Dying Clue / Literature

Examples of Dying Clues in Literature

The message was incomplete

• Ellery Queen's "GI Story": A man is murdered by one of his three stepsons (Wash Smith, Linc Smith, Wilson Smith, named after the Presidents), leaves the message "GI". But all three were former soldiers. He was trying to write "GEORGE" for George Washington Smith. But he died after completing the downstroke on the E.
• Ellery Queen's The Scarlet Letters: Adulterer is shot by a jealous husband, writes the message "XY" before dying. He and the husband were in a conspiracy to blackmail the wife. He was trying to write "XX" to signify a double-cross.
• Edward D. Hoch's This Prize is Dangerous (rewritten into Leopold Lends a Hand): There are three deaths related to the theft of some icons. The third victim dies in his apartment / office, making no effort to call police or an ambulance, instead writing out "Icon". He'd committed the first two murders, and had been shot during the second. He tried to patch himself together, but when he realized it was hopeless, tried to write out "I confess to the murders of (victims)", but died after writing four letters.
• In the Known Space book The Patchwork Girl the victim leaves "NAKF" written in his own blood on the rocks of the lunar surface. He was trying to write "NAKED", indicating that his killer was naked: i.e., not wearing a space suit, which is quite a trick out on the surface of the moon.
• Parodied in The Big Over Easy, the first of the Nursery Crime series, where the obnoxious ace detective mentions a case in which the victim pointed at an object which was an anagram of the first half of the killer's surname, and the detective regards this as an entirely reasonable combination of "the victim pointed at an object that related to the killer's name" and "the victim tried to say the killer's name but died halfway through".
• The Seventh Sinner by Elizabeth Peters: the dying man scrawled "VII". Now which of the group of seven tourists should be considered the seventh? He was actually starting to write "Virginia," the name of one of them whom most of the group knew only by her nickname.
• In Dick Francis's novel Flying Finish, a soon to be murdered character, lacking anything to write with, frantically uses a sharp point of a nail to spell out a vital clue on a piece of scrap paper by punching out holes to make the letters and hides it before he's taken away to be killed. The protagonist later discovers it and is able to deduce the identity of the bad guys from the short message.
• Subverted in one murder mystery short story as we witness the soon to be murdered protagonist (a judge) due to his height attempting to cleverly write some initials of his killer in the dust on his door frame only to find out that he's got who's getting ready to kill him completely wrong and his message will now mislead any investigation and frantically but too late tries to erase the message.
• Retired Witches Mysteries: In book 3, Makaleigh Verza whispers three words to Molly as she's dying, but Molly just thinks they're gibberish at first. It's not until a discovery spell identifies them — "Aba. Mho. Ord." — and Olivia recognizes them as runes some time later that their true meaning is found. "Aba" means "atone", "Mho" means "change", and "Ord" means "beginning". It's eventually subverted when they turn out to be the words necessary to bind the witchfinder within his prison in the castle, and were meant to be used to summon him to solve Makaleigh's murder.

