AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Christmas is about two weeks away, and I can't wait to open presents with my kids then relax, maybe snuggle up with some nice wine and read my way to a holiday escape.
BENJAMIN STEVENSON: (Reading) There are quite a few differences between an Australian Christmas and the stereotypical Northern Hemisphere fare seen in most books and movies. For one thing, we don't get snow down under. What we do get, in my specific experience, is more murders.
RASCOE: That's right. He said more murders 'cause nothing says 'tis the season like a murder mystery where clues are spelled out in blood. The book is by Australian comedian Benjamin Stevenson, and it's called "Everyone This Christmas Has A Secret." It's the third in his series involving a reluctant amateur detective. Stevenson, get us acquainted.
STEVENSON: (Reading) But before the killing starts - or the recounting of the killings, to be more precise - allow me to introduce myself. My name's Ernest Cunningham. I used to be a fan of reading Golden Age murder mysteries until I found myself with a haphazard career getting stuck in the middle of real-life ones.
RASCOE: This is a part of a series with the main character Ernest Cunningham, who's got this track record of solving murders. So who is he? How did he become this sleuth?
STEVENSON: He's a huge fan of Golden Age murder-mysteries, of classic detective fiction - you know, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot. He's a huge fan of that. And he keeps finding himself involved with real-life murders. And he thinks to himself, well, if I apply the same rules that my favorite fictional detectives apply to these real-life murders, maybe I can solve the crime.
RASCOE: Can you talk about how Ernest ends up in this position where he's investigating a Christmas murder? It came to him because of his ex-wife, right?
STEVENSON: Yeah, so she rings him up. Her name is Erin. She's woken up in the morning covered in her partner's blood. And she's upstairs in the house, and her partner has been found downstairs murdered in the kitchen. And so she calls Ernest because Ernest is really good at solving impossible crimes. So he comes in to try and help her get out of prison.
Now, her partner is running this kind of gala Christmas charity ball, which features an internationally famous magician as the headline act. So Ernest deduces that all of his suspects are going to be backstage at the theater involved in the magic show - magicians, hypnotists, illusionists, mentalists, magician's assistants. You know, it's all the things that he doesn't believe should fit in a fair-play mystery because he's a skeptic. And the question is, well, how do you find a killer when every single person you're interviewing is literally paid in the art of deception? They're professional tricksters.
RASCOE: And you talk a lot about the rules of classic mysteries. Can you talk a bit about these rules? Like, just some of them, you know?
STEVENSON: Yeah, well, it all boils down to the same thing, which is don't cheat. So they're called fair-play mysteries for a reason. So the rules - they're things like you can't have surprise identical twins. Nothing supernatural can be involved in the crime. So aliens or ghosts - you know, it's not considered fair. And then for this book, which is a Christmas special, obviously, there's kind of unspoken rules to Christmas narratives as well. So one of my personal rules is that the detective must learn the true meaning of Christmas. And so he does throughout this book.
RASCOE: Why mix the murder and the Christmas (laughter)?
STEVENSON: Well, I think that's what's so great about Christmas mysteries, is it's supposed to be kind of joyous and happy, and then something really dark happens, like a murder. Really, in every detective novel, the detective wants to solve the crime to kind of set the world right to do justice. But in a Christmas special, you've got to solve the crime by Christmas morning. So I love that kind of level of extra festive suspense that you get with this little Christmas ticking clock.
But also, my books - they have a lot of those classic Golden Age detective-style clues in them - anagrams, numerical ciphers. There's little puzzles in them. And if I have a theme such as Christmas to them, then they're really kind of fun to work with. So some of the clues of - like the victim writes the word Christmas on his kitchen floor, his own blood. Or, you know, there's an advent calendar. There's a secret Santa. All of these things are clues in the novel. So I get to create puzzles out of sort of Christmas standards.
RASCOE: You know, I love that you set this up kind of like an advent calendar. But then there's an actual advent calendar that the murder victim has, and that becomes a plot in the book, right?
STEVENSON: Yeah. The book's 24 chapters, and it's got these little pictures which give you one clue per chapter, and then the 24th chapter gives you the killer. We're into December already, so you have to kind of binge-eat the chocolates for the first couple of days.
RASCOE: (Laughter) Yeah.
STEVENSON: But if you read a chapter a day, you solve the murder on Christmas Eve is the kind of idea behind the book. But, yeah, that's one of the clues. So one of the victims loves advent calendars, and he opens his advent calendar religiously. And the day he dies, he opens the wrong door. And that is one of the clues in the book.
RASCOE: And it's an important clue (laughter). Well, you mentioned that you're a stand-up comedian, and you perform with your brother James, and you are an identical twin. And there are a set of identical twin sisters in this book. How did your experience as a twin influence how you wrote that relationship between the twins in the book?
STEVENSON: It was really fun to do because it's something that I've put off doing because, as I said before, one of the rules of fair-play mysteries is that you're not allowed to have identical twins in it. And in real life, I am breaking that rule, so I feel like a bit of a charlatan.
RASCOE: (Laughter). So you're - yeah, you're breaking the rules. Yeah.
STEVENSON: And the reason the rule exists is so that if they switch at the end, it's not seen as fair because they switch places and you had no chance of knowing it was coming. So in Chapter 2 of this book, Ernest outright says, OK, there's identical twins. But to make it fair, I'm going to tell you they're going to switch places now. And then when they do, it will be fair. But I kind of put in all of James - my brother and I's relationship. And, you know, we tried switching places at high school. One time he couldn't get his driver's license photo accepted by the DMV, so we used each other's photos, and so I was on his license.
RASCOE: OK (laughter).
STEVENSON: You know, those kind...
RASCOE: Yeah.
STEVENSON: ...Of shenanigans.
RASCOE: When you are writing a mystery with all of these kind of plot twists and things like that, do you see any parallels to, like, crafting a joke to, like, plotting a murder mystery twist?
STEVENSON: Oh, a hundred percent. Absolutely. And I think that's kind of what benefits my writing or makes my mysteries unique and in my own voice, is that I use all of the tools from stand-up comedy to build the mysteries. So things like the rule of threes, which in comedy is that you've got to mention something three times before you pay it off with a punch line - I mean, that's exactly the same as drip feeding a clue through a novel. A classic joke structure might be a pullback and reveal, where you say something and then you reveal it to mean something else. And that, again, works really well for crime clues.
But the main thing is that comedy and stand-up comedy, especially - it's about controlling pace and tension. You're putting tension in the room, and then when you're breaking the tension, you get rewarded with a laugh. And what you're doing is you're setting things up and then surprising people. You're trying to set it and break it every kind of 15 to 60 seconds. When I'm controlling it in a novel, I'm trying to set it and break it every 50 pages, so I kind of need larger kind of tensions.
Also, just in terms of pace, comedy - it's so important to never lose the pace because people can just yell out, you suck, get off. And nobody can yell, you suck, get off, at me while they're reading my book. But I try to imagine when I'm writing, like, a heckler behind me in my office yelling at me the same way they would in a comedy club. And it makes me want to never be boring because I never want to get booed from the audience.
RASCOE: That's Benjamin Stevenson. His latest murder-mystery, "Everyone This Christmas Has A Secret," is out now. Thanks for joining us.
STEVENSON: Thank you for having me.
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