Dying Clue: Difference between revisions

* In a novel by [[John Dickson Carr]], the victim says before dying to the person trying to assist him "It was your gloves". {{spoiler|It had previously been established that the victim only spoke French and that a [[Translation Convention]] was being used. In French, "your gloves" is "vos gants", which sounds similar to the murderer's name "Vaughan".}}

* Parodied in ''[[Tales of Monkey Island]]'', when {{spoiler|1=Morgan LeFlay}}'s rather lengthy dying speech (unheard by the player) is completely misunderstood by Guybrush, leading him to think that {{spoiler|[[Mad Scientist|the Marquis De Singe]] killed her instead of [[Big Bad|LeChuck]]}}.

* Played with in [[Kim Newman]]'s ''[[Anno Dracula]]'', where a victim, in her dying spasm, grabs the trouser leg of the attending doctor. The protagonists jokingly suggest that she was trying to tell them the killer's name was "Sydney Trouser", or that she was aiming for "Mr Boot" and missed. It takes them much longer to discover what the audience by this point already knows: that it was the doctor who did it.

* In the [[Sherlock Holmes]] story "The Boscombe Valley Murder", the victim and his son are alone in the woods at the time of his death and the son hears the victim say something about "a rat" before dying. What he was trying to say was "Black Jack of Balarat", but the son only heard the last part. {{spoiler|The murderer was John Turner, a man who lived with the victim. Turner had spent his younger days in a gang called the "Balarat Gang" and he had first met the victim when the victim was driving a stagecoach that the gang intended to rob. Turner had the opportunity to kill the victim then, but didn't. Years later, Turner encountered the victim again and the victim, without a penny to his name, threatened to tell the police what he knew about Turner if Turner didn't support him and his family. This was all well and good until the victim wanted to marry his son to Turner's daughter. Turner wasn't having it, so he killed him. Turner's name in the gang had been "Black Jack of Balarat."}}

* In one short story (whose title escapes me), a detective looks into the murder of a rock singer. The singer grabbed his guitar as his final act and broke two strings. Questioning the singer's girlfriend, manager, and two of his band members turns up nothing. {{spoiler|The detective's partner offers to play a song on the broken guitar, except the E and D strings are broken. One of the band members is named Ed.}}

* In Get Smart, the Dead Spy Scrawls are a specific shorthand designed to be left by dying spies.

* In the [[Nero Wolfe]] short story "Before I Die," Archie Goodwin is on hand to hear the last words of the victim of a drive-by shooting: "Shame. Goddamn shame." {{spoiler|What she was actually saying was not "shame" but "''Shane''", the name of her then-unknown accomplice, who had come up with his own idea to get money.}}

* A case from [[Tantei Gakuen Q]], early on in the anime. The victim is found dead in front of a computer, with a seemingly significant set of letters typed in. The resident [[Insufferable Genius]] tries every possible code to crack it, but fails until he takes the advice of [[The Ace]] [[The Hero|Hero]], Kyu. {{spoiler|there ''was no code'' to the message, the victim literally wrote the killer's name onto the keyboard in kanji with their finger.}}

* In [[Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (Literature)]], toons create word balloons when they speak (unless they consciously choose not to). A word balloon containing Roger's final words is found at the scene of the crime, but it's ambiguous without knowing the way the words were said.

** This had earlier been used in a short story of [[The Saint]], with people suspecting that the murderer was a policeman until Simon Templar realized the victim's nationality. The killer's name was Soren.

** Again, in one of Isaac Asimov's ''Black Widowers'' stories the guest relates the tale of a Russian spy (that is, a Russian national working for the West) who left a dying message that nobody had been able to interpret: the letters E P O C K from a Scrabble set. The word 'epock' was meaningless and no anagram could be found either, so the spy's intention had been a mystery for more than twenty years. As always, Henry the waiter solves it, pointing out that the letters ''could'' be rearranged - to form 'CKOPE', which in the Cyrillic alphabet spells the word 'score'. This, along with a newspaper opened at the sports page (the ''scores'', gettit?) implied that the agent was trying to communicate the number twenty. The Widowers' guest is thunderstruck at this - in the code they used at the time, '20' meant "Government in firm control" and if they had known this, the Bay of Pigs invasion could have been called off.

* The dying Inspector-General in ''[[Dong Yi]]'' showed the titular character a set of cryptic hand signals before he died. The signals actually point out the identity of the killer, although it would take the titular character many years before she deciphered the meaning behind them.

* In ''[[The Swan Princess]]'', King William says "It's not what it seems, Derek. It's not what it seems!" in reference to the [[One-Winged Angel|Great Animal]] that has attacked him. Derek has to figure out what he means by himself, eventually finding a book that describes shapeshifting in the library.

* Taken to rather ridiculous extremes in ''[[The Da Vinci Code]]'' ({{spoiler|dragging himself round an art gallery scrawling hidden messages on various paintings before arranging his dying body in a meaningful pose}}), since revealing the identity of the killer is not so important to the dying man as giving clues to the [[Ancient Conspiracy]] that he was killed to cover up.

* In ''[[Call of Duty]]: [[Modern Warfare]] 3'', {{spoiler|Soap is barely able to choke out "Makarov knows Yuri" before dying. Price confronts Yuri shortly thereafter and we see Yuri's backstory.}}

 

** The victim is in a museum that gives out custom pens to their employees, and the victim is an employee of the museum. It is shown on a security cam of the victim grabbing a exhibit card from a table and his pen, and scribbling something into the paper before throwing the pen away. {{spoiler|He was trying to scribble out the name of the other employee that the killer was trying to frame, but the killer purposely left a pen that had no ink on the table and then switched it out with a functioning pen later.}}

* The mystery comic series ''[[The Maze Agency]]'' had an example of this version using one of Jack the Ripper's famed messages.

* The culprit in the Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet wrote RACHE on the wall to make the police think of a revenge killing by a secret society or that the murderer's name was Rachel

** In "A Study in Pink", a loose adaptation of the story in [[Sherlock]] {{spoiler|the victim did write RACHE, but she died before she could finish writing RACHEL, the password to her computer.}}

* On one episode of ''The Cosby Mysteries'', a reporter murders a British actress, writes Guy's phone number on her hand (to imply she was going to call him), and forges an entry in her diary to cast suspicion on her husband. However, Guy notices two mistakes: the forged diary entry uses the American spelling of "color" instead of the British one ("colour") and his phone number was written on her left hand which was the hand she wrote with.

* In the [[Father Brown]] mystery, "The Wrong Shape", the victim is found with a sheet of paper on their body which has typwewritten on it, "I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!" with not quotation marks. The unusual shape of the paper (the upper left corner is snipped off, as it is on all of the sheets of paper in the room) and the presence of one less corner than sheets of paper leads Father Brown to realize that {{spoiler|a quotation mark was removed from a line of speech. The end of the story has a confession which indicates that the victim had been writing a story involving a man killed by hypnotism and the killer borrowed that last sheet to distract the investigators, snipped off the quotation mark, and burned the rest.}}

* A few cases in the book ''Minute Mysteries'' involve this, along with other books with mini-detective puzzle shorts. More often than not, they are a framing attempt made by the person writing the note, and it's left to the reader to find the reason.