Dying people lack clear elocution

• Ellery Queen's "Diamonds in Paradise": Victim steals diamonds at the Paradise Gardens Casino, but falls from a fire escape fleeing police. When asked where he hid the diamonds, he replies "Diamonds in paradise". He was trying to say "Diamonds in pair of dice". He had a specially hollowed out pair in his pocket.
• Ellery Queen's The Last Woman in His Life: The victim announces he will be changing his will to disinherit his three ex-wives (Alice Tierney, Audrey Weston, and Marcia Kemp) as he will be marrying his true love Laura. He is murdered that night, and dies saying "home". The killer was his lawyer Al Marsh (nee C. Aubrey Marsh), who had an unrequited attraction for the victim. The victim had had a stutter even before he was stabbed and couldn't risk saying "Al" (Alice), "Marsh" (Marcia), "Aubrey" (Audrey), "Lawyer" (Laura), "Attorney" (Tierney), or "Man" (Laura Mannzoni). He was trying to say "homosexual".
• A Seven Minute Mysteries had an incomprehensible dying message typed out on a keyboard that made sense once the detective realized that the victim had swapped all instances of the letter "c" with "v" and vice versa.
  • An Encyclopedia Brown story did the same thing, but with the variation that the victim survived but had amnesia.
• In Isaac Asimov's juvenile mystery story "Try Sarah Tops," a jewel thief who'd been mortally wounded by his double-crossing accomplices flees into a museum, then gasps out a cryptic phrase before dying. It sounds like he's suggesting the cops ask someone named "Sarah Tops" where he's hidden the loot, but in fact he'd tossed it into the nearest exhibit, a Triceratops skeleton.
• In a novel by John Dickson Carr, the victim says before dying to the person trying to assist him "It was your gloves". It had previously been established that the victim only spoke French and that a Translation Convention was being used. In French, "your gloves" is "vos gants", which sounds similar to the murderer's name "Vaughan".
• Played with in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula, where a victim, in her dying spasm, grabs the trouser leg of the attending doctor. The protagonists jokingly suggest that she was trying to tell them the killer's name was "Sydney Trouser", or that she was aiming for "Mr Boot" and missed. It takes them much longer to discover what the audience by this point already knows: that it was the doctor who did it.
• In the Sherlock Holmes story "The Boscombe Valley Murder", the victim and his son are alone in the woods at the time of his death and the son hears the victim say something about "a rat" before dying. What he was trying to say was "Black Jack of Ballarat", but the son only heard the last part. The murderer was John Turner, a man who lived with the victim. Turner had spent his younger days in a gang called the "Ballarat Gang" and he had first met the victim when the victim was driving a stagecoach that the gang intended to rob. Turner had the opportunity to kill the victim then, but didn't. Years later, Turner encountered the victim again and the victim, without a penny to his name, threatened to tell the police what he knew about Turner if Turner didn't support him and his family. This was all well and good until the victim wanted to marry his son to Turner's daughter. Turner wasn't having it, so he killed him. Turner's name in the gang had been "Black Jack of Ballarat."
• In one short story, a detective looks into the murder of a rock singer. The singer grabbed his guitar as his final act and broke two strings. Questioning the singer's girlfriend, manager, and two of his band members turns up nothing. The detective's partner offers to play a song on the broken guitar, except the E and D strings are broken. One of the band members is named Ed.
• The third Diamond Brothers novel is called South By Southeast, based on the victim's dying exclamation of "Suff... Beee... Suff Eees". The titular brothers decode it as the title and spend the majority of the novel trying to figure out what it means. The victim was trying to say "Sotheby's. Tsar's Feast." which is the location of a prestigous auction house and the title of a well-publicised masterpiece that was due to go under the hammer. The murderer had stolen the original, replaced it with a forgery and attacked the one individual who had figured out what they were up to, and consequently could have stopped them.
• In the Nero Wolfe short story "Before I Die," Archie Goodwin is on hand to hear the last words of the victim of a drive-by shooting: "Shame. Goddamn shame." What she was actually saying was not "shame" but "Shane", the name of her then-unknown accomplice, who had come up with his own idea to get money.
• There's a Miss Marple short story where the Asshole Victim's last words are related as being something like "a heap of fish", so people assume he was delusional and ignore it. Pilocarpine can be used to treat atropine poisoning. Atropine is an ingredient in the murderer's eyedrops, and the victim was a doctor who recognized his symptoms and was trying to call for the antidote. Unfortunately, he was surrounded by a housewife, a cook, and a deaf doctor, and he was slurring his words badly as an effect of the poison, so they all heard it as a "pile of carp".
• 87th Precinct: In Lady, Lady I Did It, one of the victims of a mass shooting manages to gasp the word "carpenter" before dying. Investigation by the 87th Precinct fails to turn up a suspect who is named Carpenter or who works with wood. It turns out the victim was actually saying "car painter" (i.e. the man who had recently painted his car) but his thick accent turned it into "carpenter".
• The Sherlock Holmes Stories of Edward D. Hoch: In "A Scandal in Montreal", the murder victim—a German student attending McGill University to improve his English—gasps the name "Norton" to the constable who reaches him just before he dies. This makes a strong circumstantial case that his killer is Ralph Norton: a fellow student with whom he had a very public quarrel a few days earlier. Once in possession of all the facts, Holes deduces that his his killer is actually his estranged lover Miss Monica Starr, whose nickname is 'North' (as in 'North Star'). While dying, he reverted to his German and was actually saying 'norden'; the German word for 'north'.
• One The Great Brain story has a murder victim gasp out "Butch" right before he dies, which causes those around him to assume the murder was Butch Cassidy. TD realizes he was actually saying "Hutch", having spotted a scar on the killer's hand and realized an old friend of his was robbing him, forcing Hutch to kill him.

Victim didn't know the killer's name

• In the Dr. Sam Hawthorne story, "The Problem of the Locked Caboose," the victim leaves the word "Elf" written in blood. Turns out that he was writing the German word for eleven. The only thing that he knew about his killer was that they were in berth 11.
• The Dragon in the Sea by Frank Herbert. The crew of an atomic submarine find the dead body of a Security agent in the reactor room where he was locked in by a saboteur. He kills himself to prevent a lingering death from radiation, leaving a detailed statement of what happened, but unfortunately he never saw who it was who locked the hatch.

