Dead Famous (novel) Dead Famous (novel) Dead Famous (2001) is a comedy/whodunit novel by Ben Elton in which ratings for a reality TV show, very similar to "Big Brother", rocket when a housemate is murdered. Unlike a typical whodunnit, Elton does not reveal the identity of the victim until around halfway into the book. The novel is about a murder that occurs on a reality television programme called "House Arrest", which is very similar to the program Big Brother, and the efforts of three police officers to identify the killer by watching all the video recordings of the ten housemates while the remaining
Dead Famous (novel) housemates continue the reality television show. The novel jumps back and forth in time to show the events in the live video recordings, leading up to the night of the murder, where the remaining eight housemates at the time had to remain in an Indian sweat box- an old-style sauna with a pitch-black interior, the intention being to prompt the housemates to have sex-; the victim left the box to go to the toilet and the killer apparently left the box wrapped in a sheet to conceal his or her identity and stabbed the victim twice in the neck and