To Fully Appreciate the Brilliant New Knives Out, It Helps to Understand the Subgenres It’s Riffing On
This post contains minor spoilers for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.
Of the three modes of mystery stories—whodunit, whydunit, and howdunit—the first two are currently most common, as seen in everything from Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series to Mindhunter. But the Golden Age of detective fiction in the first half of the 20th century was a heyday for the howdunit, or the locked-room mystery. These celebrated literary puzzles receive a hat tip in Rian Johnson’s third and latest installment in the Knives Out franchise, Wake Up Dead Man, including a brief disquisition on the subgenre from the detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig). Wake Up Dead Man, now streaming on Netflix, itself contains a locked-room mystery. The charismatic but sulfurous Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) steps into a storage alcove to the side of the altar during Good Friday service and ends up stabbed in the back, despite the entire congregation observing that no one has followed him into the alcove.
The locked-room mystery—otherwise known as the “impossible crime” mystery—is not to be confused with the closed-circle mystery often associated with the queen of Golden Age detective fiction, Agatha Christie. The classic “country house during a blizzard” setting with an array of suspects, each of whom might have committed the murder, is a closed-circle setup, as is Christie’s Orient Express train, and the steamer in Death on the Nile. In a locked-room mystery, it seems that no one could have done it and escaped undetected. John Dickson Carr—an American writer who lived in England and set most of his novels there—is considered a master of the genre, and Wake Up Dead Man prominently features Carr’s 1935 novel The Hollow Man (initially published in the U.S. as The Three Coffins), often touted as his masterpiece.
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Not everyone agrees that The Hollow Man is Carr’s best work, but it does contain a chapter-long speech in which Carr’s detective, Dr. Gideon Fell, expounds on locked-room mysteries in much greater detail and at much greater length than Blanc’s explanation in Wake Up Dead Man. When one of the other characters in the novel complains about Fell going on and on about “fiction,” in the midst of an investigation, Fell announces, “We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not,” a rare and startling moment of meta for a 1930s crime novel. The two seemingly impossible murders in The Hollow Man—the first involving a man killed in a literal locked room and the second a victim felled in a cul-de-sac carpeted with untouched snow—don’t really resemble the murder in Wake Up Dead Man, as both crimes in Carr’s novel turn out to be somewhat improvised. The murder in Johnson’s movie, on the other hand, is a careful, ingeniously devised act of misdirection that made the victim appear to have been stabbed at an early time, while he was alone—a classic scenario falling into the seventh type of impossible crime in Fell’s exhaustive taxonomy.
Locked-room mysteries tend to turn on small, mechanical devices—latches, bolts, hinges, pins, concealed apertures, threads, mirrors—that root them firmly in the physical world. Psychology typically isn’t central to the solution of the locked-room story, and this makes most of Carr’s novels, with their stock characters and routine motives, less interesting (to me, at least) than other crime fiction. (To my mind, the lesser-known Golden Age locked-room mysteries of Christianna Brand are closer in spirit to the social satire of the Knives Out franchise.)
But the locked-room mystery does have one intriguing aspect that Johnson splendidly explores in Wake Up Dead Man. A crime that no human being could have committed inevitably suggests the work of a superhuman actor: a ghost, a curse, a witch, the devil, or even God Himself. This can give the locked-room mystery an eerie atmosphere, a quality Carr deftly exploited before ultimately providing a perfectly rational explanation for his fictional murders. For Johnson, the uncertainty of the impossible crime setup provides an opportunity to oppose reason with faith, the detective and his deductions versus the religious man and his beliefs.
The true subject of Wake Up Dead Man is a spiritual crisis, that of Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a young priest assigned to Wicks’ parish in upstate New York. Wicks, an analogue to Donald Trump, commands his flock using fear and anger, both stoking their aggressive, resentful tendencies and terrorizing them with the threat of his wrath. Jud—a former boxer who once killed an opponent during a fight—wants to coax the congregation into the more loving and compassionate understanding of Christianity that was his own salvation. The two men clash, and when Wicks is murdered, suspicion naturally turns to Jud.
Having Jud team up with Blanc to find the real killer is a cheeky nod to the curious fictional tradition of clerical detectives. Probably the most familiar example to contemporary viewers is Sidney Chambers, the Anglican vicar in the TV series Grantchester, based on the novels by James Runcie. But the prototype of all such characters is Father Brown, the Catholic priest featured in 53 short stories published between 1910 and 1936 by G. K. Chesterton. Despite how prominently The Hollow Man is displayed in Wake Up Dead Man, Johnson recently admitted that Chesterton, rather than Carr, is the mystery writer whose spirit most deeply infuses Wake Up Dead Man. After all, it was Chesterton, whom Carr admired tremendously, who served as the model for Carr’s detective, Gideon Fell.
Jud soon gets caught up in Blanc’s investigation, but in one of the movie’s most powerful scenes, he attempts to question a garrulous source on the phone, only to have the woman seek his prayers in healing a painful rift with her dying mother. Abruptly reminded of his pastoral duty, Jud spends a long time comforting the woman rather than gathering the needed information, much to Blanc’s exasperation. Jud describes this as a “Damascus” moment, after the revelation that struck St. Paul on the road to that city. “This is not a game,” Jud shouts at Blanc, “not some fiddly mystery with devices and clues”—a very apt characterization of locked-room puzzles. Blanc insists that the investigation is a game, but “my game, not yours.”
Chesterton’s Father Brown—a clumsy, naive-looking priest whose unassuming appearance lulled culprits and other detectives alike into a false sense of superiority—would have taken issue with this dichotomy. In the first Father Brown story, told from the point of view of a French police detective, the priest engages in several debates with his recurring foil, a master thief named Hercule Flambeau, even as he outwits the criminal’s attempts to relieve him of a priceless relic. “I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason,” Father Brown says, “but it is just the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason.”
Arguably, the point of these Father Brown stories—besides the amusement they provide—is to illustrate how faith and reason are not opposed but united. Father Brown doesn’t do this by making long speeches about the matter, but by showing how his ability to solve crimes derives from the knowledge of humanity he has gathered in his work. (The confessional, apparently, is a goldmine of criminological data.) Nevertheless, collaring the perpetrator is not his primary concern. He is anxious to shrive the malefactors and save their souls. Eventually Father Brown even reforms Flambeau, who becomes his friend and fellow detective.
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At the end of Wake Up Dead Man, Benoit Blanc himself has a Damascus moment in the midst of that most sacred of all Golden Age detective rituals: the explanation of the crime before an assembly of the suspects. At first, to seize the attention of the squabbling parishioners, Blanc climbs into the absurdly grandiose pulpit from which Wicks once spewed fire and brimstone, taking the place of the preacher. But then, on the verge of revealing all, he is struck by a sunbeam shining through the church’s stained-glass windows and falls silent. This won’t be “Benoit Blanc’s final checkmate over the mysteries of faith,” as he puts it, because Blanc himself has had a revelation in that place of worship. He refrains from naming the culprit because grace demands that they be permitted to confess and engage in the sacraments of contrition.
Urging the killer to confess is a Father Brown move if there ever was one, and even if Blanc doesn’t believe in the soul, he has come to appreciate the merits of Jud’s vocation. Johnson would also seem to have his own point in all this. Blaming and finger-pointing were Wicks’ game, after all, the foundation of his malevolent power. Can the same tools be used to dismantle his legacy? Jud himself finds it difficult to convey God’s mercy to the murderer, but he does it because this, too, is his duty, even if he personally struggles to forgive. It is Blanc who must remind him that it will take more than justice to right the foundering ship of this community. Father Brown, no doubt, would approve.
