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{{trope}}
{{quote|''Ransacking hotel rooms is probably safe,''
|'''[[The Universal Genre Savvy Guide|The Evil Henchman's Guide]]'''}}
You've got the [[MacGuffin]] and the [[Big Bad]] knows it. So is he going to send his [[Mook
Why not try to search your room first?
This is always ''intended'' to be while the character is
There's two methods. Sneaky, and rushed.
* The sneaky way, the character only discovers the search when he returns and finds it subtly
* The rushed way involves tipping over all furniture, cutting open mattresses, smashing windows, and dumping everything on the floor. Seriously, if the whatever is something small; the ''mess'' would be harder to find it in than anything else. Mooks that resort to the obviously ransacked technique may want him to know it's happened, may be [[Too Dumb to Live]], or may resort to it because it's quicker.
** Sometimes the mess is intentionally created to stop investigators from finding out what's been taken.
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[[Super-Trope]] of [[Faking and Entering]]
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* Taken to extremes with Light in ''[[
** He's also got the pencil lead on the hinge that breaks when the door is opened (the pros didn't find that).
* Happens to Chiaki at the very beginning of ''[[Darker
== [[
* [[Tintin
* There was a ''[[Mad Magazine]]'' satire once, which showed a picture of a room before being searched by the Queensland police, and then again after. It was very neat before, totally trashed afterwards. It was a puzzle: 'How many differences can you spot between this pictures?'. The correct answer, of course, was 'none'.
== [[Film]] ==
* Happens twice in ''[[Indiana Jones and
** Before Indy leaves the United States, Henry's house was ransacked by Nazi agents.
** After Indy reaches Venice both his and Dr. Schneider's rooms are turned upside down. It turns out that Dr. Schneider's room being ransacked was [[Invoked]], {{spoiler|as she was a Nazi spy and the ransacking was staged}}.
* In ''Gotcha!'', both the CIA and the KGB ransack Jonathan Moore's apartment. They don't find the film spool he smuggled out of East Berlin because he kept it in one of his pockets the entire time.
* [[James Bond (
* In ''[[The Last King of Scotland]]'', Nicholas Garrigan comes home to find his entire house (provided to him personally by Idi Amin) ransacked and his UK passport replaced with a Ugandan one.
* [[Outrageous Fortune]] plays this straight, then spoofs it. First, the two women go to Shelley Long's apartment ''while it's being ransacked''. After a daring escape, they head to Bette Midler's apartment to find it a complete mess as well. Long panics and tries to run, but Midler grabs her and says "No, this is normal."
* ''The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe'': a team of government agents are following a man pegged as a super-agent whistleblower by an interdepartmental rival - they sneak through his apartment while he's out, photographing all his persomal effects and planting bugs. {{spoiler|The man, however, is an innocent regular guy randomly picked as a decoy, and his day-to-day activities are feverishly scrutinized by the agents.}}
* In ''[[The Game (
== [[Literature]] ==
* In [[Dorothy Gilman]]'s ''[[Mrs. Pollifax (franchise)|Mrs. Pollifax
* In [[Dan Abnett]]'s [[Warhammer
** In ''Ghostmaker'', Gaunt is startled awake and catches Inquisitor Lilith in his room. She assures him that she would not have done it if she had known he was there.
* Emil Karpo (a Russian cop) in Stuart A. Kaminsky's Russian mysteries did that
* A grim subversion in ''
** [[Mind Screw|They may have been lying.]] ''Maybe''.
* [[Harry Potter]]'s dorm room is ransacked by a Voldemort-possessed Ginny Weasley in ''[[Harry Potter and
** Technically, she wasn't possessed by Voldemort at that time. She could only be possessed when she had the diary in her possession. She ''was,'' however, terrified that Harry would talk to Tom Riddle in the diary and find out all of her secrets.
* [[
* ''[[Cthulhu Mythos|The Shadow Over Innsmouth]]'' has the character managing to escape a room ransack. Of course, rather than his mattress, they were planning on cutting open ''him''...
* Played with in ''Hard-boiled Wonderland''. Two men deliberately break into the [[The All-Concealing "I"|main character's]] apartment when he's there to both intimidate him and search/ransack the room.
* [[James Bond]]'s hotel room in ''[[
* In one ''Nick Carter Killmaster'' novel, the title character actually breaks the fourth wall concerning a search, telling people how James Bond ruined the "hair on the doorjam" technique, that he now used a new one, and that we were crazy if we thought he was going to reveal it in a lousy 95 cent paperback.
* The rushed version shows up between scenes with Han's room in ''[[The Courtship of Princess Leia]]'', although it hardly matters that it's obvious {{spoiler|since he skipped town with Leia already}}.
* Subverted in Rob Grant's ''[[Incompetence]]''. Harry intentionally keeps his apartment messy, but takes photographs before he leaves, reasoning that any fool can ransack a tidy room and replace it as it was, but it takes a professional to ransack a messy room without being noticed.
* In ''[[Jeeves and Wooster (
{{quote|
He corrected me respectfully, giving it as his opinion that the undersigned was not a tiny little dog, but well above the average in muscular development. In particular, he drew my attention to the animal's teeth. }}
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* ''[[The X
* ''Outrageous Fortune''. Happens several times through the series.
** Van & Munter stealing the "smoking gun" for Jethro. Rushed, made to look like a normal robbery so it doesn't get back to Jethro.
** Loretta stealing the money lenders cash from Draska. Rushed, had to steal the money before Draska sobered up.
** The Horsemen raiding the West house. They couldn't find the drug money so they stole every object in the house.
* On ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'', [[The Professor|Mohinder]] comes home and surprises a Company agent searching (and bugging) his apartment. The agent claims to be an exterminator, and protests "this man pulled a gun on me" to a neighbor witnessing the ensuing fight. Of course, the gun holster exposed under the agent's jacket makes this lie [[Implausible Deniability|rather obvious]].
* On [[Burn Notice]], CSS agent Jason Bly has Michael's apartment searched. It's a subversion in that Michael is there at the time. Also, Bly doesn't expect to find anything; he's just doing it to mess with Michael.
* In ''[[Community]]'' episode "[[Community
* The [[Nickelodeon]] [[Game Show]] ''[[
* ''[[
* The 1993 Australian spy series ''Secrets'' showed how this is done in real life, with the fictional intelligence agency always taking polaroids of the room beforehand so everything could be replaced.
== [[Video Games]] ==
* The beginning of ''[[Indiana Jones and
** The same thing happens in the prequel, ''[[Indiana Jones and
* Subverted in ''[[Persona 3]] FES'': in one of the security videos, Mitsuru calls in the cops because she thinks someone has broken into Junpei's room. Turns out it ''always'' looks like that...
* The rushed way is played out halfway through ''[[Snatcher]]'', culminating in a very tense scene.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Espionage Tropes]]
[[Category:MacGuffin]]
[[Category:Action Adventure Tropes]]
[[Category:Plots]]
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