He Knows Too Much / Literature

1 Following

He Knows Too Much in Literature:

Examples by author:

• If you're a character in an Agatha Christie novel, don't ever try to blackmail a murderer if you want to live to the end of the novel. And if you know anything that might have any relevance to the murder whatsoever, go immediately to Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot and tell them everything, even if you aren't certain that what you know is important. Under no circumstances should you hint that you know something but fail to say what it is. Characters who have found this out the hard way include:
  • Angele Blanche from Cat Among the Pigeons, a would-be blackmailer.
  • Josephine from Crooked House causes some concern to Charles, as he feels that her snooping may lead her to learn information that puts her in danger. She invokes this by setting up an attempt on her life, making it seem as though she's figured it out ahead of the police.
  • Louise Bourget of Death on the Nile, another would-be blackmailer, along with Salome Otterbourne, who witnesses Louise's murder and goes to tell Poirot, invoking His Name Is... before being shot dead by the killer.
  • Joyce Reynolds, the 13-year-old schoolgirl from Hallowe'en Party (1969). She tries to use her knowledge of a murder to her benefit. Instead, the murderers have her killed, drowned in an apple-bobbing tub. And what makes this worse is that it's not even her knowledge, really; she's overheard the child who really does know about the murder talk about it and has tried to pass it off as her own knowledge for attention. Later in the story, a second victim - Joyce's younger brother Leopold - figures it out, tries to blackmail the killer, and meets much the same fate.
  • All the victims in A Murder Is Announced, although the first had no idea that he knew anything of value.
  • Amberiotis of One, Two, Buckle My Shoe knew about Alistair's Blunt bigamy, a fact which he discovered from Ms Mabelle Salisbury Seale, who is friends with his secret wife. Both were killed to hide the scandal from the public.
  • Both Carlotta Adams and Donald Ross from Lord Edgware Dies were killed because they knew that the "Jane Wilkinson" at the dinner was an imposter: Carlotta because she was the imposter, and Donald because of a social gaffe made by the real Jane at another lunch party.
  • Other characters who "knew too much" include Mrs. Upward from Mrs. McGinty's Dead, Miss Johnson from Murder in Mesopotamia and Esa (the sixth victim) from Death Comes as the End — as well as the principal murder victims in Three Act Tragedy, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Cards on the Table, Evil Under the Sun, and A Caribbean Mystery.
  • An example of the second variant comes in Why Didn't They Ask Evans?. Bobby Jones witnessed the death of a man who stumbled and fell off a cliff, then tells a woman claiming to be the man's sister that his last words were "Why didn't they ask Evans?" This is enough to convince the conspirators that Bobby has to be killed, which is in turn enough to convince Bobby that the man was murdered, "Evans" knows something important, and he should investigate...

Examples by title:

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: This is the reason why Arronax, Conseil, and Ned Land will remain prisoners of the Nautilus and cannot come back to Civilization. Ever. (Captain Nemo lets them abandon the Nautilus and explore land, but is always in uncivilized shores). Captain Nemo explains:
  "... You came to surprise a secret which no man in the world must penetrate — the secret of my whole existence. And you think that I am going to send you back to that world which must know me no more? Never! In retaining you, it is not you whom I guard — it is myself."
• In Agatha H. and the Siege of Mechanicsburg, some doctors praise the modifications made to a machine, unaware that Lucrezia was the one who did so. She notes to herself that she'd like to tell them she did it so that she could receive even more praise, but then she'd have to kill them to keep the secret of her true capabilities. She tells them anyway.
• In Alternate Routes, the villain's minions are out to kill the protagonist because he accidentally overheard something that, while meaningless in itself, might have led him to dig deeper and uncover the villain's plan. (With the effect, inevitably, that he winds up uncovering and defeating the villain's plan in self-defence.)
• Animorphs:
  • Generally speaking, the Yeerks maintain an Extra-Strength Masquerade by infesting any humans who see too much. It's actually quite a bit less suspicious than vanishing since from inside the humans' heads they can take over their lives and impersonate them perfectly, and they're looking to take over the whole population anyway.
