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Revealing Coverup (view source)

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'''Flambeau:''' But what other plan is there?
'''Father Brown:''' There is only one... To make sure that everybody is looking at something else.
|''[[Father Brown|]]'', "The God Of The Gongs]]''"}}
 
{{quote|''"I will periodically send my assassins to kill random conspiracy nuts in suspicious-looking ways. There is little danger that they will find out about my plans and no one would have believed them anyway, but the heroes will be convinced that they were killed for what they knew and will get so wrapped up in trying to foil my diabolical plan to [[Epileptic Trees|give all trees epilepsy]] that my real plans will go unchallenged. Plus it gives my assassins something to do."''
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== [[Literature]] ==
* This happens a lot in [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[Discworld]]'' novels involving the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. You'd think people would have learned that if you try to cover something up in Ankh-Morpork, Commander Samuel Vimes is only going to get suspicious, dig deeper, and then come down on you like a ton of rectangular building things.
** But is subverted in a rather interesting fashion in ''[[Discworld/Thud|Thud!]]!'', when word is intentionally spread that a murder is ''not'' to be reported to the Watch, knowing that Vimes will find out sooner or later and come snooping around. The person who gave the order does this because he ''wants'' Vimes to unearth and stop the immoral activities of his superiors, which he himself is powerless to stop.
** Also subverted in ''[[Discworld/Jingo|Jingo]]!'' when in order to cover up the fact that {{spoiler|he had tried to have his brother killed as an excuse to start a war, the Crown Prince of Klatch (the Discworld's country of Saudi Arabia stereotypes)}} had various stereotypical items (coins, sand, everything but a "camel under the pillow" etc) left behind to make Vimes think that someone was trying to ''make him think'' that the assassin was Klatchian.
*** Indeed, it's also revealed eventually that a Klatchian pretended to be the villain and fled to Klatch in order to lure Vimes there so he could actually help.
** And in the ''[[Discworld]]'' novel ''[[Discworld/Interesting Times|Interesting Times]]'', the Agatean Empire tells its citizens that outside the Empire is nothing but a howling wasteland of invisible, man-eating ghosts. So when they have to go to war with barbarian invaders, they have to quickly change tack, and say that the enemy are ''not'' invisible, man-eating ghosts. Since Rincewind the wizard is technically on the side of the barbarian invaders, he wanders through the camp telling people [[Suspiciously Specific Denial|that there officially are ''not'' 2,300,009 invisible, giant, man-eating ghosts]]. He was quite proud of the "9": If he'd simply said that there aren't any, they might have believed him, but since he is saying there aren't 2,300,009 of them, people obviously wonder about the precision.
*** It helps that the Empire's army of 700,000 men is already confused about why the barbarian army of seven men is cheerfully marching out to fight them. The [[Big Bad]] tries to be [[Genre Savvy]] when he realizes the rumour won't be squashed, by spreading the tale that those ghosts in fact are there, [[Refuge in Audacity|and that this has enraged the spirits of the Empire's ancestors]]. It backfires because the empire's armies have been fighting a lot of civil wars, and many soldiers are not keen on meeting the spirits of their late opponents either.
* In the [[James Bond]] novel ''[[You Only Live Twice]]'', evil mastermind Blofeld decides to best way to lie low is to operate a castle with a poison garden for people wanting to commit suicide. If they change their mind, the "gardeners" assist them. No one is going to pay any attention to that, right?
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[[Category:Contrived Stupidity Tropes]]
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