Interrogating the Dead: Difference between revisions

* ''Journeyman Wizard'' by Mary Frances Zambrano has the heroes perform a Questing (the magical version of this), only to bring back the deceased's vengeful ghost instead.

* Played for laughs in a ''[[Discworld (Literature)|Discworld]]'' story, "Theatre of Cruelty", in which it's mentioned that the existence of [[Our Zombies Are Different|zombies]] mean that the victims are sometimes the key witnesses in their own murder.

* ''Heretics of [[Dune]]'': An Ixian Probe can scan the mind of a recently dead person. Taking the drug "shere" will prevent a probe from working long enough for the brain cells to die and become unreadable.

* ''[[Necroscope]]'': Harry Keogh can converse with murder victims due to his clairvoyance. There are also various vampire necromancers that bind souls to corpses so they can torture the truth out of them.

* In the novel [[Eisenhorn|Xenos]], Inquisitor Eisenhorn and Commodus Voke attempt to interrogate the high level psyker they kill. The psyker turns the interrogation into a portal to the [[Hyperspace Is a Scary Place|warp]], sending multiple daemons to attack the gathered Inquisitors.

* This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the key tricks of [[Johannes Cabalthe Necromancer]], later to be [[Johannes Cabal the Detective]].

* There are various ways to do this in ''[[The Dresden Files (Literature)|The Dresden Files]]'', most of them against strictly-enforced rules. Rules enforced with pointy objects and angry wizards. Molly does one of the legitimate ones, on what turned out to be the victim of a succubus. Awkwardness ensued for the watchers. Most of those other ways tend to involve Necromancy, and invite Wardens to come and behead people.

* The so-called "mechanical educators" in [[EE Doc Smith]]'s [[Skylark]] series can be used to read dead minds, as long as they're relatively intact and haven't been dead for more than a few hours.

[[Category:Crime and Punishment Tropes]]

[[Category:Interrogating The Dead]]