Australian author Benjamin Stevenson drew on the golden age of mysteries for new novel

A couple of years ago, Australian mystery writer Benjamin Stevenson plunked himself down in a storefront window so that passersby could watch him composing his latest book.

“I’d decided to pressure myself into writing in a different way, so there I was in this bookstore window in Sydney with my laptop connected to this gigantic television,” he says. The TV screen allowed gawkers to see what he was actually writing when they paused to check things out.

“I was very nervous about it at the start because I’m quite a slow writer, and I wanted this to be exciting for people walking past.” However, he managed to speed things up sufficiently to produce about 11,000 words during his week on display, and most of them remain in the early chapters of his new book, capriciously titled Everyone In The Bank Is A Thief. His final verdict on the experiment? “It was really fun.”

Everyone In This Bank is a Thief Benjamin Stevenson HarperCollins

Stevenson, who is also a popular standup comedian in his home country, infuses his intricately concocted puzzlers with a mischievous sense of humour — and that includes an affection for quirky monikers that make his books stand out on the shelf. So this new one comes after three other attention-getting titles — Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect, and Everyone This Christmas Has A Secret.

With this new one, Everyone In This Bank Is A Thief, Stevenson decides to hook the reader with his opening lines. That’s when Ernest Cunningham, his dogged but engaging series detective, informs us that he’s trapped in a vault and waiting to die.

Stevenson, who’s chatting with Postmedia in the midst of a whirlwind North American publicity tour, presents an intriguing contradiction. He’s very much a 21st century guy — and the comedy routines that he does with his identical twin brother have an enthusiastic following back home and reflect his own fascination with the foibles of contemporary life. But he also has this old-fashioned passion for classic mystery fiction — especially the Golden Age of the 1930s when writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Ellery Queen reigned supreme.

“I’m trying to show that a good old-fashioned murder mystery can be really fun,” Stevenson says. He also believes that the form’s conventions can still work in the modern world. He thinks that too much contemporary crime fiction “is all about the trick you’re playing on the reader.” In contrast, the golden age was more about “welcoming readers to clues in the mystery and then seeing if they can be fooled.”

Back in the 1930s, every Ellery Queen novel paused near the climax with a “challenge to the reader” which stated that it had provided all the clues necessary for fans to name the murderer. In the case of Everyone In This Bank Is A Thief, Stevenson tried something similar with the prepublication edition available to early readers and the book club brigade. By Chapter 40, they would have all the necessary clues, he told them in a special author’s note — and he even provided a WhatsApp number so they could send him their solutions.

“I think it’s vital to a good murder mystery to challenge the reader,” Stevenson says. “You’re saying — come out and play. It was really fun with people guessing different versions of the ending. Thankfully, nobody got the correct ending because otherwise I might have had to rewrite the book!”

This time Stevenson had wanted to write about a bank heist “because it was not something that was done a lot in the golden age.” Yet it could still adapt to a classic situation: its characters, goodies and baddies alike, are trapped in an enclosed space. “The outer doors and teller windows slap shut and those inside are isolated,” Stevenson says happily. No one can get in or out.

“I’m trying to show that a good old-fashioned murder mystery can be really fun.

So what does the novel deliver? Bank heists galore (Stevenson doesn’t do things by halves). An impossible murder. Death by spontaneous combustion. Peril for Ernest. But that’s only the beginning — such was his promise to advance readers:

“How about a bank manager locked out of his own vault, a bank robber who doesn’t seem to care about money, a guard who doesn’t care about protecting it, four dead bodies, a priest who can’t talk and a talking bird that won’t shut up?”

Critics have applauded Stevenson for managing a blend of ingeniousness and hilarity. Meanwhile he simply says that he’s always loved storytelling.

“Standup really taught me all the tricks for writing a crime novel. That’s because the way you tell a joke is to hide the ending of the joke, by letting it creep up on the audience, by surprising them, by seeking a reaction, and finally making them laugh. With a crime novel you apply the same techniques.”

So it seemed a natural progression to tackle mystery fiction. “I wanted to explore more areas than I could on stage in standup. I also still wanted to surprise — so a murder mystery seemed the perfect fix.”