Good evening! Benoit Blanc is a truly singular character, so a bit of a silly ask: do you feel he's more like Holmes, Poirot, or some secret third thing? I know the Blanc mysteries are an homage to Christie, but his whole "what you do with the truth" speech in Knives Out to Great Nana reminds me of early Holmes, who wouldn't always tell Scotland Yard what was really happening. Then again, in Orient Express, Poirot didn't tell the authorities what had happened either, if I recall correctly? I don't know enough and haven't read enough recently enough, hence the rambly ask. Thanks for reading through it all.

This is a very interesting question!

So in addition to Doyle and Christie, there's at least one other model that is explicitly referenced in the Knives Out movies, which is Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity's Rainbow. I have attempted to read this novel, but I gave up early; Blanc refers to it as "a book nobody has read." The Thomas Pynchon novel I have read is The Crying of Lot 49, which is a kind of a mystery. The protagonist, whose name is Oedipa Maas, winds up investigating this weird secret society named Thurn und Taxis which has something to do with the post office and...I forget the details, but the ending is very inconclusive. Pynchon is not so much about solving the mystery as in exploring mystery itself and the way humans are drawn to and frustrated by it. Benoit Blanc is not much like Oedipa Maas, but I think at least in Knives Out the Pynchon reference makes sense as a commentary on our contemporary moment, when none of us can really take it for granted that we will ever know the Absolute Truth about much of anything.

So in that sense, I think of Blanc as being a more contemporary character than either Holmes or Poirot. He's not a hardboiled detective--he seems very much soft-boiled--so I wouldn't lump him in with Raymond Chandler et al., either. In some ways I think his most immediate influence might be Columbo, since self-deprecation and pretending to be an out of touch idiot are some of his favorite tools. The southern-fried accent also could be a nod to Sam Ervin, the North Carolina Senator who helped bring down Joe McCarthy in the 1950s and Richard Nixon in the 1970s, and who famously referred to himself self-deprecatingly as "just an ol' country lawyer."

However, if we narrow the question to whether Blanc is more influenced by Holmes than by Poirot, I'm going to go with Poirot, largely because of the methods he uses. Blanc is well-educated but he doesn't have that fount of obscure knowledge that allows Holmes to identify 250 kinds of cigar ash, nor can you imagine Blanc doing anything useful with a chemistry set (he would be more likely to 'accidentally' blow one up to create a diversion). What Blanc really knows, and what is most useful to him in solving his two mysteries so far, is psychology. In Knives Out he realizes immediately that Marta was at the scene of the murder, so he keeps her close until he finds out what makes her tick, and along the way learns enough about the other characters to solve the mystery. In Glass Onion, again, there's no technical knowledge required to solve that mystery; he cracks the case by discovering something about the killer's psychology (trying to avoid spoilers here). Poirot's thing is knowing human nature, and so is Blanc's thing.

But I would also say that Blanc, though he started out as a metafictional device, has really become his own thing, partly due to Craig's inimitable and irresistible performance. So three cheers to that!