Writer-director Rian Johnson hits the books to craft the locked room mystery of Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, and so does the Spring Book Club of the film’s church. And if you’re quick, you’ll spy an entire whodunnit reading list onscreen to add to your TBR pile.
There’s a scene crucial to debonair detective Benoit Blanc’s (Daniel Craig) investigation into the “stuff of detective fiction” murder at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, in which accused priest Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) helps him rifle through the parish office for clues. They find one, a simple piece of paper.
On the page, the priest and the detective find a list of the church’s book club titles, and the parishioners seem to be having quite the classic whodunnit mystery binge. Not only does the list include the key “syllabus of how to commit the perfect crime,” John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, but there’s also enough Agatha Christie and Edgar Allan Poe to make an impossible crime seem possible.
Here’s everything on the Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude book club list — and there’s some pretty major ties to the murder at the heart of Wake Up Dead Man (but no spoilers).
The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr
Credit: Mashable / Orion
American author John Dickson Carr’s 1935 mystery novel, The Hollow Man, featuring his recurring investigator protagonist Gideon Fell, has become synonymous with determining the elements of an impossible crime. In Chapter 17, the detective gives his famous “locked room lecture” directly to the reader, detailing “the general mechanics” of how a murder — like, say, that of Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) — could be committed in seemingly impossible circumstances. In fact, Blanc himself uses this book to solve the case in Wake Up Dead Man, dubbing it “a syllabus of how to commit the perfect crime.”
Mashable Top Stories
Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers
Credit: Mashable / Warber Classics
Published in 1923, the spectacularly named Whose Body? is the first of English crime novelist Dorothy L. Sayers’ 14-book detective series. It introduces the iconic Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers’ aristocratic amateur detective. His first case? A London financier is murdered and left in a bathtub, naked but for a golden pince-nez. Hear that Wake Up Dead Man viewers? A bathtub.
The Murders In The Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe
Credit: Mashable / Vintage Classics
Netflix titles love a bit of Edgar Allan Poe, from Wednesday to The Fall of the House of Usher. In Wake Up Dead Man, there’s a famous title from the American writer on the list, 1841 short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue. The tale features the first appearance of the character regarded as the first fictional detective, Poe’s great C. Auguste Dupin, who had immeasurable impact on one Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his own detective, Sherlock Holmes. The investigator is faced with a locked-door mystery, a brutal and grisly double murder with the last killer you’d ever suspect.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
Credit: Mashable / HarperCollins
Who among you crime fiction fiends doesn’t know Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s famous Belgian, moustachioed detective or Miss Marple, her famous elderly, English, amateur detective. The British writer has two titles on the Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude book club list, starring her leading investigators. Published in 1926, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is an absolute masterpiece of a twisty crime novel, with Poirot pulled away from his vegetable garden to solve the murder of a wealthy widower. There’s blackmail, clandestine meetings, mysterious footprints, and yes, the crime scene is a locked room.
The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
Credit: Mashable / HarperCollins
Miss Marple’s first appearance was in Christie’s 1930 novel The Murder at the Vicarage, a murder mystery set in the small English town parish of St Mary Mead — big Wake Up Dead Man vibes. In this whodunnit, the town’s local magistrate and churchwarden is widely hated by everyone in the village — and then he turns up dead in his study. Everyone has a motive, and no one is safe from the watchful eye of Miss Marple.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery is streaming on Netflix Dec. 12.
