As a Death Trope, all spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.
Murder by Inaction in Literature.
- How Clyde finally kills Roberta in An American Tragedy — she accidentally falls overboard from their boat, she can't swim, and Clyde simply doesn't save her.
- In Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None:
- The Rogerses were accused of murdering their former employer by withholding her medication for her heart condition, which led to her death when she got a cardiac arrest.
- Vera Claythorne is accused of letting her lover's nephew Cyril swim out to sea, despite knowing that he wasn't strong enough to swim that far out without drowning, so that he would die and his inheritance would pass on to her lover. She did swim out after him later, but it's left ambiguous if she had a too-late bout of genuine remorse or was just trying to make it look like she did try to save him (the 2015 BBC adaptation shows her very deliberately waiting long enough for him to drown before she swims out after him).
- Below: The first death of the quest happens when the easy-going Tibs alone notices that carnivorous jellies have followed the party, and Dex is closest to the door. He claims to have a very good reason for killing Dex, which is well-known to seemingly everyone but the protagonist. Others who learn that it was not an accident swiftly agree it was justified.
- The Calf of the November Cloud: Parmet hates his cousin Konyek, who is their grandfather and their tribe's favorite. So, when Parmet sees Konyek lying injured and unconscious on the ground after being attacked by cattle thieves, Parmet just walks away, hoping him to bleed to death.
- Cassie Dewell: In Badlands, a Hate Sink enforcer for The Cartel falls through a frozen pond in the middle of the night during a police chase. The deputy pursuing him hears his scream for help, radios the sheriff for orders and is told to tell the freezing killer that they'll come back for him in the morning (although, given how fast the guy freezes to death, they probably couldn't have saved him in time anyway).
- Dive (2003): In one of the last flashbacks, Privateer James Blade and his cabin boy Samuel are the only survivors of their ship. Samuel is clinging to the ship's floating figurehead and Blade is injured and barely able to stay above water. Blade's actions are responsible for the deaths of their shipmates, he murdered the entire crew of the Spanish galleon they just overtook and killed Samuel's best friend in the first book over a breach of discipline. Samuel turns the figurehead away from Blade and paddles towards the shore, leaving his captain to drown.
- In the Dragonlance series this was the final step of Lord Soth's Slowly Slipping Into Evil descent. He had been tricked to believe that his second wife Isolde (who he had first gotten together with while still married to his first) was cheating on him and went to confront her when he should have been going to stop The Cataclysm. While he was doing this said Cataclysm began and caused a chandelier to fall on Isolde and their child. She begged him to save them, but he just stood by, and with her last breath Isolde cursed him. The castle itself was destroyed, but Soth rose as a Death Knight.
- Dragon Bones:
- Ward is asked about how his plan will affect his uncle. (As things are, his uncle could be killed by the villains). He, sarcastically, replies that the death of his uncle is just what he needs, now. To his shock, Oreg actually believes him, and is angry at him for the next few days, until Ward can bring himself to talk about the topic again.
- Played straight earlier, when the nobleman Landislaw comes to him and wants help in recapturing a slave he lost, and who doesn't belong to him, and whose disappearance could cause Landislaw to be killed by the disgruntled owner. Ward says he doesn't care, slavery is wrong, and he never liked Landislaw anyway.
- In Dream Park, a security guard with a cold is knocked out, tied up, and gagged. He is later found dead of asphyxiation, and it is believed that his running nose killed him. Subverted when he was murdered by a person he was blackmailing, who just had to pinch his nose shut long enough for him to suffocate.
- Seen near the end of The Elenium. Princess Arissa, aunt of Queen Ehlana, is about to be killed by the heroes just as her son and lover have been (all three are guilty of treason, murder, and other serious crimes), and she performs a sort of Kill Steal by drinking poison. A few minutes later, however, she changes her mind and begs the mage Sephrenia to save her. Sephrenia has the skill and the power to do so, and is normally an extreme pacifist who can't stand to see anyone in pain; but she decides to make an exception for Arissa, and leaves her to her fate.
