Hercule Poirot

Rian Johnson has described Knives Out as his Christie film and has talked about wanting to write the kind of puzzle he grew up reading rather than a parody of it. The apparatus is Poirot's: a wealthy patriarch dead in a large house, a family who all had reason, a foreign detective the family patronises and underestimates, a reconstruction told in flashback as each account is contradicted, and the assembled drawing-room solution. Benoit Blanc's absurd accent does the job Poirot's Belgianness does: it lets everybody in the room treat him as a novelty while he listens. Johnson's own twist is structural, handing the audience the apparent answer in the first act.

Sidney Lumet's film of Christie's 1934 novel, with Albert Finney as Poirot and a cast assembled so that every suspect is a star. The detail usually reported: Christie attended the premiere and is said to have liked it, which she said of almost none of the adaptations made in her lifetime. Her one recorded complaint was Finney's moustache, which she thought insufficiently magnificent. The solution is kept whole, which is the test for this book: twelve stabbings, twelve jurors, and a detective who chooses which of two solutions to hand to the police.

Snyder was a big murder mystery fan and Agatha Cristie was one of the main influences for the mystery in her book together with other big authors of this genre.

Agatha Christie wrote Poirot in the tradition Holmes created and made no secret of it: Captain Hastings, who narrates the early novels, is a Watson, a loyal and slightly slow companion who records the detective's cases, and Inspector Japp plays Lestrade's part.