Blatant Lies/Literature
These are definitely not examples of Blatant Lies in Literature.
Discworld
- In Making Money, Moist asks why Mrs. Lavish keeps two loaded crossbows on her desk. The answer is "family heirlooms". He notes that a lie so blatant is clearly meant to make a statement rather than be believed.
- Considering the rest of her family, it's more of a Jedi Truth. If any of her family tries anything funny, the crossbow bolts will be heirlooms, after they've been...forcibly gifted upon the family member in question.
- In Thud!, a fight nearly breaks out between a troll and a dwarf officer. Commander Vimes enters the room to find a table overturned, and the potential combatants being restrained by their fellow officers. He asks who's going to be the first to "tell me a huge whopper". Nobby Nobbs obliges by offering up an utterly preposterous explanation about how the dwarf almost drank some (dangerously chemical) troll coffee, and the others rushed to stop him. Vimes pretends to buy it, and the others pretend to believe that he buys it. Much of what Nobby Nobbs does involves this trope. He has been seen using the excuse that his "granny died" in order to get out of work. When directly asked by Colon, he says that this is about the twentieth one it happened to. Watchmen seem to be expected to have that particular excuse, having been given three afternoons off for grandmother's funerals a year.
- The "grandmother's funeral" excuse comes up again when two troll constables are given an order to apprehend another troll, Acting-Constable Detritus. This exchange promptly occurs (which showcases genius-level thinking, for a troll):
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Sergeant Colon: Lance-Constable Coalface! Lance-Constable Bauxite! Apprehend Acting-Constable Detritus! |
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- Feet of Clay also be Terry Pratchett has Vimes and Detritus discussing who possibly could have threatened Coalface's drug smuggler while a new applicant looks on in disbelief as Detritus's assurances that none of his trolls would ever do such a thing (and yet he knew who was threatened and why) are accepted.
- This is also a case of Jedi Truth since none of Detritus' trolls actually did the deed. It was Detritus himself.
- Monstrous Regiment. Roughly every other spoken line.
Other works
- In Duumvirate, Sarah raids and kills a pervert, then "found" a will on his hard drive that everything he owned was to go to her son. More a Take That than a lie meant to be believed.
- In the Harry Potter series, the Dursleys claim Harry has gone to "St Brutus' Secure Centre for Incurably Criminal Boys" to their fellow Muggle neighbors to explain his long absences at Hogwarts. Aunt Marge approves, and asks whether they still use the cane.
- The Dursleys also told Harry that Lily and James Potter died in a car crash. They seem to have told Marge that as well.
- When asked directly by Harry what he saw when he looked into the Mirror of Erised, a mirror that shows one's greatest desire; Dumbledore claims to see "a pair of thick, woollen socks." It's actually his dead sister, whom he may or may not have accidentally killed, alive again.
- In the classic novel Gladiator, when his Army superiors ask for an explanation of his superhuman powers, Hugo Danner does NOT speak of his father's medical experiments. Instead, he simply says, "I'm from Montana."
- Because most of the people in The Dresden Files are deeply in denial, large amounts of crap can be made up without anyone noticing. For example, a magical diagram to redirect a curse onto its originator is "Feng Shui", and Murphy once suggested calling in Homeland Security on the Denarians' demon-possessed asses by saying they're "terrorists with advanced biotechnology suits." However, this also gets Double Subverted in "Turn Coat" when a security guard insists on taking Harry's staff, which he says is "traditional Ozark folk art": not because he knows that the staff covered in mystic runes has, in the past, been used to blast a rampaging hell-werewolf all the way through two buildings, but because he thinks Harry could smack someone with it. Of course, Harry has been known to do just that at times.
- Johnny and The Bomb shows that it's possible to appear out of thin air, claim you're looking for the pottery club, and let everyone's Weirdness Censor do the rest.
- Earlier, Johnny notes that the phrase "We're doing a school paper" seems to grant you all sorts of access, and that Hitler could probably have conquered all of Europe by claiming it was school research.
