Two books, two very different takes on Christmas stories
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Okay, we've got two very different flavors of Christmas stories for you today. In a bit, we'll hear from the one and only Dolly Parton speaking about her book about a dog who comes home for Christmas. But first, Benjamin Stevenson's book, Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret, is a murder mystery. There is no cute dog coming home in this book. Instead, it's a very classic detective story with hints and clues along the way.

Now, Stevenson's written a number of mysteries, and what I find interesting about writers working primarily within a genre is that they get to know all of its nooks and crannies. And there's a part of this interview with NPR's Aisha Roscoe where Stevenson lays out the rules of a mystery story and breaks apart what makes the genre tick. That's ahead.

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Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Christmas is about two weeks away, and I can't wait to open presents with my kids, then relax.

maybe snuggle up with some nice wine and read my way to a holiday escape. There are quite a few differences between an Australian Christmas and the stereotypical Northern Hemisphere fare seen in most books and movies.

That's right, he said more murders, 'cause nothing says 'tis the season like a murder mystery where clues are spelled out in blood.

The book is by Australian comedian Benjamin Stevenson, and it's called Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret. It's the third in his series involving a reluctant amateur detective. Stevenson, get us acquainted. But before the killing starts, or the recounting of the killings, to be more precise, allow me to introduce myself. My name's Ernest Cunningham. I used to be a fan of reading Golden Age murder mysteries until I found myself with a haphazard career getting stuck in the middle of real life once.

This is a part of a series with the main character, Ernest Cunningham, who's got this track record of solving murders. So who is he? How did he become this sleuth?

He's a huge fan of golden age murder mysteries, of classic detection fiction, you know, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot. He's a huge fan of that. And he keeps finding himself involved with real life murders. And he thinks to himself, well, if I apply the same rules that my favourite fictional detectives apply to these real life murders, maybe I can solve the crime. Can you talk about how...

how Ernest ends up in this position where he's investigating a Christmas murder. It came to him because of his ex-wife, right?

Yeah, so she rings him up. Her name is Erin. She's woken up in the morning covered in her partner's blood and she's upstairs in the house and her partner has been found downstairs murdered in the kitchen. And so she calls Ernest because Ernest is really good at solving impossible crimes. So he comes in to try and help her get out of prison. Now, her partner is running this kind of gala Christmas charity ball which features an internationally famous magician as the headline act.

So Ernest deduces that all of his suspects are going to be backstage at the theatre involved in the magic show. Magicians, hypnotists, illusionists, mentalists, magician's assistants, you know, it's all the things that he doesn't believe should fit in a fair play mystery because he's a sceptic. And the question is, well, how do you find a killer when every single person you're interviewing is literally paid in the art of deception? They're professional tricksters.

And you talk a lot about the rules of classic mysteries. Can you talk a bit about these rules? Like, just some of them, you know? Yeah, well, it all boils down to the same thing, which is don't cheat. So they're called fair play mysteries for a reason. So the rules, they're things like you can't have surprise identical twins. Nothing supernatural can be involved in the crime. So aliens or ghosts, you know, it's not considered fair.

And then for this book, which is a Christmas special, obviously there's kind of unspoken rules to Christmas narratives as well. So one of my personal rules is that the detective must learn the true meaning of Christmas. And so he does throughout this book. Why mix the murder and the Christmas? Right.

Well, I think that's what's so great about Christmas Mysteries is it's supposed to be kind of joyous and happy and then something really dark happens like a murder. Really, in every detective novel, the detective wants to solve the crime to kind of set the world right, to do justice.

But in a Christmas special, you've got to solve the crime by Christmas morning. So I love that kind of level of extra festive suspense that you get with this little Christmas ticking clock. But also my books, they have a lot of those classic Golden Age detective style clues in them.

anagrams, numerical ciphers, there's little puzzles in them. And if I have a theme such as Christmas to them, then they're really kind of fun to work with. So some of the clues are like the victim writes the word Christmas on his kitchen floor, his own blood, or

you know, there's an advent calendar, there's a secret Santa. All of these things are clues in the novel. So I get to create puzzles out of sort of Christmas standards. You know, I love that you set this up kind of like an advent calendar, but then there's an actual advent calendar that the murder victim has, and that becomes a plot in the book, right? Yeah.