- Gordon Korman: A sympathetic version occurs in the final book of the Dive trilogy. Privateer James Blade and his cabin boy Samuel are the only survivors of their ship. Samuel is clinging to the ship's floating figurehead and Blade is injured and barely able to stay above water. Blade's actions are responsible for the deaths of their shipmates, he murdered the entire crew of the Spanish galleon they just overtook and killed Samuel's best friend in the first book over a breach of discipline. Samuel turns the figurehead away from Blade and paddles towards the shore, leaving his captain to drown.
- The Heroes of Olympus has the minor villian Octavian. He joins forces with an army of monsters to attack Camp Halfblood. He wants to kill the Greek demigods simply because they are Greek and not Roman demigods. When he is too close to a catapult, even his first officer does not warn him, so that Octavian will be fired with the catapult.
- In the original novel of The Last King of Scotland, Idi Amin's personal doctor is being pressured by British Intelligence to assassinate him. He balks at this violation of the Oath, but hedges that maybe if it was a matter of denying Amin proper treatment...
- Isaac Asimov's "Little Lost Robot": (Discussed Trope) Dr Susan Calvin immediately conceives of this danger when informed of the modifications to the NS-2 robots. Some of the models had their First Law were modified to say, approximately, "A robot may not harm a human being", which omits "...or through inaction, let a human come to harm". Dr Peter Bogert dismisses the idea that a robot with this modification can kill, and Dr Calvin then describes a robot dropping a heavy weight above a human, knowing that its quick reflexes will allow it to catch the weight in time to not harm the human; but then, having dropped the weight, it has the ability to decide not to stop the weight from killing the human. Dr Bogert is now almost as worried as he should be.
- In Little Women, Jo comes dangerously close to this trope when she's angry with Amy for burning her unfinished book manuscript. When Jo and Laurie are skating on the frozen river the next day, Amy follows them to try to make up with Jo. Laurie skates ahead, realizes that part of the ice is thin and calls a warning back to Jo, but Amy is too far behind to hear. Jo is still so angry that she decides not to repeat the warning to Amy, and even when she sees her skating straight toward the thin ice, she still resolves to just go on ahead. A moment later she has second thoughts and turns back around, but it's already too late and Amy falls through the ice, though luckily Jo and Laurie manage to rescue her.
- Discussed In Masques: the heroes are in a kind of rebel camp, and there are two nobles who are pretty useless and only cause problems. They jokingly discuss the option of feeding those nobles to a dragon (they're male and their virginity is questionable, but it may be worth a try), or let them be eaten by the undead abominations. Or just fall down a hole in the caves the rebels are hiding in. They don't do any of those things in the end, as, after all, they're still the heroes.
- Night Watch (Series): In Twilight Watch, Anton notices a subtle flaw in Well-Intentioned Extremist Kostya's plan that will make it fail in a manner that will kill Kostya. Anton keeps the information to himself while the plan goes forward.
- Redwall: Ungatt Trunn dies when, after surviving being thrown into the sea with a broken back, finds himself stranded as the tide comes in. Then his much-abused former seer shows up to gloat, not doing a thing to get him out of the rising water.
- In Raven In The Foregate, one of Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael mysteries, it turns out that the victim wasn't murdered (by being hit on the head and thrown in the river) at all. The sole witness simply didn't help him when he slipped on some ice, hit his head on a tree stump, and slid down the riverbank unconscious.
- The Rose Gardener: German officer Erich Feldmann died during the chaotic last few days of the German occupation of the Channel Islands. The long-told story is that Erich committed suicide, shooting himself in the chest, and that he didn't die right away but slowly bled out because Helene couldn't get a doctor. Turns out that the story isn't true. Erich didn't kill himself. He was shot in the chest by Pierre, a French POW. Helene could have sent for a doctor, but she seized this chance to get out of a disastrous marriage, and deliberately let her husband die.
