Clues, Counterclues, and Red Herrings: Frederick Knott and the Classic Thriller
The 1960s are a decade rife with iconic images: the Kennedys as they wave from their Texas convertible, a flower placed into the barrel of a rifle, Bob Dylan plugging in, a body aflame in Vietnam, tanks in the streets of Prague, barricades hastily constructed from cars in Paris. The 1960s saw revolutions in, among other things, advertising, music, theory, and cinema. Like many of their fellow artists and workers, the great theatre artists of the period were associated with politics and revolution: Jean Genet, the Living Theatre, Harold Pinter, Ariane Mnouchkine, Jerzy Grotowski.
But another playwright working in an entirely different realm also captured the stark contrasts of the 1960s: Frederick Knott. While most people have never heard of him by name, his influence on, and mastery of, the thriller genre is outstanding. Immortalized by Alfred Hitchcock in a film and a rebus, revered by fans of the thriller everywhere, Knott blazed the trail to craft another kind of classic play. He only wrote three, Dial M for Murder, Write Me a Murder, and Wait Until Dark, but at least two of these are among the most recognizable stories of the century: a woman, alone, terrorized by an intruder sent by her murderous husband; another woman, this time blind, caught home alone by a trio of cunning and dangerous con men. Knott’s tales are masterpieces of suspense: they capitalize on drawn out periods of extreme psychological tension and lightning bolt moments of stunning and innovative visual effect. Knott plays on our most basic fears and worst nightmares; his dramaturgy is relentless and precise in its ‘fascinating web of clues, counterclues, and red herrings’ as actor Maurice Evans (who played the lead in Dial M for Murder) recalled. Knott inverts the standard whodunit plot—his audience knows from the very beginning the culprits and the crime, the excitement arises precisely from this knowledge and how it feeds the action that unfurls. A mathematician of plot, his personal obsessions with languages and codes ancient and new (like the sugar cube system in Wait Until Dark), colour his meticulously crafted stage worlds, as well as pepper the larger angles of Knott’s trademark house-ofcards structure.
Against the backdrop of the tumultuous 1960s, Frederick Knott enacted a quiet revolution that combined the familiar structure of the well-made-play with sensational plots of crimes-gone-wrong and charismatic and calculating criminals. He set a standard that has flourished on film, but remains unsurpassed on stage: that of wrenching tension, grabyour- gut terror, and the permission—and provocation—to scream.
–Kate Bredeson
