Ripped From The Headlines / Literature

Examples of Ripped from the Headlines in Literature

• Agatha Christie:
  • Part of Murder on the Orient Express, the Daisy Armstrong kidnapping, is clearly based on the Charles Lindbergh case.
  • The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side borrows its pivotal backstory from the real life of actress Gene Tierney, to the extent that if you happen to be familiar with it, the crime is not terribly difficult to solve before Miss Marple solves it. However, Christie denied doing so, saying that she'd never heard of Gene Tierney's tragedy until after the book was written; given the PR stranglehold Hollywood studios had on their stars at the time, and that people really didn't talk about that sort of thing, disabled and mentally deficient children it's quite possible she was telling the truth.
  • The Hercule Poirot novel The Clocks features an in-universe inversion. The murder mystery, which caused a lot of media uproar, was based on an unpublished detective story. In his denouement, Poirot criticizes the murderer for being unoriginal.
• The Danielle Steel novel Vanished is based on the Lindbergh kidnapping. With a much happier ending, of course – the child is found safe and sound, the father is responsible for the whole thing, enabling him to be sent to prison and out of the heroine's life, paving the way for her to be reunited with her true love.
• All We Know of Heaven by Jacquelyn Mitchard is based on a real story about two girls who are in a car accident. One girl dies. Unfortunately, the hospital identified the wrong one as dead. In real life, the families were very nice about it and handled themselves well. The book adds more drama and a love story.
• Older Than Print: The Divine Comedy features the adulterers Francesca and Paolo in Hell because their murder was talked about all over Italy.
• Edgar Allan Poe did it with the short story "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt", which is based on the real-life disappearance and apparent murder of an American woman named Mary Rogers.
• Jodi Picoult's books often take two issues that are in the news Up to Eleven. My Sister's Keeper (in-vitro fertilization, ethics), Handle with Care (aborting a disabled child), Change of Heart (religion, death penalty, organ donation), and Sing You Home (lesbians having families, in-vitro fertilization). The Pact is about a Suicide Pact and Teen Pregnancy, Salem Falls is about being falsely accused of rape, and Mercy is about assisted suicide.
• Walter Gibson noted in an article in The Great Detectives (edited by Otto Penzler) that he based the Shadow's foe Double Z on the then contemporary terrorist Three X.
• Joyce Carol Oates is very fond of fictionalizing real cases of murder and violent death, sometimes sticking very close to actual events but going inside the minds of the people involved, sometimes departing much farther. Some examples are My Sister My Love (JonBenet Ramsey), Zombie (Jeffrey Dahmer), Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (Charles Schmid), "Dear Husband" (Andrea Yates), "Landfill" (John Fiocco), and Black Water (Mary Jo Kopechne).

• Two of the most memorable Sherlock Holmes villains, Charles Augustus Milverton and Professor James Moriarty, were based on real-life criminals Charles Augustus Howell and Adam Worth, respectively.
• Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' shortly after receiving news about five Franciscans nuns, who fled from Prussia due to harsh anti-Catholic laws and all died in a shipwreck while sailing to America.
• Many of the newspaper clippings mentioned in H.P. Lovecraft's masterpiece "The Call of Cthulhu" were literally ripped from the headlines of the days in question; for example, the earthquake, the architect's suicide, and the theosophist society's apocalyptic expectations were really reported in the New York Times on the stated dates.
• Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know is partially based on the disappearance of the Lyon Sisters in 1975.
• In Hannibal, the backstory of antagonist Mason Verger is based not-so-loosely on the purported self-mutilation of a man under the influence of PCP who sliced off bits of his face and fed them to his dogs. The sole evidence for this event seems to come from an annotated photograph in the book Practical Homicide Investigation by Vernon J. Geberth. Warning: the photograph in question is exceptionally graphic and disturbing. If you still want to view it (don't say we didn't warn you), you can access the image here.◊
• The Passage by Justin Cronin has this as the Gulf Oil Spill is mentioned to be still causing problems 100 years later.
• Saving Zoë is about a girl named Zoë who was killed by a "photographer" she met on MySpace. Ripped from stories such as the "Facebook killer" or the "Craigslist Killer" and many others.
