Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

“And what better place than in the middle of the desert to circle some carcasses,” Juliette chipped in.

Simone barked a laugh, seeming charmed rather than offended. She liked to be challenged, I just lacked the confidence to do it. But Juliette had always given her the combative banter she enjoyed. Simone leaned forward and gave Juliette one of those hugs where you keep the person at arm’s length, as if holding a urinating child, and an air kiss on both cheeks. “Always liked you, dear. You wound me, though, with truth. I take it you’re still not convinced you need an agent?”

“Keep circling. I’m happy on my own.”

“You have my number.” This must have been a lie, because even I didn’t have her number. She called me on private, not the other way around.

“I don’t have a ticket for you,” I cut in. “Juliette’s my plus-one. How’d they even let you on the shuttle bus? I’m sorry you’ve come all this way—”

“I don’t do shuttle buses. And I’ve got more clients than just you, Ern,” Simone scoffed. “Wyatt sorted me out.” She craned her head around the platform. “Where are the others?”

I didn’t know who Wyatt was, though her tone implied that was my own shortcoming. The name didn’t register as one of the other authors I’d seen in the program. Then again, I’d only flicked through it and hadn’t read many of the books; they were stacked guiltily on my bedside table. If an author’s biggest lie is that their writing is going well, their second biggest is that they’re halfway through their peer’s new book.

I did recall that there were five other writers on the program for the Australian Mystery Writers’ Festival. Handpicked by the festival to cover, as the website touted, “every facet of modern crime writing,” they included three popular crime writers, whose novels covered the genres of forensic procedural, psychological thriller and legal drama, as well as a literary heavyweight, who’d been short-listed for the Commonwealth Book Prize, and the major drawcard, Scottish phenomenon and writer of the Detective Morbund series Henry McTavish, whom even I knew by name. Then there was me, doing some heavy lifting in the dual categories of debut and nonfiction, because my first book was labeled as a true-crime memoir. Juliette, former owner of the mountain resort where last year’s murders took place, had also written a book on the events, but she was here as my guest. Her book had sold better than mine, and she is, I’ll admit, a much better writer than I am. But she’s also not related to a serial killer, and you can’t buy that kind of publicity, so the invites for things like this do tend to fall my way.

If it strikes you as odd that we were milling about at a train station, when literary festivals usually take place in libraries, school auditoriums or whichever room at the local community center happens to be empty enough to accommodate an Oh shit we totally forgot we had an author talk today, you’d be right. But this year, in celebration of its fiftieth anniversary, the festival was to take place on the Ghan: the famous train route that bisects the immense desert of Australia almost exactly down the middle. Originally a freight route, the name comes from a shortening of “Afghan Express”: a tribute to the camel-riding explorers of Australia’s past, who traversed the red desert long before steel tracks and steam engines. To drill the point home, the sides of several carriages had been emblazoned with a red silhouette of a man in a turban atop a camel.

While the name and logo might have attested to an adventurous spirit, the days of sweat and grit were long gone. The train had been overhauled with comfort, luxury and arthritis in mind—it was now a world-renowned tourist destination, an opulent hotel on rails. Over the course of four days and three nights, we were to travel from Darwin to Adelaide, with off-train excursions in the pristine wilderness of Nitmiluk National Park, the underground township of Coober Pedy, and the red center of Australia, Alice Springs. It was both a unique and an extravagant setting for a literary festival, and half the reason I’d agreed to come was that I’d never be able to afford the trip on my own: tickets didn’t just run into the thousands of dollars, they sprinted.

If that was half the reason, another quarter was the hope that four days immersed in literary conversations might spark something in me. That the muse might leap out from behind the bar just as I was clinking glasses with Henry McTavish himself, who never did public events anymore, and my new novel would crack wide open. I’d gush the idea at Henry, because we’d be on a first-name basis by then, of course, and he’d raise his glass and say, “Aye, I wish I’d thought of that one, laddie.”