    • According to Temrash's memories in Animorphs: The Capture, Tom initially joined The Sharing because a pretty girl he liked was a member. During one meeting, she went off to meet with other Yeerks. Tom, thinking she was sneaking off to see another guy, followed her and saw Visser Three in Andalite form, and for this was captured, dragged off to the Yeerk pool and infested.
    • In Animorphs: The Discovery, Visser Three makes David's parents into Controllers after he and a bunch of Hork-Bajir storm their house.
  • The Animorphs consider this during the David Trilogy, when the eponymous character turns against them and threatens to expose them to Visser Three. Rachel promises him that if he does that she'll kill his parents, but everyone knows this isn't a permanent solution and he escalates further from there. Cassie has an alternative to murdering him, but it's really not any kinder.
  • In Animorphs: The Hidden a cape buffalo gets the morphing power and morphs human, and sees the Animorphs. It's friendly towards them and rescues them at multiple points in their Stern Chase with the Yeerks, but it's a noisy blunt instrument that they can't control or even really communicate with. They can't just leave it behind for the Yeerks to kill because if they capture it instead, they may infest it and then they'll know the "Andalite bandits" are human, so even Cassie agrees that it has to die.
• The Beginning After the End: In the distant past, Kezess Indrath, the ruler of the Asuras, orchestrated the genocide of the Djinn out of jealousy for their ability to control aether. He and his clan ended up covering the atrocity that they committed, obfuscating its true nature to the rest of the Asuras. As such, most of the Asuras do not know what really happened to the Djinn, and those who wanted to find out the truth wound up being covertly dealt with on Kezess's orders. Even whole clans on the Great Eight are not safe. Mordain Asclepius, once a close friend to Kezess, stood up against his former friend when he was about to order the genocide, which led to him and his clan being banished from Epheotus. A similar fate befell Agrona Vritra and his clan, who uncovered the truth through their study of the ruins the Djinn had left behind. Unlike Mordain, Agrona took his banishment far more severely, as it led to him instigating the Divine Conflict that ravages the setting.
• A short story in The Best in Chess revolves around a cobbler who claims to have discovered an unbeatable chess opening, thereby rendering all Chess theory — and the game itself — obsolete. A chessmaster reassures him that there's still a way to defeat it, but then plunges a chess bishop into the cobbler's back.
• Beyond the Bitterroots: Gregg Harbinson and Pinky Ogle are murdered because another outlaw mistook Gregg for Spoffard at a dark campfire along the road and started talking about their plot, and blackmailer Pinky read a letter Gregg wrote about the incident before his death.
• The Black Arrow: Sir Daniel Brackley murdered Harry Shelton, heir of Tunstall, and obtained guardianship of his minor son Dick to hijack his inheritance. Several years later, when Dick's suspicions are raised and he starts making questions about his father's death, Sir Daniel decides to murder him before he discovers the truth.
• In A Brother's Price, the protagonists find the corpse of a man who likely died from blood loss after his tongue was cut off. They conclude that the women who killed his family and kidnapped him wanted to keep him around (men have Gender Rarity Value in the setting), but didn't want him to be able to talk, and were too incompetent to silence him without killing him. Later on, one of Jerin's kidnappers advises her sisters to not talk too much in front of Jerin, as she would like her future husband to have a tongue.
• The Cat in the Stacks Mysteries: A couple of the victims are killed for this.
  • In book 3, it comes out that the main murder victim had witnessed a murder when they were a child, and while the memories were repressed, they eventually recovered them and began to work on a way to expose the truth. The killer figured it out, and killed him to keep him quiet.
  • In book 4, there's some in-universe speculation that Vera Cassity was murdered to keep her quiet for trying to dig into the Ducote sisters' past, and not wanting it exposed. It's subverted though, since she hadn't been able to find out anything before she was killed for completely different reasons.
  • In book 7, the main murder victim was killed partly because of this and partly out of sheer greed. He'd uncovered the killers' own embezzlement scheme and tried to blackmail them into sharing the money, and they killed him to keep him quiet and keep their funds to themselves. And their next victim, who witnessed this murder, was killed for the same reason.
