Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man is a locked-room mystery. There’s a literary lineage behind it.

This post contains minor spoilers for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery .

Of the three modes of mystery stories—whodunit, whydunit, and howdunit—the first two are currently most common, as seen in everything from Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series to Mindhunter . But the Golden Age of detective fiction in the first half of the 20 th century was a heyday for the howdunit, or the locked-room mystery. These celebrated literary puzzles receive a hat tip in Rian Johnson’s third and latest installment in the Knives Out franchise, Wake Up Dead Man , including a brief disquisition on the subgenre from the detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig). Wake Up Dead Man , now streaming on Netflix, itself contains a locked-room mystery. The charismatic but sulfu