Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

The novel’s protagonist and narrator, Ernie, is a divorced Australian man in his early forties who, after a career spent writing “how to” advice pamphlets for mystery writers, recently published his own first book, a true-crime narrative about murders that occurred while his family was staying at Sky Lodge Mountain Retreat. Ernie is a paradoxical study in contrasts. He has the confidence to investigate crimes and to write about his experiences. A devotee of golden-age mysteries and their genre conventions, he knows his own preferences as a writer and sticks to them regardless of what others think. His narrative voice is friendly and poised, full of sarcastic quips, colorful figurative language, playful misdirection that allows him to walk a fine line between reliability and unreliability, and satirical commentary about the theme of Genre and Its Impact on Creativity. His style is a key element of the novel’s thematic arguments about