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Time-Delayed Death: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
This happens in crime dramas a lot. Basically it involves a death exhibiting a standard pattern:
#Someone is injured.
#Unbeknown to the victim, some vital organ or other's been damaged and he's slowly dying of internal bleeding (alternatively, a careless surgeon may have left something in them after operating on them).
#The victim dies in an unrelated situation and [[Hilarity Ensues]] for the investigators.
#Double points if the place of death [[The Corpse Stops Here|by coincidence]] happens to be the home of a sympathetic character with "prior convictions" or an enemy in high places, the victim gets into an argument before dying, or someone [[Red Herring|steals from him when he collapses]].
When done properly, this can be a reasonable solution to a [[Locked Room Mystery]]. If it makes someone [[Guilt by Coincidence|innocent look guilty]], it can lead to [[Clear My Name]] for a protagonist, or even a [[Vigilante Execution]] for a passerby or [[Red Shirt]]. The latter is more common if the series focuses on the investigators. Note that being fatally wounded and not dying immediately isn't this trope. Parts 2 and 3 as mentioned above are necessary to count as this trope.
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See also [[You Are Already Dead]], for a form of killing technique in martial arts and other stories that works like this; and [[Secretly Dying]] for when someone is intentionally hiding that they're doomed. [[The Last Dance]] is a somewhat related trope.
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{{examples}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
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== [[Literature]] ==
* S.S. Van Dine's novel ''The Kennel Murder Case'' is a Locked Room Mystery in which the solution is that {{spoiler|the victim had been stabbed elsewhere but hadn't noticed, and went to his room to go to sleep and locked himself in before dying there}}.
* This is what happens to the murdered man in ''[[Lord Peter Wimsey|Busman's Honeymoon]]'' by [[Dorothy L. Sayers]]
** Subverted in '' {{spoiler|Have His Carcase}}''. The death merely looked like it had been delayed in that case, but it was still enough to get the police looking for an alibi for the completely wrong time.
* Done as well in Randall Garrett's ''[[Lord Darcy|Too Many Magicians]]''. Gets the argument bonus points, too.
* Used (in combination with a few other things that complicate it) in the classic [[Locked Room Mystery]] ''The Hollow Man'' by John Dickson Carr.
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== Film ==
* In the Cheap Detective, one of the villains has been bleeding to death for 40 years.
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* ''[[CSI]]'' and its spinoffs love this trope:
** ''CSI''; A man who was punched in the back of the head in a bar fight, who later died of a brain hemorrhage in the bath.
** ''CSI: NY''; A woman who was in a car accident and died (from bleeding out due to lacerations on her spleen) in an apartment while feeding a friend's fish {{spoiler|(coincidentally before a fire broke out)}}.
** ''CSI: Miami''; A woman who appeared to have died in a car accident actually died of toxic shock (from a sponge which was left in her after surgery) while driving.
** Another ''CSI'' example: A boy who was {{spoiler|stabbed trying to prevent his little brother from murdering their mother's boyfriend}} tries to walk home, but collapses and dies... right under the tires of a cab. The cabbie then {{spoiler|gets [[Vigilante Execution|beaten to death by a mob]] who thinks he ran the boy over}}.
** Variation on ''CSI: NY'': A man who had a pair of forceps left in him after surgery to {{spoiler|change his appearance after working as a con man}} went insane from the toxic shock, but this didn't kill him directly. Instead he was {{spoiler|shot by his partner in crime after he accidentally paid her share of their loot with counterfeit money}}.
** A weird one: A gambler slowly dying of lead poisoning from the chocolate he consumed every night at the table was accelerated to ''right now'' by a stinger of eye drops left in his drink. ([[Quip to Black]]: "Literally, death by chocolate.")
** There was an episode where a bull rider cracked a vertebrae after getting kicked in the head, only to die after {{spoiler|Getting decked in the face by someone, breaking his neck fully.}}
** Another episode of CSI had an episode based on the case of Peter Porco mentioned in the [[Real Life]] section. The victim was a sports coach who was {{spoiler|struck over the head with one of his own trophys by a member of his team he was keeping on the bench for having been involved in an accidental shooting}}.
** And one on ''[[Law and Order]]'': a homeless man was hit and run by a high-end automobile, only to have it turn out he was already dying from a head wound earlier that night.
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== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* [[Played With]] in [[Dungeons
== [[Video Games]] ==
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* ''[[Pokémon]]'' has Perish Song, which works like this.
* In ''[[World of Warcraft]]'', fire mages have the [[Heal It with Fire|Cauterize]] talent, which heals a mage by burning a fatal wound. The downside is that the burning itself will kill the mage if they don't get proper healing within the next 6 seconds.
* ''[[Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney]]'' features a killer who sent {{spoiler|a poisoned stamp to their intended victim so that they would die when they licked it}}. Said poison however is slow-acting, so after {{spoiler|sealing his fate with the lick}} he went on to have an interview with a journalist. During this interview he took a swig of the coffee his daughter made for him, only to drop down dead from the earlier poisoning straight after {{spoiler|(as well as getting the poison that was already on his tongue onto the rim of the cup)}} making it seem like he died from a poisoned mug of coffee.
== [[Real Life]] ==
* [[Harry Houdini]] died of a ruptured appendix shortly after one of his shows. Before that show, a man came backstage and tried to test Houdini's "abs of steel" by punching him in the abdomen several times. This led to the well-known (but [http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/houdini.asp false]) [[Urban Legend]] that the man's punches caused Houdini's burst appendix.
* In an especially creepy Real Life example, murder victim Peter Porco, after taking several blows from an axe to his head, woke up, went about his daily routine of making coffee and fetching the morning paper, then finally collapsed back into unconsciousness and died, apparently unaware the entire time that he was bleeding to death, or even injured, due to brain damage. The entire scenario, as well as the subsequent murder trial, made ''48 Hours Mystery'' and ''Forensic Files''.
* Natasha Richardson was lucid after a seemingly minor head injury, but developed a headache hours later.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natasha_Richardson#Injury_and_death\]
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* Ingestion of ethylene glycol (antifreeze) initially produces symptoms very much like plain old alcohol intoxication. But the body then proceeds to break ethylene glycol down into toxic chemicals, and death ensues probably within 12 to 36 hours after consumption.
* Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary was stabbed through the heart with a sharpened nail file in 1898 while walking down a pier to board a ship—but the nail file was very thin and made a very narrow wound, and no one saw any external bleeding because of the tight corset the Empress was wearing. She actually got up after her assailant ran away, continued walking down the pier, and boarded the ship. After boarding the ship she whispered "What has happened to me?" and collapsed into unconsciousness, dying of internal bleeding shortly thereafter.
* Depressed skull fractures. They can often cause a hemorrhage into the brain, causing this trope.
* Events like this happened so often in England when dueling was still legal that there's still a law on the books: it's not murder if your victim took more than a year to die.
* The death of Virginia Rappe in 1921 from a ruptured bladder (most likely caused by back-alley abortions) led to the arrest and prosecution of comic actor [[Fatty Arbuckle]] for her alleged murder. Although he was acquitted of all charges, it still destroyed his career and led directly to the imposition of the [[Hays Code]] on Hollywood.
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[[Category:Death Tropes]]
[[Category:Crime and Punishment Tropes]]
[[Category:
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