Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty and Netflix
Knives Out was the last movie I saw in theaters before the pandemic began, and the first movie in 20 years for which I’ve seriously considered hiding in the bathroom and sneaking back to immediately watch it all over again. I didn’t sneak—barely—but am looking forward to Friday’s Netflix debut of Glass Onion, Knives Out’s anthological sequel, with an enthusiasm far exceeding my anticipation of just about everything else this Christmas season.
And that’s not just about this one movie. I’m taking the first movie’s success, enough to justify a sequel, as confirmation of what I’ve been hoping for several years now: The golden age of whodunits is back, and just in time to assuage a cultural moment strikingly like the context of the genre’s creation.
The first golden age of detective fiction arrived a century ago, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. Arthur Conan Doyle was still pumping out Sherlock Holmes stories until 1927, and Agatha Christie’s inaugural Hercule Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, dropped in 1920. The Detection Club assembled in London in 1930, counting British mystery greats including Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and G.K. Chesterton among its members.