Yeah, the book's 24 chapters and it's got these little pictures which give you one clue per chapter and then the 24th chapter gives you the killer. We're into December already so you have to kind of binge eat the chocolates for the first couple of days. But if you read a chapter a day, you solve the murder on Christmas Eve is the kind of idea behind the book. But yeah, that's one of the clues. So one of the victims loves advent calendars and he opens his advent calendar religiously and the day he dies, he opens the wrong door and

And that is one of the clues in the book. And it's an important clue. You mentioned that you're a stand-up comedian and you perform with your brother James and you are an identical twin. And there are a set of identical twin sisters in this book. How did your experience as a twin influence how you wrote that relationship between the twins in the book?

It was really fun to do because it's something that I've put off doing because, as I said before, one of the rules of Fair Play Mysteries is that you're not allowed to have identical twins in it. And in real life, I am breaking that rule. So I feel like a bit of a charlatan. So you're breaking the rules, yeah. Yeah.

And the reason the rule exists is so that if they switch at the end, it's not seen as fair because they switch places and you had no chance of knowing it was coming. So in chapter two of this book, Ernest outright says, okay, there's identical twins, but to make it fair, I'm going to tell you they're going to switch places now because

And then when they do, it will be fair. But I kind of put in all of James, my brother and I's relationship. And, you know, we tried switching places in high school. One time he couldn't get his driver's license photo accepted by the DMV. So we used each other's photos. And so I was on his license. You know, those kind of shenanigans. When you are writing a mystery with all of these kind of

plot twists and things like that. Do you see any parallels to, like, crafting a joke to, like, plotting a murder mystery twist? 100%. Absolutely. And I think that's...

That's kind of what benefits my writing or makes my mysteries unique and in my own voice is that I use all of the tools from stand-up comedy to build the mysteries. So things like the rule of threes, which in comedy is that you've got to mention something three times before you pay it off with a punchline. I mean, that's exactly the same as drip feeding a clue through a novel. A classic joke structure might be a

pull back and reveal where you say something and then you reveal it to mean something else. And that, again, works really well for crime clues. But the main thing is that comedy and stand-up comedy especially, it's about controlling pace and tension. You're putting tension in the room and then when you're breaking the tension, you get rewarded with a laugh. And what you're doing is you're setting things up and then surprising people. You're trying to set it and break it every kind of 15 to 60 seconds.

When I'm controlling it in a novel, I'm trying to set it and break it every 50 pages. So I kind of need larger kind of tensions. Also, just in terms of pace, comedy, it's so important to never lose the pace because people can just yell out, you suck, get off.

And nobody can yell, you suck, get off at me while they're reading my book. But I try to imagine when I'm writing like a heckler behind me in my office yelling at me the same way they would in a comedy club. And it makes me want to never be boring because I never want to get booed from the audience. That's Benjamin Stevenson. His latest murder mystery, Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret, is out now. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me.

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This next interview is partly about Dolly Parton's new book, Billy the Kid Comes Home for Christmas, inspired by Parton's dog, but it's also about Parton's commitment to literacy. In this interview with NPR's Michelle Martin, she talks about the influence her father had on her as a man who was one of the smartest people she knew, and yet he couldn't read. Here's the interview.

It is no secret that superstar Dolly Parton does it all. But in her long list of accomplishments, one mission stands out, and that is Dolly's commitment to promoting children's literacy around the world. Dolly also loves Christmas and her French bulldog named Billy the Kid. Inspired by both, Dolly now brings us Dolly Parton's Billy the Kid Comes Home for Christmas. It's a new children's book in which her canine side characters

has to decide between fame or family this holiday season. And Dolly Parton is with us now. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you. And a very early Merry Christmas to you. I appreciate that. So I read someplace that you put a Christmas tree in every room of your home in Tennessee.

Is that true? It's true. They're not always big ones, but they're little ones, medium ones or whatever. But there's always some sort of little tree. Even in my bathrooms, I have little trees and, you know, just cute little things. But I love Christmas and I love all the Christmas decorations. And I always have my house lit up inside and out every Christmas. I'm like a kid when it comes to Christmas. What is it about the holiday that you love so much? Oh.

Oh, I just love all the festivities. I turn on my Christmas lights the night of Thanksgiving. I just love family, friends, all the gatherings and all the wonderful food that goes along with it as well. So what's not to love about Christmas? And I like the presents. I like to get them.

And I like to give them. Well, yes, exactly. So Billy the Kid is your real-life god dog, I understand, who lives in Nashville and has a following on Instagram for people who know about that. So tell us about him. How did he come into your life? Well, he belongs actually to my manager, Danny Nozell. And since he was a tiny little baby, he just took to me.

