a habit of talking to the reader directly, including mentioning on which pages certain things will happen, and that was excruciatingly complex to edit!
Knox’s Decalogue, the set of ten rules for fair-play detective fiction written by priest and critic Ronald Knox in 1929, became a structural spine for the novel. But Stevenson encountered it as a discovery during research, not as a plan he arrived with.
I actually found Knox’s rules after I decided to write the book. Before I’d started writing it, but while I was researching it. [paraphrased from audio]
Ernest Cunningham’s running commentary on the physical object of the book, his narrator’s habit of telling readers what page a revelation is coming on, sounds like a comic flourish. It was also one of the most technically demanding elements to produce, requiring three separate editions with three separate versions of that device.
I think I’m probably one of the only books that has three separate editions that actually mention each. [paraphrased from audio]
The print edition uses page numbers; the ebook replaces them with percentage markers; the audiobook has Ernest say things like ‘there’s five minutes left until someone dies.’ The joke required engineering at every format.
Comedy shaped the book’s texture but was deliberately kept out of its plot machinery. His years doing stand-up gave him a precise sense of how to deploy humor without letting it undercut the seriousness of what was happening to the characters, and he describes the balance as a discipline rather than a natural state.
I write double the jokes I need, and then I edit them out because I think, at times, brevity is a good partner to wit.
Stevenson’s process is slow by design. He treats each sentence as close to final before he moves to the next, which means his 10,000-word plot breakdowns are doing structural work that other writers might defer to revision. The reason for the caution is frank.
Editing scares me so much that part of the reason I write so slow is because I won’t move forward until everything I’ve done up to that point is, in my eyes, as good as it can be.
On craft choices
Stand-up timing as a mystery-writing toolBefore he published his first novel, Stevenson sold out shows at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe. He doesn’t treat that career as separate from the fiction: the two disciplines share a mechanism, and he identified it early.
I started working as a stand-up comic, which I actually think gave me a lot of skills that I could then put into mystery fiction when I decided to write, because jokes are all about hiding the answers and surprising audiences.
The narrator’s awareness that the reader is holding a physical book, that pages are thinning on the right side, becomes one of the book’s running jokes. On the Authors on the Air podcast, Stevenson described how that device works as a comedic and structural instrument at the same time.
there’s too many pages against your left thumb, you know, we can’t reveal the killer yet. [paraphrased from audio]
Stevenson wanted the book to feel like an escape without losing the weight of its deaths. That required a specific tonal discipline, one he set for himself as a firm limit before he began.
I wanted to write something fun! And so I approached this novel with a Sherlockian relish. I’ve previously written quite gritty crime novels, and after the gruelling 2020/2021 I wanted to really treat this novel, even with all the murder and twists and suspense, as a joyous escape.
What he wants us to sit with
Fair play as a promise, not a twistStevenson’s central concern, the one he returns to across nearly every interview, is the compact a mystery writer makes with readers. He frames it not as a question of cleverness but of ethics: whether the person who bought the book feels respected when they close it.
The key of playing fair is that it feels good when you read it, even if you get tricked, instead of feeling betrayed. I just wanted that communal sense of fun — that the reader and I, as the author, are a team. I’m not trying to trick you, I’m playing fair, I want to satisfy you.
He sees fair play as the genre’s defining obligation, one he believes writers lose sight of when they become preoccupied with concealment. The satisfaction he’s after works regardless of whether the reader beats him to the answer.
Mystery fiction is a team game, which lots of writers forget — yes, you have to withhold the answers from the reader, but you’re also solving it together. So, most of all, I hope my readers feel that I’ve played fair the whole time, and haven’t cheated!
Beyond the immediate experience of reading, Stevenson hopes the book functions as a pointer. His affection for Christie, Doyle, and Knox isn’t background color: it’s something he wants to pass on.
I hope people discover in it my real love and affection for Golden Age mystery fiction, and perhaps that compels them to read or reread some classic favourites.