Comedian and author Benjamin Stevenson has a unique approach to sibling rivalry.
The identical twin, who tours with his brother James as part of the musical comedy duo The Stevenson Experience, has developed a habit for getting revenge on the page.
His latest novel Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone is a bestseller and will be adapted into an HBO television series.
But how does his brother feel about the title?
"He's very sensitive about that," Stevenson said.
"Particularly because in most of my books, brothers don't end up well, without spoiling anything.
"There's a few, let's say, Freudian notions in the book, apparently."
Stevenson said his brother has complained about being repeatedly "killed off".
"And I said 'oh, I'm sorry, it's an accident' and he said 'well, stop doing it!'
"And then my rationale is, in one of my earlier books (Either Side of Midnight) – and this happens in the first chapter, so it's not a spoiler – the brother dies. It's the victim that sort of starts off the mystery.
"And I said, 'Well, I made that guy the handsome, intelligent one.
"'So, you can either be handsome and dead, or less handsome and alive,' and James is like 'Oh, I'll be the dead one then'. So, he accepts it."
Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone is a departure from Stevenson's previous work in that he uses one of the key weapons in his arsenal – humour.
"I've written a couple of books before, and they were very serious crime novels and I'm really proud of them," Stevenson said.
"And I wrote them in the rural noir space that Australian crime fiction was in.
"But then I thought, well, hang on, I've had a career as a stand-up comedian for 15 years.
"And as you write each book, you grow as a writer, and I was like, I'm leaving half of my quiver of arrows at the door by not putting this in a book.
"So that's why I added that particular skill set of mine that I didn't think I'd be able to use in crime fiction, but it turns out, they complement each other really well."
The 'surviving characters' are back for a sequel
Stevenson's next book is a follow-up Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect and will be released in October.
"So, Everyone In My Family is written as if (the main character) Ernest is writing a memoir of the murders that happen at the ski resort," Stevenson said.
"And then in the next book, he's published that book and he's been invited to a writers' festival on the Ghan, which is the train between Adelaide and Darwin.
"And on that writers' festival, there are six crime writers, himself included, of all different fields and then one of them is murdered.
"And together the crime writers, they each think, 'Oh, well, I'm a forensic crime writer, so I can do the autopsy'. And another one thinks, 'Oh, well, I'm a psychological crime writer, so I can profile the suspects'.
"So, they sort of get together, completely unskilled authors, and decide that because they write about it, they have the skills between them to solve the crime.
"But the problem is, if all of them know how to solve a crime, all of them know how to commit one.
"So, Ernest has to try and find who the killer is, amongst this group of, well, perfect killers."
A session with Harper and Stevenson
The Sydney Writers' Festival is perfect fodder for Stevenson's novel as he confirms he's nailed the dialogue and scenarios that come up in the book.
Stevenson will appear at a couple of sessions after the festival kicks off May 22 including one in which a beloved writer speaks to a breakout author from the past year – Your Favourites' Favourite.
Stevenson is the breakout author. The beloved writer is the internationally bestselling author of The Dry, Jane Harper.
Harper has had an extraordinary amount of success with her novels. The Dry was adapted into an Australian box office hit starring Eric Bana as Aaron Falk with a sequel based on Harper's second novel in the series Force of Nature in cinemas in August.
Harper's fifth novel and third in the trilogy Exiles is the final outing for Falk.
"It's kind of my 300-page goodbye letter to him," Harper said.
Harper had no preconceived notions of how things were going to play out when she first wrote The Dry.
"When I first started writing The Dry, I didn't really have any expectation it would even get published," she said.
"It was something I was doing for myself, I really wanted to write a book and it was something I wanted to do for a long time.
"It finally got to the point where I just thought, I'm just going to try and write this book. And I'm going to try and write the story that I think I would like to read and characters that I think I would relate to and if nothing happens with it, that's fine. At least I would have done it.
"The fact that it did get published and I then got the opportunity to write more books and expand the Aaron Falk character out into a trilogy has been beyond anything I thought at the time."
Benjamin Stevenson and Jane Harper will appear at the Sydney Writers' Festival which takes place from Monday, May 22 – Sunday May 28.
