“Wake Up Dead Man”: A Murder Mystery with God in the Details

Key Highlights

• “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.