Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Like the other section titles, the Part 6 title, “Literary,” works on multiple levels, and like the preceding five section titles, it refers to one of the writers onboard the Ghan. In this case, the reference is to Wolfgang, who writes literary novels and is working on an art project designed to prove their superiority to commercial fiction. The title also refers to a literary trope and a literary panel of sorts: Ernie rounds up writers, an agent, and several fans for a classic golden-age-mystery-style denouement—and also, he jokes, to announce his new book, Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect.

The title of Part 7, “The Seven Deductions of Ernest Cunningham,” is a callback to Simone’s comment about trendy “first-name-last-name” books containing numbers in their titles (181). This joke, as a form of internal allusion, has a metafictional function. In addition, this section is literally about the deductions that Ernie has made about seven characters: Royce, Fulton, Brooke, Majors, Douglas, Wolfgang, and Jasper. Part 7 fulfills the traditional golden-age-mystery function of a public denouement of the evidence that builds to a climax when the solution is finally announced. This allows readers to check each of their own deductions, to understand how traditional mystery elements like red herrings may have been used to misdirect them, to understand how the genuine clues fit into the overall puzzle, and to continue “playing along” up until the last moment. It’s an important part of the “fair-play” ethos that Ernie endorses throughout the book and is part of the fun of reading a mystery.

This traditional form of denouement is uncommon in contemporary mysteries, however, as it’s seen as clumsy and unrealistic. The extended analysis inherent in such a scene draws attention to the mystery’s composition, pulling readers out of a novel’s pretend world. In addition, the gathering of suspects for a long speech can seem uncomfortably artificial to modern readers. That both Royce and Ernie insist on holding a denouement gathering is a thematic commentary on The Foibles of Literary Culture and Authorial Ego; none of the characters except Hatch, a “real” detective, minds the lengthy exposition and recapping of the action. The more literary characters apparently assume that their detective, Ernie, has earned the right to an audience for his ideas, much as authors of golden-age mysteries might have assumed that the hard work of composition earns one the right to this kind of denouement as an opportunity to showcase a carefully constructed plot. In Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect, the inclusion of a careful deconstruction of the plot is doubly important because it supports the theme of Language as a Tool to Manipulate Perception: Ernie’s speech is an opportunity to understand how, throughout the novel, characters have blurred the line between truth and fiction through lies, half-truths, and misdirection.

The discussion of Wolfgang’s art project, The Death of Literature, in Chapter 34 also bolsters these themes. Wolfgang’s project examines the supposed divide between “high” and “low” art; alluding to the theme of The Foibles of Literary Culture and Authorial Ego, he ostensibly shores up his own authorial ego by proving that commercial fiction is worthless drivel that even a machine can write. His creation of Erica Mathison and her work exemplifies the theme of Language as a Tool to Manipulate Perception and shows how fuzzy the boundaries can become between the “real” and the “unreal.”