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) producer; Detective Coleridge, an amateur actor, provokes a confession by creating fake video evidence of the producer's rehearsal murders. The housemates: The television crew: The police: Elton makes references in this novel to both Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth. David, the actor, has the first four lines of Hamlet's soliloquy "To be, or not to be" tattoed around his ankle. This allows both Kelly and the police officers to identify him as a porn star who starred in a movie in which Kelly was an extra. This threatens his reputation, as he wishes to become a serious actor again. Inspector Coleridge