There’s no accounting for taste, whodunnit edition.

This post is by Phil Price. Andrew recently gave a rave review to the whodunnit “Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone”, by Benjamin Stevenson (and he also loved the sequel, “Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect”). I read EIMFHKS and, in short, I liked most of it pretty well but hated the ending. Below is an what I said to Andrew in an email. It has a pretty significant spoiler, not about the identity murderer but about a plot point, so I’m putting it below the fold.

[Whoops, for some reason the ‘read more’ tag isn’t working correctly, or at least it isn’t when I preview the post. I’m adding this filler here just to put some more space so you have a chance to avert your eyes before inadvertently reading the next several sentences before you can stop yourself.]

I read the book, based on your strong recommendation, and I liked the first 90% quite well.  Wouldn’t have given it a rave review but would have mentioned it favorably in a conversation about whodunnits.  But then the final scene was so ridiculous that it almost ruins the whole thing for me.  I don’t mean the reveal, which was ridiculous but OK, hey, it’s light fiction, and it’s a genre whose veins have been so thoroughly mined that there’s not much else to find, that’s tolerable, although it would already have gotten me to take my evaluation down a peg.  But the thing that really gets me is that we are supposed to believe that a large room catches fire so quickly that people can’t even get out of the room without being badly burned.  In ten seconds the entire room is afire, and in twenty the floor joists are completely burned through and parts of the floor are collapsing.  I can suspend my disbelief a long way, but nowhere near far enough for that.  

Obviously it didn’t bother you. How did it not bother you? Maybe there’s a sense that of course it’s gonna be ridiculous, it’s a whodunnit and who really cares if there’s something nutty like an exploding room in a hotel?  Or maybe there’s something meta going on, like “this guy said he’s going to be a reliable narrator, but of course he’d say that even if he isn’t one….who knows what really happened with the library and the fire, maybe that whole scene is made up, even in the world of the book, and that only makes the book better!”?

Still, even if some readers aren’t bothered by this sort of thing, some of us are.  At least several people read the book before publication, probably more like dozens.  Didn’t any of them point out that this scene is literally impossible and nobody will believe it?  “Some people won’t mind, maybe a lot of people won’t mind, but it will ruin the ending for a lot of people so you should change that part”, didn’t anyone say that? Or did some people say that and the author refused?   It would have been so easy to come up with another way to do what needed to be done to hit all the major buttons of the denouement. What a missed opportunity.

I suppose I should clarify that the “library” is not a building with hundreds of people in it, nor is it a maze-like warren of rooms like the library in The Name Of The Rose. It’s a room roughly the size of a living room, with about ten people in it. A room full of old paperbacks could indeed catch fire really quickly…but unless they are wet with gasoline the whole room isn’t going to be aflame in seconds. And we are talking seconds: the way the paragraph is written it’s one of those “everything happened so fast” scenarios where several things are happening at once and it’s hard to keep track.

Andrew suggested I post this on the blog so he can respond here, so, here it is. I’ll also mention that I read the sequel, Everyone On My Train Is A Suspect, and, although it didn’t have any howlers like the exploding library, I didn’t love it. I won’t be reading any more by this author. Just not my cup of tea.