• "Delial", the girl Navidson frequently mentions in House of Leaves, turns out to be the name he mentally gave to the subject of his award-winning photograph of a starving orphan girl in Africa in the view of a vulture. Befitting the Mind Screw nature of the book, this ends up being lampshaded and deconstructed; in the upper layers of the story, Johnny Truant actually mentions the Real Life version and the photographer by name and cites this trope as evidence against the Navidson Record's existence despite Zampano's claims to the contrary, as Navidson's backstory is blatantly just a heavily fictionalized version of a real event that was in the news at the time Zampano wrote his essay and Navidson himself is therefore just a stand-in for the photographer in question. Truant further points out how disrespectful and sleazy this is, since it's taking the actual suffering of two innocent people and using it for cheap drama.
• "A Good Marriage" is centered around the idea of a normal suburban housewife finding out that her husband is a sexually sadistic serial killer. Stephen King defends his being inspired by the then-recent arrest of the BTK Killer and the public outcry surrounding his wife, Paula, who many couldn't believe the idea of not knowing your husband of thirty years was a felon. She wasn't terribly pleased by the resurgence of attention caused by the story.
• The Pearl by John Steinbeck exaggerates this trope.
• Johnny and the Dead by Terry Pratchett is about Blackbury Council selling the cemetery to United Holdings (Holdings) Ltd. for 2p. This was based on Westminster Council selling three cemeteries to corporate buyers for 5p each.
• Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels: The final book Home Free focuses on a character who is explicitly stated to be a clone of Bernie Madoff.
• After by Amy Efaw is about a teenage girl named Devon who gets pregnant in high school. She then dumps the baby in a dumpster, but the baby is found and she is charged with attempted murder. The author states on her website that it is inspired by various news stories about babies left in dumpsters or trash cans, such as the story of Melissa Drexler or Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson.
• The climax of The Fear Index features an extreme flux in the DOW Jones, which actually happened and is called a Flash Crash. One gets the impression that Harris found this interesting and worked backwards from that.
• Scarface was loosely based on Al Capone and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
• Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent is based on an actual news story about an unsolved terrorist plot.
• Every Dale Brown story is prefaced by extracts from news articles that came out shortly before publication, establishing the relevance of the events and equipment featured.
• In the Rainbow Magic series, several UK-specific books are about current events in the monarchy.
• The Last Guru by Daniel Pinkwater is loosely based on the story of Maharaj Ji of the Divine Light Mission, who became famous as an avatar of God in his early teens.
• The stories featured in The Railway Series are all based on stories of real incidents on railways. This can get frustrating in railfan circles while discussing real historic events, only for a Railway Series fan to interject and point out "hey, I know this story from Thomas!"
• The plot of No Way to Treat a First Lady by Christopher Buckley is a mishmash of the Monica Lewinsky/President Clinton sex scandal and the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
• Hobgoblin was published to cash in on the then-recent death of James Dallas Egbert III by having an RPG-obsessed teen fall under the spell of his game and try to play out his fantasies. Contrary to the Egbert case, Scott employs his fantasy to save others by becoming the hero his character had been.
• In 1989, Swedish writer Jan Guillou wrote Enemy's Enemy, where the main character's mission involves killing the spy Stig Sandström who had escaped from prison and fled to Moscow, which is what the real-life spy Stig Bergling had done two years earlier. The big difference is that the character also had killed his wife, while Bergling's wife had fled the country with him. After Bergling turned himself in to the authorities in 1994, he called Guillou from prison and said that he probably deserved a signed copy of the book, which Guillou agreed to, and sent him a book where he wrote that "this is the strangest dedication I've ever written."
• Joe Pickett: The harassment of the Robersons by the EPA in Breaking Point was based on the events that led to Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency US Supreme Court case.
• The central character of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons is a fictionalization of Sergey Nechayev.
• At the climax of The Nebuly Coat, the church tower's collapse and later rebuilding exactly mirror the real-life collapse of Chichester Cathedral's central tower in 1861.