  • In book 8, the second murder victim knew too much about the killer's previous activities, including blackmail, resulting in the killer arranging their death to cover it up.
  • In book 13, this is suspected to be the motive behind Cora Apfel's murder, whose snooping around is theorized to have led her to finding out who was behind Denis Kilbride's murder, and the killer eliminated her to cover their tracks. Subverted when the one responsible admits to a different motive for killing Cora — namely, her stealing an item that the late Todd Gregory had gifted to his mother, who murdered Cora in retaliation.
  • In the climax of book 15, the killer gives this as their reason for running down Mickey Lindsay, saying he'd seen them on the scene of the first murder and could have identified them.
• The Cat Who... Series: One of the victims in book #24 (The Cat Who Went Up the Creek) is a nature photographer who found signs of illegal tree and gold prospecting in the Black Forest Conservancy, and is shot to prevent him from telling anyone.
• The Nelson De Mille novel The Charm School is kicked off when the KGB silence a tourist who blundered into evidence of the eponymous school. Ultimately, the US government also decides to hide the existence of the Charm School — and the American POWs who staff it — through even more drastic methods.
• The Chrysalids has a rare heroic version. The protagonist is one of a number of secret telepaths living in a dystopian society where anyone discovered to have a mutation or genetic deviation is tortured or killed. His supportive uncle and Secret-Keeper murders a nasty character who has discovered the group's secret from his wife (who’s one of the telepaths) and is on the point of exposing them, in order to save them from almost certain death. Unfortunately, this causes the wife to mistakenly blame the other telepaths and leave a letter exposing them when she hangs herself, but because her sister is able to get it before the letter is opened (the person who found the letter was illiterate and gave it to the sister, who could read), no harm comes to the telepaths at that point.
• Chrysalis (RinoZ): The Legion does not force any candidate to go through with the horrifically painful process of becoming a full Legionary. But they don't allow anyone to walk away with knowledge about that process, either. If someone wants to back out, all they have to do is volunteer and receive a quick death instead.
• The Cosmere:
  • In The Emperor's Soul, Shai knows she's going to be killed after she is no longer useful to her captors in part because she could blackmail them with the fact that the Emperor was almost killed and they resorted to forbidden magic to fix and conceal this. She doesn't actually want to blackmail them, but they won't believe that.
  • Used in "Sixth of the Dusk" as well; Dusk originally thinks this is why Patji is trying so hard to kill him, even when he's trying to drive intruders from the island. He knows the secret of the island's heart, the fact that every Aviar must migrate here and eat a special fruit filled with worms. Otherwise, they cannot grant a talent.
• Darth Bane: By the time of the third book, Bane and Zannah have this as standard operating procedure for anyone who might have even the remotest suspicion that they are not simply a pair of eccentric businesspeople with an interest in old Sith artifacts. Or who might sniff to close to their affairs, even if they have no idea what they're sniffing at, as one unfortunate smuggler and a bartender on an out-of-the-way planet learn first hand.
• The Diabolic: Sidonia cries to her teacher about how her family is sending Nemesis off to court instead of her. The teacher says "that's treason", and Nemesis kills her. She tried to pull her away from Sidonia so that she didn't have to watch, but ultimately did it without a second's hesitation.
• The climax of Dinner at Deviant's Palace is a No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine situation with a bunch of the villain's underlings joining the villain and the hero for the eponymous dinner. When the hero is shown in, he addresses the villain by his true name, and the villain notes that several of the dinner guests have now been let into a secret they can't be allowed to leave with and will have to be killed when the dinner is over. As the conversation continues through the hero's other discoveries about the cult, the villain continues to casually note whenever another revelation has doomed a few more guests, until they get to the real reason the villain's cult bans music, at which point the villain announces that the list now includes every single person in the room.
• In Duumvirate, anyone getting too close to certain truths is most commonly fed misinformation, with options for inflicted insanity, death, and acquisition.
• The Elemental Trilogy: The Bane kills hundreds of his soldiers when Titus reveals his usage of taboo sacrificial magic.
