Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect uses characterization, setting, plot, and metafictional elements to satirize literary culture and the egos of authors. The book’s very premise pokes fun at the overinflated self-image of publishing, as the Australian Mystery Writers’ Festival celebrates itself by booking its 50th anniversary gathering aboard the luxurious Ghan. It’s a trip that relatively few fans can afford, but the sparse attendance seems less important than the prestige of such a setting. Most of the authors, agents, and publishers among the novel’s characters are portrayed as at least egocentric and callous. Both Simone and Wyatt break laws, extort others, and take advantage of their own authors to make money and further their careers. Ernie is actually somewhat frightened of Simone, and he comments that he supposes he “should be grateful she’s on [his] side” (14). The writers are all hyperconscious of their relative statuses; they know one another’s sales figures, read one another’s reviews, and keep track of one another’s awards. Several of them take advantage of any opportunity to bolster their own prestige by putting down a fellow author: Their comically extreme backbiting and sniping is even more obvious when juxtaposed against the kinder approaches of Juliette and Jasper. Popular authors like McTavish lap up fans’ attention yet treat them dismissively—or, worse, try to take advantage of them, as McTavish does with Brooke. Less popular authors beg for blurbs to try to boost their sales or retreat into bitterness, consoling themselves by denigrating commercial literature.

The novel establishes that this isn’t simply a chance assembly of people who happen to be ruthless and self-involved. It lays the blame squarely on the publishing world’s competitive and profit-driven culture: Simone is the way she is, for instance, because of a culture of misogyny within publishing that holds space for men by putting women at a disadvantage. It’s such a competitive world that it has its own finely tuned insults masquerading as politeness, as when Fulton insults Royce by saying that her mother enjoys his books. In Ernie’s metafictional commentary about the process of writing the book, he’s constantly aware of needing to craft his work around the publisher’s desire to maximize profit. He mentions, for instance, how his publisher is trying to intervene in his writing process through marketing demands. Even Ernie’s proposal to Juliette is partially motivated, he lets readers know, by Simone’s expectation that the book will contain some romance.