As Benoit Blanc’s Wake Up Dead Man’s murder investigation heats up, he discovers a crucial clue: a list of mystery novels read by members of the Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude church. “My god, this is practically a syllabus for how to commit this crime!” the master detective (played once again by Daniel Craig) exclaims.
Writer/director Rian Johnson would know something about that syllabus. The Knives Out films are inspired by a lifetime of love for murder mysteries, from Agatha Christie to John Dickson Carr.
In Wake Up Dead Man, that love is acknowledged within the film. “The John Dickson Carr book The Hollow Man is prominently referenced in the movie,” Johnson tells Netflix. Carr’s books are clockwork masterpieces of deception that turn whodunits into howdunits by placing crimes behind inaccessibly locked doors — just as Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) is killed in Wake Up Dead Man.
This new spin on the classic murder mystery is part of what made Johnson so thrilled to continue the adventures of Benoit Blanc. “The thing that excited me was the idea of each one of them being a different novel on the shelf,” Johnson says. “That’s why they’re not called Knives Out 1, Knives Out 2, Knives Out 3. Every one of them has its own title, its own identity, its own tone, its own theme, just like Agatha Christie’s books do.”
Read on to dive into Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude’s book club spring reading list, and to find out how those same books inspired Wake Up Dead Man, now streaming on Netflix.
The Hollow Man is the most obvious influence on Wake Up Dead Man; in one of his signature monologues, Blanc deploys his knowledge of the book to unravel possible murder methods. “In The Hollow Man, the detective, Gideon Fell, gives a rundown of all the possible methods of a locked-door killing,” Blanc says. “So let’s line ’em up and knock ’em down.”
John Dickson Carr’s work has been a major touchpoint for Johnson, alongside the better-known Christie. “[Wake Up Dead Man] takes a lot of cues from an author that we name-check in it, John Dickson Carr, who’s someone I discovered over the past few years,” he says. Johnson wrote an introduction for a new edition of The Problem of the Wire Cage, published in 2024 by American Mystery Classics, and in 2022 cited Carr’s The Mad Hatter Mystery, The Crooked Hinge, and Hag’s Nook to Tudum as excellent starting points for Carr’s oeuvre.
“He was part of the golden age of detective fiction, along with Christie and Dorothy Sayers,” Johnson says. “His books were always tinged with almost like an Edgar Allan Poe-like gothic tone, and he would veer close to supernatural horror with his books.” Wake Up Dead Man, which in its very title raises the question of supernatural resurrection, fits perfectly into the Carr canon.
The debut novel by English novelist Sayers follows nobleman Lord Peter Wimsey, whose investigation into a naked, nameless body leads him down increasingly unsettling paths.
Sayers, along with Carr and Christie, belonged to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, an era from the 1920s to 1930s when the genre was flourishing on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. “There was a group that would get together and have a detective’s club basically,” Johnson says. Sounds a bit like Blanc’s Glass Onion quarantine Zoom — with a little less Among Us.
Widely considered the first modern detective story, Poe’s short story introduces C. Auguste Dupin, an amateur detective who uses a skill he calls “ratiocination” to investigate crimes. Dupin’s method combines imagination with intellect, allowing him to read the intentions of those around him in a manner that makes him a forebear to Holmes, Poirot, and Blanc. He also has a sidekick, a police counterpart, and plenty of other characteristics that would bleed into the next generation of detective fiction.
In The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Dupin investigates an early locked-room murder, which appears not to have been committed by human hands. Of course, as in any classic whodunit, there is a rational explanation, and like his successors, Dupin finds it.
One of Christie’s most famous Poirot cases is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a murder mystery with perhaps the most shocking conclusion she ever wrote. “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,” Johnson told Tudum in 2022. “And I think it’s brilliant.”
Without fully spoiling the surprise, Ackroyd turns on a potentially unreliable narrator, a move that Wake Up Dead Man borrows when Father Jud (Josh O’Connor) recounts the events of Wicks’s murder only to be rebuffed by Blanc, who knows he’s lying about something. For a split second, it seems that Blanc has caught his murderer already, but Jud’s lie turns out to be something far more commonplace. “Father Jud is actually the number one suspect,” Johnson says. “[But] Blanc believes Jud is innocent, and he joins forces with him to try and find who the actual killer of Monsignor Wicks is.”
The first full-length novel featuring Christie’s second famous sleuth, Miss Marple, The Murder at the Vicarage was a jumping-off point for Wake Up Dead Man’s setting. “I told Daniel, ‘I want to make a movie about faith,’ ” Johnson says. “There’s a history of that with murder mysteries, with The Murder at the Vicarage and GK Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries.”
Johnson thought the question of faith — what it means, what it does, and what it fails to do — made for the perfect combination with the detective film, which is about another kind of faith altogether. “The two worlds of faith and of all the questions raised by a good murder mystery go together incredibly well,” he says.
Johnson, who grew up Protestant, has a deeply personal connection to Wake Up Dead Man’s questions about faith, and to Father Jud’s own journey through the film. “It was a very important part of my life, and so I have a lot of very deep and complicated feelings about all of it,” he says. “ I don’t have black-and-white, easy, hot-take feelings about it. It's a multifaceted thing that I hold inside me that I'm constantly reexamining. To be able to use this movie to do that, hopefully from a generous spirit, that was the goal.”
Wake Up Dead Man is now streaming on Netflix.