• In The Enemy by Desmond Bagley, a British scientist runs to Sweden after an attack on a member of his family. A Government Agency of Fiction follows him but only finds the scientist and his bodyguard killing time there. In order to shake things up, they pretend to be a KGB team conducting a ridiculously inept tail, but this backfires badly when the bodyguard responds by shooting dead the man he's guarding after they're cornered. The rest of the book is spent finding out what was so important about the scientist he had to be killed to prevent him from falling into enemy hands.
• Flawed: After Craven gives Celestine a sixth brand, he does whatever he can to cover it up. Any staff that saw it mysteriously cannot be reached, while Carrick is forced into hiding.
• The Fragility of Bodies: The Cartel tends to do this to people who get too close to uncovering their Blood Sport. They usually just bribe people, which works well in the poorer areas of town. But people who are determined to expose the truth, such as Rafa and Verónica, are marked for death.
• Gaunt's Ghosts:
  • Traitor General has a rare heroic example, with a kill team being formed to hunt down and eliminate the eponymous villain before he spills too much of what he knows to his new Chaotic masters.
  • In The Armour of Contempt, Ludd interrupts a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown intended to kill Merrt. The man ordering it assures him that the body would never be found here, and offers a bribe. Ludd says he could report it anyway, and the man admits he knows too much to live. Fortunately, Ludd had backup, even though Hark had been distracted for a minute before.
• In Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma, Karen, the eponymous character, believes this was why she went into her coma in the first place — she caught a glimpse of the future, and it wasn't pleasant.
• Gun Law at Laramie: A wounded survivor of an outlaw gang is strangled at the doctor's office before he can be questioned about his gang.
• Throughout Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Kreacher the house-elf serves as little more than a nuisance to anyone in 12 Grimmauld Place (namely Sirius), but they can't free him with clothes because he knows too much about the Order (as long as he is owned, he is actually incapable of violating his owner's orders).
• A Hole in the Fence: Subverted. When Basile reveals to Grisón that some people discovered the secret of the Forbidden Zone, Grisón asks warily what happened to them. When Basile answers "Absolutely nothing", Grisón becomes flummoxed and asks why nobody explains why the Zone is forbidden so everybody knows why they should stay away. Rather than answering, Basile encourages Grisón to keep investigating... but without making questions. Making questions is a bad idea.
• Honor Harrington: Defied in Crown of Slaves. After Thandi Palane resigns from Solarian Commodore Luis Roszak's staff, his XO suggests eliminating her on this basis, but are warned away by the fact that she is connected to knowledgeable and hardened killers (read: Victor Cachat, Anton Zilwicki, and Jeremy X) who would take bloody vengeance, compounding the fact that the person who knows too much is the one they would go to for assassinations in the first place. More to the point, the Sollies are fairly certain that Thandi will keep her mouth shut, and they generally liked her anyway.
• Hurog: In Dragon Bones, the protagonists are told about a man who got tortured and very nearly killed by the villains, who suspected he knew too much. He faked being masochistic and suffering amnesia in order to avoid this fate. (He pretended to have forgotten about the torture and be only worried someone could find out that he sometimes pays women to inflict pain on him.) It worked, probably due to Wrong Genre Savvy villains who thought they were in a detective novel, where leaving the potential witness alive would indeed be cleverer.
• Jaine Austen Mysteries: In Death of a Trophy Wife, the killer lures Bunny's maid Lupe to a "job interview" to keep her quiet about their identity, after Lupe figured out who was really supposed to die that night, but couldn't report it due to her immigration status. When they have Lupe where they want her, they bash in her head with a tire iron and throw her in a dumpster. Thankfully, Lupe survives.
• In Kill Decision, after Strickland discovers that someone is stealing his team's code and gathers them, the villains have them killed before they can investigate further or tip anyone off.
• In Moonlight Becomes You, it's revealed that Nuala was murdered because she found a bell on her friend Constance Rhinelander's grave, which made her suspicious enough that she looked into the other recent deaths at Latham Manor and realized they may have been murder victims as well, as they all had bells on their graves and died within weeks of each other. The killer later attempts to murder Maggie because she had realized the same thing as Nuala.
