Author Interview: The Dysfunctional Family’s Guide to Murder by Kate Emery

Families fight, bicker, and keep secrets but in Kate Emery’s The Dysfunctional Family’s Guide to Murder, Ruth takes it a step further: she suspects her relatives of actual homicide. With a blend of laugh-out-loud wit and genuine chills (including one unforgettable “death by typewriter”), Kate crafts a mystery that’s as much about the messy ties that bind us as it is about solving a crime. We caught up with her to talk about building a family dynamic where love and suspicion go hand in hand, the art of balancing absurd humor with real stakes, and what makes Ruth such a singular amateur sleuth.

The Dysfunctional Family's Guide to Murder

by Kate Emery
Published by: Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers
on October 1, 2024
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In this hilarious, contemporary YA whodunit, a mystery-loving teen finally gets a chance to solve a real-life crime. But solving a murder is complicated when all the prime suspects are related to you...
14-year-old Ruth was expecting a few fights on her family's vacation at their remote farmhouse. But she wasn't expecting a murder. And "death by typewriter" wasn't quite how she thought her step-grandmother, GG, would meet her end.
As an avid reader of mystery novels, Ruth is more than a little excited to have a real mystery to solve. (Though she's sad about GG. Obviously.) And she's read enough Agatha Christie that catching a killer should be a breeze... right?
With her annoyingly hot sort-of-cousin, Dylan, as the Watson to her Holmes, Ruth soon begins to uncover long-buried family secrets, finding that each of her relatives--her dad; her aunts and their partners; even, in the interest of fairness, Dylan and herself--had reasons to want GG gone.
But are any of them capable of murder? As tensions rise with everyone stuck in the house together, Ruth will have to dig deep to find out... before the killer strikes again.

Interview with Kate Emery

Ruth’s idea of family bonding is basically accusing everyone of murder. What did writing this tangled love-hate family dynamic teach you about the secrets we keep from the people closest to us?

Ruth’s family is a real mix of my own and the Durrell Family, at least as they’re portrayed in Gerald’s Durrell’s excellent and very funny memoir My Family and Other Animals – a favourite book of mine in my teens. The dynamic of a family that loves each other but expresses that love through insults and mistrust was both very familiar to me and really fun to write.

Having Ruth essentially suspect any and all of her family members to be guilty of murder felt like a very logical extension of that kind of a family vibe. The idea that every suspect has a secret is a real trope of the murder mystery genre but it’s also true of famiies, where small and big secrets over the years can build up and build up unti they explode.

You balance laugh out loud humor with a pretty grisly death scene, ‘death by typewriter’ is iconic. How did you decide where to lean into the absurd and where to let the mystery feel genuinely chilling?

I think humour is so underrated in fiction. I hate the idea that to be good books need to take themselves seriously all the time. At the risk of comparing my YA murder mystery to one of the greatest novels of all time (too late!), Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 is the GOAT when it comes to using humour to tell a very serious story. The jokes don’t diminish that book’s message about the absurdity of war – they highlight it (and make it a joy to read instead of a slog).

What I wanted for this book was for the humour to be front and centre but for it still to feel like the stakes were real and that the mystery at the heart of the book mattered. Yes, getting killed by a typewriter is pretty funny but it’s also quite a dark way to go. I have to shout out my editor for helping me pull off this balance between light and dark: there were definitely times when the book felt like it was leaning too far one way or the other and she was onto it and helped me to rein it back in.

There’s a lot of wink and nod Agatha Christie energy here, but Ruth is still so distinctly her own kind of detective. What would Ruth say her biggest amateur-sleuth strength is, and what’s her fatal flaw?

I think Ruth would agree with me that she shares her greatest strength with Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple: her age. While Miss Marple is underestimated because people see her as a little old lady, Ruth is similarly dismissed because she’s a teenager and what could they possibly know, really?

At the same time, Ruth’s (very age-appropriate) recklessness is her fatal flaw. She tends to have a little too much confidence in her plans, from searching one (potential killer) family member’s room when they’re out to staging a confrontation with another potential killer, Ruth doesn’t always think through the consequences if one of her master plans doesn’t work out.