- Twice in the X Wing Series novel Wraith Squadron:
- The Wraiths, pretending to be the crew of a warship, are on that warship's mission, touring planets aligned with Warlord Zsinj. The captain dies while they are capturing his ship, and at some point a planetary governor hails them and wants to talk to that captain. Improvising, the squadron's actor coats a pair of goggles with fluorescent paint, sticks one end of a tube in his nostril, the other in his ear (to disguise his distinctive features), and pretends to be a lieutenant and says that the captain is in the bath, dictating his memoirs. When the governor states his confusion, the actor roars that Captain Darillian has to budget his time; he's not some planetary governor who can skim taxes with one hand and pick his nose with the other!
- Later, the Wraiths' actor, "Face" Loran impersonates that captain with the help of his full-holo Captain's Log. Most of the people who they met either hadn't known the man or had barely met him and knew little of him other than his melodrama and ego. But then the actor talks in depth to Darillian's immediate superior, making him suspicious when they turn out not to know something the captain should. He gets out of this by furiously improvising, again, and telling the admiral, as the captain, that it's been a very long time since he was home. The admiral knows that, and that the captain's family died thanks to Isard. The actor, as the captain, continues to improvise and tells the admiral that he was in love with Isard, and was wildly conflicted and distracted by this. Going off on a tangent about her, the actor fascinated the admiral long enough that he forgot about his suspicions and almost fell into the Wraiths' trap. This was helped by the fact that Loran had met Isard in person, and his particular talents allowed him to notice and remember very subtle details about her.
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Face: Thank you, thank you. Performances every hour, on the hour. Imperial madmen a specialty. |
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- In Solo Command, during Wedge and Han's "mutiny of anonymity", the various crew off-duty refused to refer to one another by their proper name and rank, or allow people who did into their section. The preferred address was "person who looks like [so and so]". Wedge explains:
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"not-Wedge": Who do you think I am? |
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- Another from Wraith Squadron, when Wedge breaks up a fight:
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Phanan: We were discussing the finer points of a specific hand-to-hand combat maneuver... |
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- And of course, there's Starfighters of Adumar.
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Wedge: We'll need a wheeled transport, one of the flatcam units our pursuers are carrying, and four sets of women's clothing. |
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- In one Robert A. Heinlein novel (Starman Jones?[please verify]), the main character questions one of his friends about the contents of some boxes the friend has smuggled aboard. The friend claims they're tea cosies, which he's importing as "skullcaps for pinheads". Not so much.
- In Callahan's Secret, by Spider Robinson, Mike Callahan recounts how, after a dimly-remembered alcoholic event, he woke up naked in New York and wound up riding a police horse, using the horse blanket as a toga. He averted attention by galloping boldly through the streets and periodically shouting, "Attack of the Horseclans! Coming soon from United Artists!"
- In Drugs & the Dominoes, when Luck Gandor pulls himself together after near-decapitation in front of a witness, there's no possible plausible lie, so he goes for a blatant one:
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Luck: [grabs magazine with a red cover off shelf] Oh my, that was dangerous. If not for the timely rescue of this book, I would have died. |
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- Everything Shin-tsu of The Longing of Shiina Ryo says is taken as this, even though he's telling the truth. It's not his fault the Universe made him its plaything.
- The Antichrist in Left Behind, despite supposedly being the agent (and later, living avatar) of the Prince Of Lies, uses a lot of these. It only works since he has some ill-defined Mind Control powers to back him up, and more importantly because the authors portray the entire population of the planet after the Rapture as morons.
- In the first Star Trek: Millennium novel, when Dr. Bashir asks Garak to aid him in identifying two recently-discovered bodies (referencing Garak's expertise), Garak responds: “Oh, Doctor, I'm afraid that in matters of mysterious deaths, I am entirely bereft of experience”. No-one is amused. Bashir then clarifies he wanted Garak to examine their clothing..."I meant your expertise as a tailor".
- In A Song of Ice and Fire the Frey's excuse for the Red Wedding is that Robb's forces attacked first, transformed into wolves and they were forced to kill them in self defense. Unsurprisingly no one really buys this, but they're relying on people accepting it for political reasons. It's not proving very effective.
- An Elegy for the Still-living Francis Church convinces a prisoner to play a game where they take turns asking and answering questions. Either player can accuse the other of lying. If the accuser is correct, he wins the game. The prisoner spots a loophole in the rules and decides never to make an accusation. Almost everything Francis says from that point on is a lie. Some of what he says is actually pretty subtle, but "I am not afraid of anything," is obviously untrue.
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