- In Alexandr Grin's The Scarlet Sails:
- Menners refuses to aid the half-starved Mary whose husband is away on a long voyage and who also has a baby daughter to feed (or rather he agrees to help, but not for free). It leads to Mary going to a pawn-broker several miles away in a terrible storm, catching pneumonia and dying.
- Mary's husband Longren gets his revenge when in another terrible storm several years later Menners' boat is carried off to sea and he cries for Longren to save him. Longren calmly stands on the shore and reminds Menners that Mary had pleaded too. Menners doesn't drown but gets frozen to death.
- Scavenge the Stars: It's revealed that the benefactor who helps fund the creation of the counterfeit gold coins that are flooding Moray finds out they carry the ability to induce a deadly disease. He even creates a cure for it, but doesn't care at all about distributing it, as he wants the plague to rip through and kill off the poor population of the city who he hates.
- In The Sea Wolf, Larsen promises van Weyden "not to lay a finger" on Leach and Johnson, the two sailors he threatened to kill before. In turn, van Weyden has to promise not to try to kill Larsen. Van Weyden accepts. So after Leach and Johnson tried to flee with one of the hunting boats and it sunk in a storm, Wolf Larsen finds them drifting in the water and simply lets them drown.
- In A Song of Ice and Fire:
- Many people counsel the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch to abandon the wildlings behind the Wall to be killed by the Others, due to the difficulty of saving them and their historical status as enemies of the Night's Watch. During one attempt to convince them why this is not a good idea, he points out that the Others raise the dead, and they're proposing giving their enemy thousands of soldiers.
- House Frey learns a universal truth: don't try to really piss the neighbours off after decades of being pains, because they might just ignore you when you actually do need real help to not die of insurgency on all fronts... Since they are going to: buy popcorn to silently munch as they consider how lands and titles will be divvied up afterwards, offer heckled "advice" from the sidelines to you, offer real advice to those undermining you and/or critique the performances of the oh-so tragic Frey victims as they get killed. Right in front of them or relatives of them. Rather than, you know, help the decades-long problem family out of the Hate Sink hole they've definitely helped dig themselves.
- In Sphere, Norman decides to abandon Beth and Harry to their fate by rationalizing how much trouble they've become and how their fears have almost killed him. It's only when he realizes that he's manifesting his own worst fear, the fear that he doesn't care about anyone besides himself, that he turns back and saves them.
- In The Stormlight Archive, Kaladin is shown thinking in a flashback about whether it would've been right to murder Roshone, the man actively trying to destroy his family's livelihood for no real reason. He concludes that it would be wrong, but allowing Roshone to die due to his own stupid decisions would've been justified. Of course, his father Lirin feels differently, and proceeds to save Roshone's life, though Roshone is an Ungrateful Bastard and berates Lirin for not also saving his son. This comes back to bite Lirin when Roshone manages to get Kaladin's younger brother, Tien, drafted into the army.
- In the short story "Sweat" by Zora Neale Hurston, Delia's abusive husband gets bitten by the same snake he used to threaten her with. After some deliberation, and realizing he'd die even if she did go for help, Delia just sits under the chinaberry tree and waits for him to die.
- In the young adult novel Twins by Caroline B. Cooney, Mary Lee discovers that her twin sister Madrigal and her boyfriend had a bonding moment when they stood together on the shores of a lake and watched a man drown.
- Warrior Cats:
- Tigerclaw attempts to murder Fireheart in this way at least two times: in Fire and Ice, Tigerclaw lets Fireheart nearly be killed by Leopardfur; in Forest of Secrets, Fireheart falls in a river and nearly drowns while Tigerclaw watches, but Longtail saves him.
- In Mapleshade's Vengeance, Mapleshade believes the deaths of her kits to be this: Frecklewish was watching to make sure Mapleshade left the territory when exiled, saw them swept into the river, and left. Frecklewish said she'd seen RiverClan warriors on the other side, and assumed that they'd be saved and she never wanted them to die; this is also what she told her own Clan. It's not clear if Frecklewish was lying or not, as we're limited to Mapleshade's POV and she was only aware of RiverClan once they pulled her out of the water.