• Morgan and Merlin's Excellent Adventures: Arthur tells Uther he has important news he needs to share in private. Uther, being a king, is always surrounded by courtiers; he refuses to get rid of them, resulting in all of them hearing the extremely dangerous news that Merlin is dead. Arthur did this on purpose to prove a point about what "private" means. Then Arthur has the courtiers killed before they can spread the news.
• The Mote in God's Eye. After the three midshipmen crash land on Mote Prime, they wander around for a while and make a number of discoveries. The Motie decision makers decide to kill them to keep them from telling the other humans what they've found out. And it plays out the other way, too. The humans are about to be captured, but they decide that they know too much about human technology to allow themselves to be taken prisoner — so they kill themselves.
• Never Flinch: Trig, a Serial Killer who is avenging a wrongfully accused man named Alan Duffrey by killing random people as proxies for the jury that sentenced Duffrey to prison, murders his fourth Victim not as another proxy but because the man, reverend Mike, could potentially link him to the other killings as Trig mentioned the Duffrey case to him during a NA meeting they both attended.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four: Syme lauds the principles behind Newspeak to Winston, explaining in great detail how it helps the Party perfect its control over the general populace. Despite being thoroughly loyal to the Party, he is eventually made an "Un-person" due to this understanding — a fate Winston himself is able to see coming, predicting that Syme will be "Vaporized" several chapters before it actually happens.
• In The Numair Chronicles, it's heavily implied that Faziy was killed to prevent her from revealing too much about Prince Stiloit's death. Arram suspects that Stiloit's death was premeditated rather than caused by an errant storm and that Faziy had something to do with it, given her connection to the lightning snakes. His masters and friends advise him to keep this to himself lest he meet Faziy's fate.
• Subverted in A Piece of Resistance, a novel by Clive Egleton set in a Soviet-occupied Britain. A resistance leader is captured, and the protagonist is told by his superior that he must be freed or, failing that, killed as he knows the identity of hundreds of Resistance members. It turns out the only person he knows is the superior, who's just protecting his own skin.
• Pretty Little Liars: Hanna gets hit by a car when she recognizes A's number in Perfect.
• In Qualia the Purple, JAUNT blows up an entire plane in order to dispose of Hatou and Yukari's family, who were traveling to America because they were prying into the incident that resulted in Yukari's death.
• Safehold:
  • This is a constant danger for the protagonists, as their knowledge of Safehold's status as a Lost Colony in Medieval Stasis would be blasphemous to the average person. They have to be insanely cautious about who they let in on the knowledge. Those people are also told if they don't work it out themselves, that if there's any danger of betrayal they'll be forced to take measures.
  • A specific instance occurs in the third book, By Heresies Distressed when an attempted assassination is foiled by the arrival of Merlin, who is supposed to be hundreds of miles away in a whole other country. Merlin then proceeds to kill every enemy there to prevent anyone from talking about his arrival.
  • In later books, the protagonists start using Merlin's cave complex deep in the mountains to house such individuals as a compromise. Those still deciding where they stand, or who can not bring themselves to become allies of the protagonists, can be kept there in isolation and physical safety, unable to be a risk to the Inner Circle, and allowing the Inner Circle to avoid being any more ruthless than absolutely necessary. They even offer their "prisoners of state", the option of cryo-sleep so they can awake after the conflict has ended if they so wish.
• In Seven Years Awesome Luck, Trick witnessed a corpse being added to someone else's grave while he was still a cat, but didn't understand nor much care about its significance. When he later passes the information on, though, it starts attracting unwanted attention.
• Sherlock Holmes:
  • "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb" features a counterfeiter gang which doesn't include a repairman for their heavy equipment, so once a year or so, they are forced to bring in a disposable one.
  • The titular character of "The Greek Interpreter" is hired by criminals to communicate with their Greek kidnapping victim. When it becomes clear that threats have not sufficed to keep the interpreter quiet, they try to kill him along with the victim.
