Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

That’s it: the book, the blood, the body. Carrots dangled. End of prologue.

It’s not like I don’t trust your editorial judgment. It just seems overly pointless to me to replay a scene from later in the book merely for the purpose of suspense. It’s like saying, “Hey, we know this book takes a while to get going, but it’ll get there.” Then the poor reader is just playing catch-up until we get to the murder.

Well, that scene is the second murder anyway, but you get my point.

I’m just wary of giving away too much. So, no prologue. Sound okay?

Best,

Ernest

P.S. After what’s happened, I think it’s fairly obvious I’ll need a new literary agent. I’ll be in touch about that separately.

P.P.S. Yes, we do have to include the festival program. I think there are important clues in it.

P.P.P.S. Grammar question—I’ve thought it funny that Murder on the Orient Express is titled as such, given that the murders take place in the train and not on it. Death on the Nile has it a bit more correct, I think, given the lack of drownings. Then again, of course you say you’re on a train or a plane. I’m laboring the point, but I guess my question is whether we use on or in for our title? Given, of course, most of the murders take place in the train, except of course what happens on the roof, which would be on. Except for the old fella’s partner and those who died alongside him, but that’s a flashback. Am I making sense?

Memoir

Chapter 1

So I’m writing again. Which is good news, I suppose, for those wanting a second book, but more unfortunate for the people who had to die so I could write it.

I’m starting this from my cabin on the train, as I want to get a few things down before I forget or exaggerate them. We’re parked, not at a station but just sitting on the tracks about an hour from Adelaide. The long red desert of the last four days has been replaced first by the golden wheat belt and then by the lush green paddocks of dairy farms, the previously flat horizon now a rolling grass ocean peppered with the slow, steady turn of dozens of wind turbines. We should have been in Adelaide by now, but we’ve had to stop so the authorities can clean up the bodies. I say clean up, but I think the delay is mainly that they’re having trouble finding them. Or at least all the pieces.

So here I am with a head start on my writing.

My publisher tells me sequels are tricky. There are certain rules to follow, like doling out backstory for both those who’ve read me before and those who’ve never heard of me. I’m told you don’t want to bore the returnees, but you don’t want to confuse the newbies by leaving too much out. I’m not sure which one you are, so let’s start with this:

My name’s Ernest Cunningham, and I’ve done this before. Written a book, that is. But, also, solved a series of murders.

At the time, it came quite naturally. The writing, not the deaths, of which the causes were the opposite of natural, of course. Of the survivors, I thought myself the most qualified to tell the story, as I had something that could generously be called a “career” in writing already. I used to write books about how to write books: the rules for writing mystery books, to be precise. And they were more pamphlets than books, if you insist on honesty. Self-published, a buck apiece online. It’s not every writer’s dream, but it was a living. Then when everything happened last year up in the snow and the media came knocking, I thought I might as well apply some of what I knew and have a crack at writing it all down. I had help, of course, in the guiding principles of Golden Age murder mysteries set out by writers like Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and, in particular, a bloke named Ronald Knox, who wrote out the “Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction.” Knox isn’t the only one with a set of rules: various writers over the years have had a crack at breaking down a murder mystery into a schematic. Even Henry McTavish had a set.

If you think you don’t already know the rules to writing a murder mystery, trust me, you do. It’s all intuitive. Let me give you an example. I’m writing this in first person. That means, in order to have sat down and physically written about it, I survive the events of the book. First person equals survival. Apologies in advance for the lack of suspense when I almost bite the dust in chapter 28.