So you liked Wake Up Dead Man!
Hi! It's me, your resident murder mystery historian/freak. You might remember me from this reference guide I wrote about Knives Out and Glass Onion. And now I'm back!
Wake Up Dead Man, the third Benoit Blanc mystery film, is doing something different with source material than the previous two, less quoting and more synthesis, so I'm going to give you a little overview of how the film was pulling from golden age detective fiction and priest media, as well as a list of things to check out if you want more of the good stuff, some of which Rian Johnson was probably (or definitely) pulling from. I'm separating this into two sections: the mystery bit and the priest bit.
The Mystery Bit (Impossible Crimes)
There are crimes which are impossible because they occur in a locked room, and crimes which are impossible because they occur in front of spectators with no clear cause--Wake Up Dead Man is the latter. Locked room mysteries have existed as long as the genre of detective fiction--Poe's Murder in the Rue Mogue is one, and it's widely considered to be the first detective story. That isn't the film's only tie to golden age detective fiction, however (the golden age is generally considered to be the interwar period--1920s & 30s--but some stretch it to 1950). It follows a fairly typical whodunnit structure; the suspects are introduced, the protagonist (who is not the detective) among them, the crime occurs, and subsequently the detective arrives, sometimes quite late in the game. Rian Johnson has also taken the stereotypical English village and plopped it down in upstate New York (sort of). Can't get much more classic whodunnit than that.
Johnson name checks probably the most famous impossible mystery, The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr (published as The Three Coffins in the US). Carr is interesting, because he was an American who exclusively set his books in Europe. His most famous detective was Dr. Gideon Fell, the detective in The Hollow Man, and he delivers the lecture that Benoit quotes from (sort of lol) in the film. I pulled that chapter out of a copy of the book if anyone is interested in reading it. I read a bunch of Carrs after Johnson mentioned him in an interview about WUDM, but Carr wrote 70 detective novels, 1 novella, and 9 short story collections across 4 names (his own and 3 pseudonyms) so this is FAR from comprehensive.
The Hollow Man / The Three Coffins (1935) Features both a locked room murder AND one witnessed by several people.
The Black Spectacles / The Problem of the Green Capsule (US title)(1939) This is emphatically about murders witnessed by spectators, as the person who dies is literally doing a demonstration of a false murder (his own) and having it filmed in order to prove to his audience that their perceptions are flawed. But of course he dies for real.
The Crooked Hinge (1937) Another murder in plain view, this time of a man in a garden surrounded by but obscured from others in the garden and but also in partial view from the house. This one features an 18th century automaton (for fans of Father Jud's knife-throwing robot), and has one of the wackiest conclusions I've ever read.
Christianna Brand was another prolific golden age detective writer who employed impossible crimes to good effect. Death of a Jezebel (1948) shares some DNA with WUDM: a person nobody likes is murdered literally on a stage and all of the suspects are in view of the audience the entire time. (For more on this genre, I recommend the Shedunnit Podcast's Locked Room episode.)
The Priest Bit
Priest detectives (the Catholic kind) aren't really a thing, with one major exception: Father Brown, who was introduced by G.K. Chesterton in 1910. His DNA is present twice over, as Carr was a big fan of Chesterton's, and the character of Gideon Fell is based on Chesterton in personality and appearance. Father Brown is a Catholic priest who solves murders using his insights into human nature. The stories predate the golden age and Father Brown was in conversation with Sherlock Holmes--another proto-golden age detective--who instead relied on science and logic.
In terms of what shows up in golden age fiction, we have the vicar. Similar in plumage to a Catholic priest, vicars tend to have moral standing in the village if not outright social or political power. They turn up more often than Catholics due to the whole state religion thing. They are victims or suspects, but in the golden age did not tend to be detectives (I'm sure there are scattered exceptions--I can only think of Reverand Dodd in John Bude's The Cornish Coast Murder (1935)). Modern mysteries have rectified this a little, with titles such as James Runcie's Grantchester Mysteries (begun in 2012) and more recently the Canon Clement Mysteries by Richard Coles (himself a Church of England priest). Also priest-adjacent we have The Cadfael Chronicles by Ellis Peters (1977-1994) and Umberto Eco's In the Name of the Rose (1980). (Shedunnit also has an episode on vicars/priests in mysteries.)
I am fundamentally uninterested in priest stories, so for priest media writ large, I called on my Priest Correspondent @wellntruly:
The Exorcist (1973): Boxer priest, "much more of a hang-out movie with a stressed priest than you might expect"
M*A*S*H (tv series, 1972-1983): Boxer priest, "very comic (and in the earlier seasons quite bitingly anti-Republican), but also very socially sincere and sweet"
On the Waterfront (1954): "Marlon Brando is the fighter this time, but the priest character is a major part of the story and like, if youāll forgive the pun, hell-bent on fighting injustice, and a real community organizer."
The Exorcist (tv series, 2016-2018): "one of our premiere priests text, also discusses the mixed value of the Church capital C a lot, and one of the priests in particular has a rough past + intent gentleness vibe that I definitely thought about watching Father Jud"
First Reformed (2017): "my running theory is that First Reformed is actually part of the reason that Wake Up Dead Man is set in upstate New York, as Father Jud is said to be from a town in Albany County, the same area that Ethan Hawkeās pastor works in in that movie. And once again, this is a movie about a man of the cloth unearthing injustice and getting very intent on fighting it with everything heās got"
"I would also like to recommend the Polish film Corpus Christi (2019), which is about a devout kid who gets out of juvenile prison, and ends up semi-accidentally posing as the new priest in the little town heās sent to for workāand the thing is, heās really good at it. But also, will this lie and the darkness in his past come for him? Etc. etc., good stuff."
Adaptations
There are few--zero??--film adaptations of Carr or Brand's work. Which is bad and should be rectified. Brother Cadfael was on tv in the 90s, played by gay icon Derek Jacobi. But for priests and vicars (are they different? we just don't know), you're in luck. Father Brown's on the BBC, Canon Clement is on Acorn, and Grantchester is up to its 3rd detective vicar now. Of these, I highly recommend Murder Before Evensong: set in the 1980s, progressive and proactive priest (vicar)(canon??), VERY good visuals and vibes.
That's all I got! Huge thanks to Tarra for caring about priests so I don't have to. If you read any of these mysteries (or have read others that you see in Wake Up Dead Man) please let me know.
