When I was in my early teens, I was both a devout churchgoer and an avid reader of mysteries. One of my favorite writers was P.D. James , whose Anglican faith informed her fiction in subtle ways. For James, the plotting and solving of murder was a grisly yet profoundly moral undertaking. A detective story, she wrote, "confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means."

The new movie Wake Up Dead Man , Rian Johnson 's latest whodunit after Knives Out and Glass Onion , is too funny and slyly over-the-top to feel like a P.D. James story; to my knowledge, James never incorporated body-dissolving acid or the old poisoned-beverage switcheroo trick. But in his own crafty way, J

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