Other messages

• Ellery Queen's "The Glass Domed Clock": The victim knocks over a glass domed clock and grabs an amethyst. One of the suspects was a stockbroker (the clock resembled a stock ticker), who was born on February 29 (birthstone is an amethyst). However, other evidence indicates that the victim thought the suspect was born on March 1. Other evidence reveals that only one suspect knew the real birthdate and could have left that message.
• And yet another Ellery Queen example, the short story "A Lump of Sugar". Ellery and Inspector Queen spend the whole story discussing the possible meaning of the dying clue — a lump of sugar in the victim's hand — with respect to each of the suspects, until they realize the killer was simply the one mostly likely to have a sugar cube in his hand: the mounted police officer.
• In Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, toons create word balloons when they speak (unless they consciously choose not to). A word balloon containing Roger's final words is found at the scene of the crime, but it's ambiguous without knowing the way the words were said.
• Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge features possibly the most epic case of "murder victim writes cryptic final message" in the entire history of detective fiction. The murderer uses a uniquely science-fictional murder weapon that results in a four-decades long, lingering death of old age for the victim, so she has time to write a final message over two million words long — but the important bit is still so cryptic only one man could see it — and it's not her lover. This is because the murderer is watching her the entire time, and would have destroyed anything that looked like a clue to his-or-her identity.
• Agatha Christie:
  • A Murder Is Announced has one that doesn't quite count as a clue, as it's actually the reason she was killed, but similarly to the Roger Rabbit case above. Was it "She wasn't there"? or was it "She wasn't there"? or maybe "She wasn't there"? "She wasn't there".
  • Another famous Christie example appears in Murder on the Orient Express. When examining the Asshole Victim's room for clues, Poirot comes across a charred piece of paper that reads "—member little Daisy Armstrong." It turns out to be a vital piece of information: the victim, who was traveling under an assumed name, was responsible for the kidnap and murder of a child heiress named Daisy Armstrong, whose death prompted a massive string of tragedies for the Armstrong household. The note helps Poirot realize that he is not investigating a mere murder, but a deeply-rooted revenge plot. It ultimately turns out to be a subversion, though, as the person who burned the note wasn't the victim, but one of the people behind the murder—he and everyone else involved deliberately taunted the criminal by sending the note, then tried to destroy it to remove all evidence of the Armstrong case and make the crime unsolvable. The charred piece was never supposed to be found in the first place.
  • The book Why Didn't They Ask Evans? is named after one, one of the main characters Bobby Jones finds a dying man who asks this question. When he tells the victim's sister about this, he is poisoned not long after and tries to solve the murder, despite not knowing who Evans was or what they should have been asked about. It turns out that Evans was the parlour maid of a man who had died just after changing his will. Evans wasn't asked witness the will being changed and the gardener, who was further away was. This was to disguise the fact that the man making the will was an impressionist and not the genuine article at all. The parlour maid would have noticed but the gardener wouldn't.
• The Saint:
  • In a short story, the Victim writes "COP", with people suspecting that the murderer was a policeman until Simon Templar realized the victim's nationality— in the Cyrillic Alphabet "COP" = "sor". The killer's name was Soren.
  • Similarly, in one of Isaac Asimov's Black Widowers stories the guest relates the tale of a Russian spy (that is, a Russian national working for the West) who left a dying message that nobody had been able to interpret: the letters E P O C K from a Scrabble set. The word "epock" was meaningless and no anagram could be found either, so the spy's intention had been a mystery for more than twenty years. As always, Henry the waiter solves it, pointing out that the letters could be rearranged - to form 'CKOPE', which in the Cyrillic alphabet spells the word 'score'. This, along with a newspaper opened at the sports page (the scores, gettit?) implied that the agent was trying to communicate the number twenty. The Widowers' guest is thunderstruck at this - in the code they used at the time, '20' meant "Government in firm control" and if they had known this, the Bay of Pigs invasion could have been called off.
• In The Swan Princess, King William says "It's not what it seems, Derek. It's not what it seems!" in reference to the Great Animal that has attacked him. Derek has to figure out what he means by himself, eventually finding a book that describes shapeshifting in the library.
• Taken to rather ridiculous extremes in The Da Vinci Code dragging himself round an art gallery scrawling hidden messages on various paintings before arranging his dying body in a meaningful pose, since revealing the identity of the killer is not so important to the dying man as giving clues to the Ancient Conspiracy that he was killed to cover up.
• In the Dirk Pitt Adventures novel "Iceberg", Dr. Hunnewell's last words to Dirk Pitt are "God save thee!" Pitt later discovers that Hunnewell wasn't just identifying Oskar Rondheim as his killer, but also admitting to being in league with him. The dying message was an excerpt from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", Rondheim's favorite story.
• In the Zachary Nixon Johnson book The Doomsday Brunette, the murder victim Foraa Thompson scrawled a series of seemingly random symbols just before dying. Multiple characters lampshade the general contrivance and implausibility of the trope.
  Zach: Foraa's dying clue. She drew these symbols in the wine puddle just before she died. Maybe as some sort of veiled reference to her killer's identity.
  Electra: Why didn't she just write down the killer's name?
  Zach: Because that would have been too easy.
  Electra: So she spent her last nanos of life devising some arcane symbolic code?
  Zach: Well, apparently, lots of murder victims do it.
• The Thinking Machine: "His Perfect Alibi" features a rare variant in the which the victim manages to actually write down the name of his killer before expiring. However (as might be guessed from the title), the killer has a seemingly perfect alibi that makes it physically impossible for him to have committed the murder.
• The Sherlock Holmes Stories of Edward D. Hoch: In "The Manor House Case", a dying murder victim drags himself across the room to pull the ten of spades from a deck of playing cards as a clue to his killer's identity. The suit was irrelevant. The dying man grabbed first ten he found in the deck in attempt to indicate the killer's surname was 'Zehn': German for 'ten'.
• Simon Ark: In "The Witch of Park Avenue", a man who is dying trapped inside a revolving door knows he only has seconds to live and writes the name "MARIE" on the glass with a felt tip pen. Although this seems to implicate a woman named Marie who is involved in the case Simon determines that the victim and Marie had never met, so he could not have known her name, nor would she have reason to kill him. The actual killer was Dr. Langstrom, who had just married the eponymous witch. Langstrom's name was too long for him to write in the time he had left, so he tried to leave a short word that would nonetheless implicate Langstrom. However, while dying, he instinctively reverted to his native language, French, and wrote "marié", the French for "bridegroom".
• In the Nero Wolfe novella "The Zero Clue", the victim has on his desk three pencils, a pencil eraser, and two more pencils. He does this to indicate his murder is connected to the recent bombing that killed 302 people. Justified because that way the murderer thinks he's just fidgeting and not leaving a clue.

