Unkindest Cut of All

Consider a murder mystery in which the motive is inheritance or insurance money. You’re probably thinking, “What, another one?” This is such a commonplace trope in novels, films, and TV that there is a page dedicated to it at Tvtropes.org. (I toyed with an inheritance theme myself in my short story Cold Dishes.) It is an easy type of mystery for a writer to set up because a motive is self-evident and conflicts of interest among survivors are certain. Sometimes the script isn’t a mystery at all but rather a suspense drama: the audience wonders if the perpetrator (revealed in the early scenes) will get away with it. Columbo episodes are in this category. Double Indemnity (1944) set the big screen standard for the murder-for-insurance plot, and it is still hard to beat. Another subset of the genre is one in which multiple heirs to a fortune are all suspect when the matriarch/patriarch is murdered. Typically the soon-to-be-departed wealthy character has announced to the soon-to-be-suspects an intention to change the beneficiaries of a will or insurance policy; the murder occurs before the change can be made. There is usually a wild card, which is to say someone with a motive other than financial. Just a few among the multitude of productions of this type these are Another Thin Man (1939), Agatha Christie’s Murder, She Said (1961), and even an episode of Joss Whedon’s scifi series Dollhouse (“Haunted” 2009). The trope is so well-worn as to invite parody, but a surprisingly straight-up old-fashioned entry to the genre is 2019’s Knives Out, which spun up in my Blu-ray player a few days ago. It proved the concept still has legs when scripted well.

Knives Out has a stellar cast including Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, Toni Collette, Riki Lindhome, Ana de Armas, and Christopher Plummer. While the movie is not played for laughs, there is dark humor in the whodunit’s characters and situations. Premise: wealthy mystery writer Harlan Thrombey dies of an apparent suicide by self-inflicted knife wound the night of his 85th birthday party at which his disreputable family was present. The police are ready to dismiss the death as suicide, but private detective Benoit Blanc (Craig) has been anonymously hired (with an envelope of cash) to look into it. He has doubts.

The movie cost $40,000,000 to make (moderate by today’s standards), and most of that went to actors’ salaries. Otherwise it was modestly budgeted. It has earned over $300 million to date, showing that comic book superheroes in spandex immersed in insanely expensive fx are not essential for a commercially successful film. A good script alone still works. Only Once Upon a Time in Hollywood grossed more money in 2019.

Murders for insurance or inheritance are not so rare in real life as one might imagine – note 21 examples listed by JRC Insurance Group on its website. None of the schemes in that list display any sign of the intelligence typically shown by perpetrators in movies. Police were not fooled though it sometimes took time to assemble proof. (It is possible, of course, that intelligent schemers are not so much absent from real life as uncaught.) Occasionally, multimillion dollar estates are at stake as in the movies, but more commonly there is shockingly little money to be gained by the schemers. A local NJ murder case last year was over $10,000. (In a departure from the usual movie setting of a country mansion, Killer Joe [2011] with Matthew McConaughey and Juno Temple was set in a trailer park and depicted a more realistically tawdry murder plot for a paltry payout: a good movie but not for the puritanical or squeamish.) While the overall homicide rate in the US has dropped precipitously in the past 40 years, it is not clear that this particular type of cold-blooded murder has joined the decline – just something to consider before announcing an upcoming change in your will to your heirs.