Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Front Matter-Prologue

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Parts 6-7

Part 8-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Gemini Pens

The fancy souvenir pens that Wyatt gives away to authors and others associated with his company, Gemini Publishing, are a motif that appears multiple times throughout the novel. When Ernie first sees one, in Royce’s room, he describes it as ornate, designed to look “like an antique dip pen” (127), and very sharp. The pen’s elaborate design demonstrates its significance—both to the story and to Wyatt, to whom these pens represent his business. Their sharpness foreshadows Wyatt’s death since he’s stabbed in the throat with one of them. Wyatt’s manner of death alludes to two aphorisms: “The pen is mightier than the sword” and “Live by the sword, die by the sword.” Figuratively, pens are the “swords” of the publishing world, and they can be wielded in the cause of justice or injustice, just as any literal weapon can. Because Wyatt lived by the pen, he dies by the pen, and when the pen is stabbed through his throat, his own actions symbolically silence his voice. This is a strong indictment of the publishing world and offers support for the novel’s thematic criticism of The Foibles of Literary Culture and Authorial Ego.

False Identity

Many of the novel’s characters aren’t precisely what they seem. Of course, this is always true for at least one character in any murder mystery because the killer tries to seem like any other innocent bystander. To create an engaging mystery, authors also generally give innocent characters secrets that complicate solving the crime. However, Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect carries this convention to an extreme that both supports the novel’s thematic interest in Language as a Tool to Manipulate Perception and creates a motif of false identity. Throughout the story, characters lie, misdirect via partial truths, and engage in clever verbal gymnastics to present themselves as people other than who they truly are. Brooke is secretly not just a McTavish fan: She’s his daughter. Douglas pretends to be a fan, but he’s really the opposite: He’s onboard the train to kill a writer. McTavish himself isn’t the writer he seems to be: Most of his novels are written by Jasper, who appears to be just another fan attending the festival. Wolfgang is Erica Mathison, in a sense, though “Erica” is really just a name attached to the works of an artificial intelligence program. Once revealed, these obscured identities lend a comic tone to Ernie’s “imposter” syndrome: Ironically, Ernie is one of the few people onboard the Ghan who is exactly who he says he is.

False Deaths

Throughout Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect, people who are apparently dead turn out to be very much alive. The novel establishes this symbolic motif early through discussions of Henry McTavish’s third book, Off the Rails, in which a character stages their own death to escape the consequences of a crime. Later, the Archie Bench clue in the Morbund book in which Morbund supposedly died signifies that he’s still alive. “Archie Bench” is an anagram for Reichenbach, which is an allusion to a Sherlock Holmes book in which Holmes is supposed to have died but hasn’t. Harriet, too, is resurrected from the dead when she appears in Ernie’s hotel room despite supposedly dying after falling from the train.

These recurring resurrections represent how the past continues to come alive again in the present. Harriet’s bad review haunts her relationship with Jasper and at least partly motivates her murders of McTavish and Wyatt. The train accident in which the Ghan ran into a school bus has haunted Douglas for decades, and McTavish’s theft of this plot has haunted Majors. Likewise, McTavish’s rape of Fulton has consequences that reach into the present—for McTavish, Brooke, Fulton, Wyatt, and Royce.