Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

“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.”

Now that Ernie has already detailed the very scene he claims he doesn’t want to lead the book with, he critiques the modern mystery’s tendency to begin in medias res and then flash back to the beginning of the story. As a devotee of the older style of golden-age mysteries, Ernie manages to have it both ways: He can claim loyalty to a style that he doesn’t find “cheap” while reaping the benefits of that same “cheap” style. This introduces elements of Ernie’s characterization: His actions and his rhetoric don’t always match up, and he believes strongly in the literary value of golden-age-mystery conventions. In addition, this quote introduces the text’s metafictional humor and its thematic concerns about Genre and Its Impact on Creativity.

“I’ll tell you that I use the killer’s name, in all its forms, exactly 106 times from this point.”

This introduces Ernie’s running joke in which he lists character names with tallies of how many times each has been mentioned as a part of his “fair play” promise to readers. This metafictional gag is typical of Ernie’s playful