MYSTERY MAN

How Rian Johnson became an Agatha Christie for the Netflix age.

- ANNA RUSSELL

When the film director Rian Johnson was a child, he picked up the final book that Agatha Christie published before her death, in 1976: "Curtain: Poirot's Last Case." The novel was sitting on a shelf in his grandparents' sprawling home, in Denver. It had a moody black cover that featured an illustration of the mustachioed detective Hercule Poirot. "It felt very adult," Johnson told me recently. "Very creepy." The story takes place at a grand country house where the guests have an unfortunate habit of dying, or nearly dying, under seemingly unrelated circumstances. A hunting accident. A poisoning. A bullet to the head.

The book was not only a dynamite mystery; it also represented a kind of magic trick. Although it was published at the end of Christie's life, she wrote the manuscript in the middle of her career, in the nineteen-forties. Then, in a twist worthy of Poirot, she sealed it away in a bank vault for thirty years, insuring that it was kept secret. As her popularity waned, she suddenly produced—voilà!—a book written at the height of her powers. The novel was, Johnson said, "very mysterious and awesome, and very, very weird." Soon, he was bingeing Christie novels two or three at a time. He once walked into a fire hydrant while reading one.