The central locked room mystery of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery sees writer-director Rian Johnson drawing on a long literary history. The film takes many cues from the likes of authors including Agatha Christie and Edgar Allan Poe, but one particular novel is crucial to the core puzzle: John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man.
The American author’s 1935 mystery novel, which features his recurring investigator protagonist Gideon Fell, functions as a key text in Benoit Blanc’s (Daniel Craig) investigation into the murder at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. But what exactly is this important book?
What is The Hollow Man in Wake Up Dead Man?
Early on in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, new Chimney Rock resident and priest Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) is reckoning with the impossible crime that is the murder of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Stabbed in the back in a small room with only one way in or out, in front of an entire congregation? It’s “the stuff of detective fiction,” as Blanc declares, the famous detective now on the case.
In his clue-gathering, Blanc mentions Carr’s novel The Hollow Man and the methods of Gideon Fell, Carr’s fictional detective. And according to a list Father Jud finds in the church office, The Hollow Man just so happened to be the Spring Book Club title for Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude — it seems the killer was inspired by the novel.
The Hollow Man gives “a syllabus of how to commit the perfect crime.”
Credit: Orion / Mashable
In The Hollow Man, a murderer shoots a professor and vanishes from a locked room, then kills another victim in a public street with witnesses and without leaving footprints in the snow. However, there’s one very famous chapter, 17, which has become synonymous with defining the elements of an impossible crime. Here, Carr has Fell giving this famous “locked room lecture” to the reader, describing “the general mechanics” of how a murder (like Wicks’) could be committed in impossible circumstances.
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Blanc describes The Hollow Man in Wake Up Dead Man as “a syllabus of how to commit the perfect crime,” as Fell maps out a number of scenarios, including the following:
1. It is not murder, but a series of coincidences ending in an accident which looks like murder.
2. It is murder, but the victim is impelled to kill himself or crash into an accidental death.
3. It is murder, by a mechanical device already planted in the room, and hidden undetectably in some innocent-looking piece of furniture.
Carr would deploy the locked room framework in many novels, like The Problem of the Wire Cage (a murder on a tennis court) and The Crooked Hinge and Castle Skull (murders which at first appear supernatural).
Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (both also on Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude’s book club list), Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room, Soji Shimada’s The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and The Adventure of the Speckled Band and The Adventure of the Crooked Man — all locked room mysteries, impossible crimes that it would take a real Jonathan Creek to solve.
Or, a Benoit Blanc.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery will open in select cinemas on Nov. 26, then debut on Netflix on Dec. 12.