• Rumer Godden's 1969 novel In This House of Brede, follows a newcomer to an order of Benedictine nuns, who takes the veil in her middle years. One reason is the death of her 5-year-old son in a highly publicized accident years before. With only a few details changed, this part of the story seems to have come from a combination of the Floyd Collins tragedy and that of Kathy Fiscus.
• The Warrior Cats book Moonrise involves a mountain lion-like cat based on rumors of big cats roaming the British countryside which come up in the news every few years (the "sightings" usually involve panther-like cats said to have escaped from zoos or circuses, and their accuracy is debatable). There was a particular influx of these articles around the mid-2000s when Moonrise was written.
• The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum was inspired by several real-life scandals involving German tabloid Bild-Zeitung's sensationalistic coverage of the Red Army Faction and their crimes. The novel's author Heinrich Böll had previously written an article for the magazine Der Spiegel wherein he sharply criticized Bild's journalistic practices and stated that the paper "isn’t crypto-fascist anymore, not fascistoid, but naked fascism. Agitation, lies, dirt."
• Big Trouble has a subplot seemingly inspired by news about a sting operation in Miami resulting in the arrest of a couple of Lithuanian nationals for offering to sell undercover agents nuclear weapons. Dave Barry mentioned this in a column as something that could only happen there.
• In the afterword of the first volume of Sexiled: My Sexist Party Leader Kicked Me Out So I Teamed Up With A Mythical Sorceress!, Ameko Kaeruda reveals that she started writing the Light Novel in reaction to the news of a "certain medical university" rigging the scores of female students. While she technically doesn't name the university, this is pretty obviously in reference to the Tokyo Medical University scandal, in which it was revealed that the entrance exam results of female applicants has been automatically lowered for several years in an attempt to keep the ratio of women in each class of students below 30 percent. In particular, Alisa's subplot involving the Magic Academy is pretty nakedly a reference to this.
• Holding Up The Universe by Jennifer Niven involves an obese young woman who is subject to unwanted media attention after her house has to be partially demolished in order to get her to the hospital, loosely based on the case of Georgia Davis, but taking place in the US rather than the UK.
• The Kolnari in The Ship Who... don't reflect any specific incident, but they are a very close representation of racist white fears of "superpredators" which started to really be hyped up in certain circles at the time when The City Who Fought was written - superpredators being urban black people who (supposedly) have no consciences or morals, are very physically adept and clever but not smart, are extremely fertile and become 'adults' at a very young age, want nothing but to steal, murder, and rape, and generally have very little humanity. All this plus keloid scars, with a side of Recycled IN SPACE!, applies to the black-skinned Kolnari, including people calling them soulless and comparing them to vermin.
• Under Suspicion (Series):
  • In a downplayed example in The Cinderella Murder, Brett Young initially tries to talk Laurie into covering a twenty-year-old cold case (the novel takes place in 2014, so the cold case is from 1994) where a child beauty pageant queen was found murdered in her own home in the Midwest; Laurie is extremely reluctant, arguing that the case has been covered extensively already and there's nothing new to say about it, there aren't any viable suspects available for interview seeing as the girl's family were cleared via DNA evidence and the police never found any other likely suspects, nor does she want to exploit a murdered child for the sake of ratings. It's strongly implied the case is inspired by - but not directly based upon - the murder of JonBenet Ramsey due to the similarities.
  • All Dressed in White appears to be loosely inspired by the real case of Jennifer Wilbanks, which like the fictional mystery was also referred to as the Runaway Bride case; six days before her lavish wedding, Wilbanks went out for an evening jog and disappeared, with her concerned fiance and family reporting her missing. Something very similar occurred in the backstory of All Dressed in White. However, in the real case Wilbanks was found about a week later when she called her fiance on her would-be wedding date, claiming to have been kidnapped; she later admitted to investigators she'd lied and ran away to escape the stress of the wedding. The fictional Amanda Pierce case saw the bride disappear for over five years and it turns out she was the victim of foul play. The Wilbanks case is even seemingly referenced in the novel; when Laurie is pitching the Runaway Bride case to Brett Young, he says he thought the bride eventually turned up in Vegas (where Wilbanks briefly stayed after running away), only for Laurie to state that this is a different missing bride case.

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