knives out, beaks bloody

alt titles: navs out, beaks bloody; knives out, beaks boney; idk something actually funny i guess

benoit the ninth

This post owes a blood debt to Jessie for reading the draft of this piece and helping me choose which version of Benoit the Ninth to use (yes, there are several); also to Jessie, Louis, Mim, Rosemary, Waverly, and honestly most people I’ve interacted with in the last month or so for listening to my ravings about Gideon and Harrow the Ninth.¹

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Okay so I know what you're going to say. 'Ellie,' you're going to say, 'you can't possibly compare noted vehicle for Daniel Craig's unhinged accent work Knives Out with Tamsyn Muir's masterpiece about extremely and anachronistically Online lesbian necromancers Gideon the Ninth.' And yet, reader, you will find that I very much can and will. 

You're right, of course, that there are some notable differences. There are no (canonical) lesbians in Knives Out. It also lacks really any bones, or magic, or bone magic. However, it features at least one genre-aware character, and Gideon does not,² so perhaps it balances out. As far as I can tell these are the only significant differences. 

What Knives Out and Gideon do share is, first and foremost, a profound and largely structural debt to Agatha Christie, and also a bone-deep faith in the rug-like qualities of bizarre vocal affects (they tie the room together). Acknowledging this is essential for understanding either text, even a little. What I submit to you is that these two things are good in almost the exact same way, and Gideon is basically like Knives Out if you swapped Daniel Craig's Kentucky accent for Gideon's internet speak, and threw in a dash of necromancy and homosexuality for good measure. This means it is the perfect work of art. 

necromantic narratives

Gideon the Ninth is, as Muir has put it, ‘the story of seventeen dolts in a space shack trying to become God’s dead best friends’; I suppose a similar summary of Knives Out would be that it’s the story of nine dolts in a New England mansion trying to become dead Dad’s best friends. This formula handily draws our attention to several essential parts of the texts: the houses, their inhabitants, the father figure, and the competition. Unmentioned, however, are the murders and the mystery, which I think are vital. 

What it comes down to is energy. The sometimes hilariously powerful necromancers in Gideon depend on ‘thanergy’, an energy released by dying cells, to have essentially any magical ability whatsoever — no thanergy means no reanimated skeletons, and then where would we be? So a lot of the book is taken up with demonstrating various methods of obtaining thanergy, up to and including borrowing someone else’s soul for a little while. The holy grail of necromancy would be a sustainable thanergenic power source, but that’s pretty difficult to achieve given the — well, given the death.

The peculiar necromancy of narrative — giving life to dead words, frozen images, people who have never existed — has similar energy requirements, except it needs desire. Characters need to have motives and desires in order for the basic function of a ‘plot’ to even happen. Readers or viewers have to want something from the story before they can become invested in it, and they have to stay wanting it, which means narrative needs to give them something of what they want but never all of it. Almost everything a story does, then, can be understood as creating power sources on which readers’ desire can feed: things like moments of self-recognition, narrative suspense, beauty, lesbians.

The handy thing with a murder mystery is that it offers a basically renewable power source. The murder provides a convenient sense of threat and suspense, especially because the obligation to provide motives for multiple characters means they’ll have competing aims — most often fighting over inheritance, as in Knives Out. This both drives the plot and also gives the reader a reason to become invested: when there’s danger for a character, you’re likely to care about what happens. If you’re lacking a bit of suspense, it’s pretty easy — though not sustainable — to just kill someone else off. The mystery, meanwhile, means both that readers become invested in wanting to know what happens, but also that it’s extremely easy to give them some of what they want — some clues, an obvious suspect — while keeping the answer hidden and leaving them unsatisfied.

