Some murder mysteries are obsessed with darkness, with the depths of depravity the soul can sink to. Others, are more light-hearted affairs. Sure, there’s a dead body or two, but that’s no reason not to sit down for a spot of tea or curl up with a blanket and your pet cat while you work out which of your eccentric neighbors committed the oh-so quaint murder. Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone goes for something a little different. It’s a self-referential, comedic mystery, obsessed with the “rules” of classic detective fiction even as it plays things completely unfair.
Ernie Cunningham is the narrator. The son of a criminal who died in a shootout with the police, Ernie writes books about murder mysteries. Not actual murder mysteries, books about the books themselves. Because if you’re going to throw plausibility out the window, you might as well throw it as far as you can while you’re at it. A few years before the start of this story, Ernie had witnessed his brother kill another man, and his decision to testify against his brother in court has torn his family apart. Now that his brother is getting out jail, the family wants to do a reunion, and g Ernie wants to make amends by returning the nearly $300,000 his brother left with him before his crime.
Before we go any further, I need to admit something since it may impact how seriously you should consider this review. I listened to this as an audiobook and I developed such a strong dislike of the narrator that I can’t 100% trust my own evaluation of the novel’s prose and plotting. I can only describe it as a posh Australian accent, something I have never before encountered. The main problem is that his delivery really rendered the intended humor of the story null and void. There are countless attempted jokes, many centered on the meta nature of the story, but not a one of them made me so much as crack a smile.
There is of course an inherent problem with a comedic mystery novel, in that it should become more difficult to maintain a sense of humor as the bodies start piling up around you. That’s not a problem for our boy Ernie, though. To an entirely unrealistic degree, he keeps firing off his little quips as those around him keep dying. And may I remind you this book is set at a family reunion. There’s just nothing recognizably human about the behavior of the characters in this story, and even if I found the wink-wink, nudge-nudge “see what I did there” references to the history and conventions of mystery novels humorous, I still wouldn’t like this novel.
Without spoiling, I will also say that the solution to the mystery is so convoluted, inexplicable, and uninteresting that it would turn off even the most congenial of readers.
Have I made my feelings clear?