• Slumrat Rising: Truth gets sent on plenty of secret missions. He demonstrates very quickly that he knows when to keep his mouth shut, and when to shoot people who don't know when to keep their mouths shut. In his last mission for Starbrite, the enemy shouts out the secret of what they're smuggling, and Truth's entire squad is ordered to commit suicide. Once he comes out alive, he is very pissed, because in addition to all the other problems, his loyalty was never in question and killing him was completely unnecessary.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Bran sees Jaime and Cersei having sex and is then pushed out of a tower for it. During the ensuing coma, he's attacked by an assassin. We later learn that the assassination attempt is a subversion — he was attacked because Joffrey wanted his father's approval.
  • Jon Arryn learned about Jaime and Cersei and promptly died under suspicious circumstances. Interestingly, this is a subversion — he was killed because Petyr felt like sowing some discord.
  • Petyr has a habit of doing this, murdering Ser Dontos, whom he used as a catspaw in order to smuggle Sansa Stark out of King's Landing, and his accomplice in Jon Arryn's murder, Lysa Tully.
• Star Trek:
  • In the Star Trek novel "Ghost-Walker", the Midgwin Yarblis Geshkerroth takes over Captain Kirk's body. Worried that Spock knows that he has taken over Kirk, Geshkerroth tries to kill Spock by luring him into the shuttle bay and opening the bay to space.
  • Lampshaded in a novel in which a friend of Captain Kirk learns of the existence of Section 31 — and then dies in a Teleporter Accident before he can tell Kirk. Upon learning of this, Spock muses that "the overly knowledgeable had become exceedingly short-lived".
• In Striptease by Carl Hiaasen, characters discover a Congressman who beat up another patron at a nudie bar. They're hoping for some blackmail, but the Congressman's people have other ideas. A purer example is mostly in the background — three migrant workers are hired to murder one character, sent back to Jamaica afterwards, and it's implied that a fatal accident will be arranged for them there.
• Morgause's spy in Sword of the Rightful King kills (at least) two people directly and one indirectly because they know his face and some part of his plans, meaning they might blow his cover.
• Talma Gordon: Cameron's father was killed by Captain Gordon after helping him bury his treasure to keep the location secret. Cameron notes that this was a custom among pirates.
• Touching Spirit Bear: After Cole Matthews raids a store, he brags that he committed the crime to the whole school. One of his fellow students then does what any sane person would do: file a report to the police. As it turns out, that person was ravaged by Cole, with the consequences including damage to his brain.
• A mysterious murder committed for this reason kicks off the plot of the Web Serial Novel Tremontaine. It's not revealed until later what dangerous secret the dead man knew: that the woman known as Diane Roehaven, Duchess Tremontaine, has actually been an imposter for the past two decades — a servant girl who couldn't deal with her Rich Bitch employer any longer and pulled a Kill and Replace on her, taking advantage of their uncanny resemblance. The dead guy, apparently Too Dumb to Live, tried to blackmail her with this secret.
• In Updraft, the Singers executed Nat's father because he knew that Singers possessed knowledge of how to safely navigate at night, which would be very useful for non-Singer fliers. Even if the Singers had been prepared to share that particular technique, people would wonder what else the Singers were hiding... and would now be better able to discover just that, since night would no longer cover Singer activities which people would get really angry about.
• In Warrior Cats, this happens a few times:
  • In the first book of the original series, Into the Wild, Ravenpaw witnesses Tigerclaw murdering one of their Clanmates, Redtail, in the hope of getting Redtail's job. Tigerclaw suspects he knows something, so he sends Ravenpaw on dangerous missions, clearly hoping that he'll get killed.
  • In the eighth arc, A Starless Clan, after Frostpaw has a vision that Reedwhisker was murdered by one of their Clanmates (though she's not sure who), she gets attacked by an unknown assailant and left for dead. Her attacker turns out to be Splashtail, the cat who murdered Reedwhisker.
• Wings of Fire Legends: Dragonslayer:
  • It turns out that Wren was sacrificed to be eaten by dragons after she read a book about the illegal acts of the dragonmancers.
  • Whenever someone questions Heath's story, gets too close to his treasure, or has even the slightest chance to expose him as a fraud, he would banish them from Valor. Pine learns this the hard way.