But murder mysteries are pretty stale at this point, and can easily become formulaic if you’re not careful. The genius of Gideon and Knives Out, I think, is that they take what the mystery plot can give them — use it, essentially, as an engine to power their narrative and a frame to hang it all on — and then go off in a bunch of other directions. So let’s talk about how they do that.

barrels full of guns

A concept which repeatedly comes up in discussions of the browser-based baseball simulator-come-horror game Blaseball, in which I am overly invested, is the idea of ‘showing the barrel of the gun’. It’s a move available to GMs in a tabletop RPG called ‘The Sprawl’, although as a term for analysing media it was first used by Cat Manning on twitter.³ It’s the basic strategy of just showing that there’s a threat, and something bad will happen; making your audience aware, very early on, that it’s out there. Crucial to this is that you only show the barrel: the audience doesn't see who’s holding it, they just know that someone is. It’s a really handy way to think about this development of suspense but also, crucially, of desire: your audience want to know whose finger’s about to pull the trigger, and when; you get them invested, in a sense, in the whole house of cards falling down.

But let’s roll back a bit and talk about the houses in the first place. The plots of both Gideon and Knives Out are — like all good mysteries — set in motion by an inheritance. Knives Out is mostly set in a richly decorated Massachussets mansion, where family patriarch and mystery writer Harlan Thrombey has died in an apparent suicide; however, many family members seem to have reasons to want to kill him, mostly financial, and there are various things to be suspicious about. Marta Cabrera, the protagonist, was Harlan’s nurse and caregiver, and believes that it was her error which led to Harlan’s death; she spends much of the film trying to hide this fact from Benoit Blanc, a private detective. 

In Gideon, the cast, a group of necromancers and the sword-wielding cavaliers with whom they are paired, attempt to become extraordinarily powerful ‘lyctors.’ Our protagonist, Gideon, is the cavalier for her sworn enemy/love interest, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, who’s desperately attempting to attain lyctorhood in the hopes of saving the swiftly deteriorating Ninth House; all of those attempting this task represent one of the eight planets, the Second through Ninth Houses, on which the bulk of humanity lives. To do so, they head off to the vast Canaan House on the First House — probably Earth in the distant future — to complete various challenges, but pretty soon after they get there, the murders start. Once again, many characters seem to have motives — or, at least, are deeply suspicious — mostly centring around the extremely scarce keys which seem to enable lyctorhood. 

You barely need a marxist analysis to tell you that mystery stories are basically about economics and class. Inheritance is an essential structuring force for mysteries, because it creates a necessary connection between the deceased and the survivors from which both motive and mourning can arise, while also linking the cast together — they’re likely family members — and giving each a significant and not necessarily common stake in the case. (It also, frequently, provides its own setting: the house might be one of the things to be inherited, so it gets away with being pleasingly luxurious.) 

In Knives Out, the most classical mystery story of the two, all of these boxes are ticked: Harlan’s death prompts a mystery plot which is really an economic fight over his inheritance. Any conflict tends to become class conflict, or at least falls along class lines — the deceased will almost certainly be the richest, hence anyone needing the inheritance in the first place, and the rest of the cast will be arrayed across varying economic relationships to them. Cooperation tends to happen along class lines — the Thrombeys generally work together throughout Knives Out, for example, primarily because their economic interests align, not because of any family bonds — and both antagonist and protagonist will frequently be among the least privileged or at least outsiders.

So let’s talk about guns, and barrels thereof. At the start of Gideon, we’re pretty quickly shown a lot of guns: Gideon’s own (we’re endlessly told how buff she is — it’s endearing); the overwhelming lack of any actual guns in an obviously future setting, hinting at the series so far’s central mystery of the apocalypse; and the fact that something is up with a bunch of the other characters. When Gideon and Harrow first arrive on the First House, our attention — with Gideon’s — lingers over two sets of characters: the twins Coronabeth and Ianthe Tridentarius and their cavalier Naberius the Third, and then Dulcinea Septimus and her cavalier Protesilaus the Seventh. Indeed, while every other character arrives simultaneously, they alone have their landing delayed because of ‘an inconsistency in both’ shuttles.⁴

The ‘inconsistency’ is an easy and early way to tell us to pay attention to these characters, and then the book keeps telling us we need to but never really giving us information on why. At first, the answers seem relatively clear: Dulcinea is heavily ill, and there are three representatives of the Third House when there should only be two. But then there are tons of other oddities with both groups that our attention keeps getting directed to: Dulcinea keeps seeming to know things she shouldn’t, or starting to say things but stopping herself; Protesilaus seems to be running at like one-tenth the speed of everyone around him and the first physical description we get makes him sound like a corpse (‘he didn’t look healthy; he looked like a collection of lemons in a sack;’ ‘strange, translucent tinge;’ ‘waxen looking’). 

