Why ‘The Hollow Man’ novel is crucial to ‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery’

The Mystery of the Centrally Locked Room Wake Up Dead Man: A knife-edge mystery sees writer-director Rian Johnson draw on a long literary history. The film draws inspiration from many authors like Agatha Christie and Edgar Allan Poe, but one novel in particular is crucial to the main puzzle: that of John Dickson Carr. The hollow man.

The American author’s 1935 detective novel, which features his recurring investigator protagonist Gideon Fell, functions as a key text in Benoit Blanc’s (Daniel Craig) investigation into the murder of Notre-Dame de la Force Perpetuel. But what exactly is this important book?

What is The hollow man In Wake up dead man?

At first Wake Up Dead Man: A knife-edge mysterynew Chimney Rock resident and priest Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) must face the impossible crime of murdering Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Stabbed in the back in a small room with only one entrance or exit, in front of an entire congregation? It’s “detective fiction”, as Blanc, the famous detective currently in charge of the case, declares.

In his collection of clues, 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 found in the church office, The hollow man It turns out that this was the Spring Book Club title for Our Lady of Perpetual Force – it seems the killer was inspired by the novel.

The hollow man gives “a program on how to commit the perfect crime.”

Credit: Orion / Mashable

In The hollow mana murderer shoots a teacher and disappears from a locked room, then kills another victim on a public street with witnesses and without leaving a trace in the snow. However, there is a very famous chapter, the 17th, which has become synonymous with defining the elements of an impossible crime. Here, Carr has Fell give this famous “closed room lecture” to the reader, describing “the general mechanics” of how a murder (like Wicks’) could be committed under impossible circumstances.

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White described The hollow man In Wake up dead man as “a program on how to commit the perfect crime”, as Fell describes a number of scenarios, including the following:

1. It is not a murder, but a series of coincidences leading to an accident that resembles a murder.

2. It is murder, but the victim is driven to suicide or an accidental death.

3. It is a murder, committed by a mechanical device already installed in the room, and hidden undetectably in an innocent-looking piece of furniture.

Carr would deploy the locked room setting in many novels, such as The problem of the metal cage (a murder on a tennis court) and The twisted hinge And Castle Skull (murders which appear at first sight supernatural).

Agatha Christie’s And then there was noneEdgar Allan Poe The Rue Morgue Murders (both also on the list of the Notre-Dame de la Fortitude Perpétuelle reading club), the book by Gaston Leroux The mystery of the yellow roomthat of Soji Shimada The Tokyo Zodiac MurdersSherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Adventure of the Speckled Band And The Adventure of the Twisted Man – all the mysteries of a locked room, impossible crimes that it would take a real Jonathan Creek to solve.

Or even a Benoît Blanc.

Wake Up Dead Man: A knife-edge mystery will be released in select theaters on November 26, then debut on Netflix on December 12.