And I took to him, so I just claimed him. And I said, well, I'm just going to have to be his godmother. So that makes him my goddog. Exactly. Exactly. And he thinks of me, you know, as his dolly mama. And so I just enjoy Billy and I enjoy Christmas. So why not do a...

Christmas book on Billy the Kid. How did the idea come to you, though? Was it when you were doing one of your kind of fun things together? I was just kind of wondering how the idea came to you. The books are based on either a song that I've written or

of children's songs, or this one is a song that I wrote called I'm Coming Home for Christmas. And so I thought, well, that would be perfect to talk about family and friends and wanting to be home during the holidays. And Billy's a star now. He became that in his first book. So it just seemed to be

right for him to actually have to make a decision whether he's going to go home for Christmas or stay on tour. Gets a big offer for the Barcafella Center to perform there in the book. There's much story in between, but he eventually winds up getting to be home at Christmas after all.

There are lots of people who face that dilemma. And is there a moment when that was particularly painful or difficult for you? Oh, absolutely. Many times through the years, that little hum...

always wants me to go home for the holidays. And to my knowledge, I've never missed a Christmas. I try to set it up beforehand, no matter what kind of offers we get, whether I'm working Vegas or back in the day when I did do that, or even on tour, I always say, "I'm not going to be working for Christmas. I want to be home for Christmas."

And that's kind of what this was about. Billy was on tour, and we have to work in order to be able to buy somebody something for Christmas. So even Billy would understand that. But yes, I totally relate to that, and I try to incorporate in the books that we write parts of myself and my own feelings about things.

As I said earlier, that really stands out is your commitment to children's literacy. And I just wondered if you could remind us where that comes from. Well, I started the program called the Imagination Library about 30 years ago because of my dad, because he couldn't read and write. And he felt really, really embarrassed and bad about that, tried to kind of keep it a secret, so to speak. But daddy was so smart and I always wondered what all he might have done.

Ben had an education, but I think he was what he wanted to be. Our daddy, you know, married to my mama, you know, simple mountain country farmer. But daddy was really bright. And I used to always go to daddy for information and for advice about things, even my own businesses. I started to grow. Daddy had great input. So I thought, I'm going to do something great.

And I'm going to involve my daddy in it. I'm going to start this little program where children get a book from the time they're born, once a month, until they start kindergarten. That way they can learn to read. They get their little book with their little name on it. It gives them a great interest in that to think, oh, when they get big enough to know that that's theirs, they're going to get somebody to help them read. So I thought, well, this would be a great little thing in our home area.

But it went over a couple of counties, and before you know it, it was all over Tennessee. And now we've given away 250 million books since we started. So I'm very proud, and my dad got to live long enough to see it doing great, and I involved him in it, asked his advice, and he felt real good about that, and that made me feel real good. Did he ever learn to read?

I don't think so, not to any degree. But, you know, he can make out. I think he would know our names on sight and all that. But, I mean, he's a smart guy, so I think it's true. It's very crippling to people because then I think after they're grown, they believe that they can't learn it because it seems like it's too big of a deal somehow.

Or they just don't have the time to go learn something. You've got a family to feed. You've got to do what you've got to do. But we just knew it, like I say, early on. And I think Mama would say certain things. Now, don't bother your daddy with that. You come to me with that sort of thing. Wow, that's amazing.

Well, thank you so much for talking with us. Before we let you go, what are you up to this Christmas? I know you said it's a priority. You make it a point to be home for Christmas with family and friends. Anything special happening this Christmas that you can share? It'll just be special that I'm going to get to be home with my family and friends. So I'll just be happy that I'm home and still have the chance to be home with my family, my husband and my brothers and sisters.

That is Dolly Parton. Her new children's book is Dolly Parton's Billy the Kid Comes Home for Christmas. Dolly Parton, thank you so much for talking with us and Merry Christmas to you. And Merry Christmas to you. Come in, hurry this way.

And that's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. If you want more, you can sign up for our newsletter at npr.org slash newsletter slash books. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The podcast is produced by Danica Panetta and Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Karen Miller-Metsen, Todd Muntz, Mark Navin, Sarah Handel, Jordan Marie Smith, Elena Torek, Melissa Gray, Adriana Gallardo, and Ana Perez. Beth Donovan is our managing editor. Thanks for listening.

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