For the twins, Ianthe looks like the ‘starved shadow’ of Corona, who for her part looks gorgeous and radiant and whatever other synonym you want to find for ‘Gideon thinks she’s hot’ — but, wait, aren’t we also told that necromancers are supposed to look drained by their magic, like when Gideon comments on the ‘necromantically uncharacteristic cleavage’ of characters in the comic books she reads? And why is Ianthe telling someone she was born through a surgical intervention after Corona was born first, despite Gideon overhearing the confused priests of Canaan House accounting for the twins both being there with ‘born at the exact—’, and then referring to herself as ‘the necromancer of the Third House,’ singular (and extremely menacing)? What’s with Naberius’s frequent and clumsy attempts to mediate in a mysterious conflict between the sisters, and why does Ianthe so often wander off on her own?

All of this is relayed as minor asides and we’re told it before anyone gets murdered; it’s only because I’m already rereading that I caught all of it, and I’ve probably missed a bunch even still. Furthermore, there’s a lot of misdirection in here, and while we’re given a lot of the puzzle pieces we’re given very little sense of the final picture. I guess you could put this all together and realise that (spoilers!) Dulcinea isn’t who she says she is, Protesilaus is dead, and Ianthe is the only necromancer of the Third — and much more talented than anyone gives her credit for. 

I’m not, though, sure that this actually helps you work out the ‘solution’ to the mystery plot, even if it does give you some good clues about the culprit. The real value of this stuff is that it trains the reader to be looking for mysteries in the right place, and gives them an impetus to start trying to solve it while feeling the threat — even if the book then starts introducing us to all the other characters. Showing us the actual guns, right at the beginning of the book, is hugely effective here.

Knives Out does something similar with Ransom Drysdale, Harlan’s grandson. Like the Third and the Seventh Houses, he’s the last major character to arrive at the house, and as a result his arrival earns a lot more attention than anyone else’s — particularly because, although every plausible suspect seems to have had an argument with Harlan the day before his murder, we’re shown before he enters the present-day narrative that he was the only one who was angry enough to storm off afterwards and didn’t attend the funeral. Like Dulcinea — who’s played off as a love interest — and Ianthe — who’s frequently absent from the narrative, only occasionally resurfacing — his role in the story is somewhat obscured, in that he’s put into conflict with the family and aligned with Marta from the start. 

Yet the fact that his first lines are to say he should be called ‘Ransom, my middle name’ because ‘the help call me Hugh’ should probably both tell us that he’s a dickhead and give an indication of his actual class allegiances, while also giving us a good hint at a central part of the mystery. Obviously, unlike in Gideon, this is after the murder’s taken place — but it still shows us the barrel of the gun, and it’s crucial that it does so. At this point in the narrative we know that there is a risk — Marta might be found out — but have no sense of what the actual threat is. Ransom's arrival gives it impetus.

lyctoral understanding

There’s something fascinating to me in how both Gideon and Knives Out play with the audience’s knowledge in relation to the protagonists’ throughout. At times, we know a lot less than them, most obviously when tension is created because they have some information about their own intentions or actions we don’t, but frequently also about the ‘rules’ of the setting: while Gideon’s had a sheltered life, she knows much better than us how necromancy works, for example; Marta, meanwhile, knows the Thrombeys’ relationships with one another and with Harlan extremely well, and indeed is frequently giving the police information about their possible motives. This lets us learn things from them and, I think, gives us a level of trust in them as perspectives we should trust. 

Sometimes, though, we know about as much as they do and are left sifting through the same clues, which lets Johnson and Muir align our perspectives with their protagonists in interesting ways in order to enable the deferred and piecemeal gratification mysteries depend on. And then, occasionally, we actually know more: Gideon, for instance, is really a horrible sleuth and misses a ton of really important information which we’re shown but she doesn’t remark on; Marta spends the entire film with a spot of Harlan’s blood on her converse. 