Since the author is dying, a frequent subversion is that the killer is actually able to use a dying message to their advantage — either modifying it to lead to another party, or acting on the message themselves.

• Something Wicked by Alan Gratz: Duncan is found dead with his son's name, MALCOLM, written in his blood, but the hero realizes it's a frame-up because Duncan and everyone else called his son Mal.
• The culprit in the Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet wrote RACHE on the wall to make the police think of a revenge killing by a secret society ...or that the murderer's name was Rachel.
  • In "A Study in Pink", a loose adaptation of the story in Sherlock the victim did write RACHE, but she died before she could finish writing RACHEL, the password to her phone.
  • In "A Study in Emerald", a weird crossover between Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu Mythos, the victim again wrote "RACHE" in the wall. Turns out it was, indeed, actually the nickname of the killer.
• Agatha Christie:
  • Death on the Nile has the letter J written in blood at the scene of the crime, but Poirot dismisses it since Jackie, the obvious "J" person, had an airtight alibi and couldn't have possibly committed the murder, and in any case the victim clearly died instantly and wouldn't have left any clues. Poirot deduces that it was actually left by the murderer trying to frame Jackie. Or, as it turns out, because they had a flair for the dramatic.
  • Thirteen at Dinner.: After a young woman is murdered, Poirot and Hastings discover a note she had written detailing some kind of prank she was apparently playing at the titular dinner; a portion of the page has been ripped off, but it doesn't seem important, as the whole message is still legible. Unfortunately, the killer deliberately tore the page in such a way that, in the portion of the letter hinting at who had put the victim up to the trick, the word "She" became "he," prompting the detectives to examine male suspects instead of focusing on the woman who was behind the whole plot.
• In the Father Brown mystery "The Wrong Shape", the victim is found with a sheet of paper on their body which has typwewritten on it, "I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!" with no quotation marks. The unusual shape of the paper (the upper left corner is snipped off, as it is on all of the sheets of paper in the room) and the presence of one less corner than sheets of paper leads Father Brown to realize that a quotation mark was removed from a line of speech. The end of the story has a confession which indicates that the victim had been writing a story involving a man killed by hypnotism and the killer borrowed that last sheet to distract the investigators, snipped off the quotation mark, and burned the rest.
• A few cases in the book Minute Mysteries involve this, along with other books with mini-detective puzzle shorts. More often than not, they are a framing attempt made by the person writing the note, and it's left to the reader to find the reason.
• Judge Dee: Sergeant Hong is murdered in broad daylight by the person he's having tea with. He tries to write the murderer's name in spilled tea, but the murderer notices and wipes it away contemptuously.

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