The New Yorker:

In Rian Johnson’s latest whodunnit, Josh O’Connor plays a Catholic priest trying to restore moral order at a church befouled by murder.

By Justin Chang

In the seventeenth chapter of John Dickson Carr’s mystery novel “The Three Coffins” (1935), the story pauses so that Dr. Gideon Fell, a brilliant sleuth, can deliver the “Locked-Room Lecture,” an elaboration of all the various methods by which a person might be found murdered in a “hermetically sealed chamber,” a room locked from the inside. It’s one of the most justly celebrated passages in the history of detective fiction, and Carr, engaging the possibilities and limitations of genre as his very subject, breaks the fourth wall with merry aplomb. “We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not,” Fell tells his audience. “Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories.” A surreal gesture with a rational impulse: that was Carr all over. He was the undisputed master of plotting and solving the impossible crime, the murder as magic trick, in which victims appear to have been killed by supernatural means.

I began reading Carr in my early teens, and I never stopped. Even among the great Golden Age detective novels, his work stands out for its cheeky humor, baroque invention, and macabre spirit. The director and screenwriter Rian Johnson has made no secret of his own fandom—he wrote an introduction for a recent re-release of the author’s novel “The Problem of the Wire Cage” (1939)—and although Agatha Christie is an obvious inspiration for Johnson’s “Knives Out” murder-mystery movies, Carr has always struck me as the more profound, if less acknowledged, influence. (As it happens, Christie and Carr were peers; she claimed he was the only detective novelist who could bamboozle even her.) Imagine my delight when, roughly halfway through “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” Johnson laid his Carrs on the table. Confronted with an impossible crime of his own, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the private investigator who anchors the series, launches into a bullet-point summary of Dr. Fell’s famous lecture. Blanc even hauls out a paperback copy of “The Three Coffins,” albeit under its U.K. publication title, “The Hollow Man.”

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