We’ve also got more genre awareness than they do, which really stands out in what are two hugely genre-savvy texts. So, in Knives Out, Marta should know that she’s playing by mystery novel rules but really just doesn’t: there’s a sequence of light slapstick when a dog brings her some possibly-incriminating evidence and she throws it away, only for the dog to bring it right back when detective Blanc can see it. Obviously that’s what happens — you can’t get rid of evidence that easily in a mystery, and fictional dogs will always play fetch — but she doesn’t expect it. While both are structured by mystery conventions, meanwhile, they both step in and out of other genres extremely fluently, so in Knives Out we get a few sequences straight out of thrillers and the film relies on our generic literacy to get us through with minimal work done to prepare us for the new genre, while Marta’s sat panicking in a way a protagonist in a thriller never would. 

In Gideon, a lot of the setting comes from sci-fi and fantasy, but most of the actual narrative beats are straight horror. One of the most painfully memorable moments in the book has Gideon fall asleep once she’s got a character she’s protecting somewhere safe; if you’ve ever heard of horror movies,⁵ you’ll know what she sees when she wakes up, but obviously Gideon doesn’t. 

There’s so much else I could talk about in Gideon and Knives Out — Muir’s honestly staggering worldbuilding, for instance, and the fascinating system of necromancy — but I think what I’m left with in both of them is the intelligence of their use of genre and voice. The mystery plot gives them the basic structure and the engine to drive the narrative forwards, but the work they then put in is all about putting flesh on the bones — metal on the chassis? —  through the characters and the setting and above all the tone. 

Gideon could be as well designed as it likes but without Gideon herself, and the tone she lets the book set, it just wouldn’t be the same. We wouldn’t understand Harrow — and Gideon’s perspective on Harrow — without her first introduction being the observation that ‘Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus⁶ had pretty much cornered the market on wearing black and sneering. It comprised 100 percent of her personality.’ 

Benoit Blanc’s accent is funny, sure, but the sheer strangeness it adds — and then the compassion and kindness with which he treats basically everyone; the odd hilarity and profundity of his comments on Gravity’s Rainbow, a book he has never read but from which he got the idea of I guess a parabola as a model of his investigative method; his outburst of anger in the climactic scene — means he just pulls the whole film together, makes it so much more compelling than it could be. Mystery plots are great tools, but playing it straight can only get you so far; you need the gays, or at least a nice dose of camp, to get you the rest of the way. 

1. An accountability note to say that I’ve been unspeakably terrible at actually acknowledging the people who’ve helped with this newsletter (including but not limited to Kim, Louis, and Mia alongside those mentioned above) and am resolving to do better at thanking them.

2. (Spoilers:) Okay, maybe there’s one, Cytherea, but it’s not 100% clear.

3. Credit is probably also due to whoever runs the account for Blaseball team the Baltimore Crabs for pioneering the use of the term to refer to a barrel with guns in it.

4. Incidentally, this is one of the best scenes for demonstrating another quality of Gideon: it feels extraordinarily cinematic, as if Muir has storyboarded — or even actually recorded — the events and is now just writing them down. You can almost feel the camera movements as Gideon sees the shuttles descend, watches the Third House descend from their shuttle, then looks back to the Canaan House priests as they confer — then a quick cut to Dulcinea falling out of her shuttle (we’re even told that it ‘felt like painful slow-motion’), probably handheld following Gideon over to catch her, and so on. Part of this comes from the fact that Gideon is such a constantly observant character — not in the sense that she’s noticing important plot details (she extremely does not: she’s hilariously bad at seeing what’s in front of her if she can’t be gay about it), but that she’s so frequently looking. For the record, I think maybe this is why her horniness is so important for the book — it means her gaze is so active and can be followed so easily. But the cinematic quality also comes down to Muir’s excellent sense of (what I can’t find a better way to express than) blocking in her prose, so she always knows how characters are moving and how the ‘camera’ is seeing them — part of why her fight scenes are reliably fantastic.

5. And, again, I think horror movies are the referent here: I don’t know the genre quite well enough to give a good example, but even I know that it’s conventional to have someone closing their eyes as a set-up to a jumpscare.

6. Doesn’t really matter but I thought you should know that google docs thought this should be ‘Harrow Park Nonagesimo’.