Unpacking the literary references in ‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery’
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the latest murder mystery on Netflix with the Southern sleuth Benoit Blanc, is full of wild twists and turns – some, you see coming; others, you can barely imagine.
The “perfectly impossible crime” takes the detective to a small parish in upstate New York, where the wicked and feared Monsignor Jefferson Wicks is found murdered in a tiny closet inside his own church. While to everyone, the locked-door mystery is mind-boggling, still, all eyes are on the newly transferred priest with a violent past, Jud Duplenticy.
Although Blanc considers himself incapable of not solving a crime, the case does give him a run for his money for quite some time. But during one of the most intense build-ups in the investigation, he discovers a crucial clue: the list of the books the members of the Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude church read. Upon the discovery, Blanc exclaims, “My god, this is practically a syllabus for how to commit this crime!”
It is no coincidence that director Rian Johnson’s story in Wake Up Dead Man is inspired by his lifelong fascination with murder mysteries, from the pioneers of the literary genre Agatha Christie to John Dickson Carr. In a conversation with Tudum, following the release of this Knives Out film, the director opened up about his literary references, including the John Dickson Carr book The Hollow Man, which appears in multiple scenes.
“The thing that excited me was the idea of each one of them being a different novel on the shelf. That’s why they’re not called Knives Out one, Knives Out two, Knives Out three. Every one of them has its own title, its own identity, its own town, its own theme, just like Agatha Christie’s books do,” Johnson says. So, let’s dive into them.
The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr
The most significant literary reference in Wake Up Dead Man is undoubtedly The Hollow Man. In a monologue, Blanc relies on his knowledge of the book to decipher the possible murder methods that could have been used to kill Wicks. “In The Hollow Man, the detective, Gideon Fell, gives a rundown of all the possible methods of a locked-door killing. So, let’s line ‘em up and knock ‘em down,” Blanc says in the movie.
Whose Body? by Dorothy Sayers
Whose Body? serves as the debut novel for English author Dorothy Sayers, who belonged to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction alongside Carr and Christie – the era from the 1920s to ‘30s. The novel tells the story of a nobleman, Lord Peter Whimsey, who investigates a naked body without a name, leading him down a dark path of revelation.
Whose Body? was one of the books from the reading list in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue is a short story about an amateur detective, C. Auguste Dupin, who implements a unique skill in his investigative process, which he describes as “ratiocination.” The method is a combination of imagination and genius, allowing him to read the minds of those around him, making him the sleuth ancestor of Holmes, Poirot, and also Blanc.
In the short story, Dupin also investigates a locked-door murder just like Blanc does in the Knives Out film.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is considered one of Christie’s most well-known Poirot cases, with the most jaw-dropping conclusion ever. “I think the audacity of the main twist is that it’s something that, if someone did it today, they would be accused of subverting the genre or worse. And I think it’s brilliant,” Johnson told Tudum in 2022.
Ackroyd tells the story through the lens of an unreliable narrator whose parallels are drawn with Father Jud’s unreliable narrative in Wake Up Dead Man. Early in the investigation, Blanc pushes Jud to recount the events and write it from his own point of view, which makes him convinced that he’s lying about something, or perhaps, hiding the “dishonest” part.
The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
According to Johnson, The Murder at the Vicarage serves as the “jumping-off point” in Wake Up Dead Man. “I told Daniel, ‘I want to make a movie about faith. There’s a history of that with murder mysteries, with The Murder at the Vicarage and GK Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries,” he says.