"[distracted by Natalie drinking a bottle of mouthwash] Will you please? And that’s why they chose me. Adrian Monk, the perfect patsy! They knew about my problems. They knew I’d never take a good look at the guy. So, there never really was a leper except for the guy you were making out with all night."
— Adrian Monk, Monk, "Mr. Monk and the Leper"
The perp hires a detective to solve the crime, in order to throw suspicion off himself. The perp may have a plan to make the detective a Fall Guy for the crime. Or it may be done merely to strengthen their claim that they're innocent and ignorant of the crime (the same logic that sometimes leads criminals to report their own crimes to the police). Typically, the detective in question is a Defective Detective, to minimize the odds of him actually working it out.
Invariably, the detective turns out to be not quite so defective as the perp thought, and figures it all out.
This often leads to monologuing (both from the Detective and the Perp) and the inevitable "The only thing I couldn't figure out was..." statement during the Final Confrontation.
This is an archetypal trope in detective fiction, as even Sherlock Holmes was abused like this.
This trope is often used as a reveal or twist, expect spoilers below. Compare Detective Mole.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- In Case Closed, a case that had both Conan and Heiji working together in Osaka had the detective who was helping them and Kogoro to catch a serial killer... as the killer himself. The victims were the people who caused the death of his father, 25 years ago; he specifically became a policeman to find them, make them spit the truth out, and then kill them in a way that would both baffle the whole Osaka police corps ''and'' let him blame someone else for it.
- In StrikerS Sound Stage X of the Lyrical Nanoha franchise, Teana found herself in this role, as she eventually found out that the perp who was behind the killings of the case she was investigating was Runessa, her assistant who had been part of the case since day one and who regarded the already dead fanatic Toredia as a mentor and father figure.
Audio Play
- In The Firesign Theatre's "The Further Adventures of Nick Danger", Nancy claims to need Nick's help, but really, she just wants a patsy to frame for the murder of Rocky Roccoco, who is blackmailing her.
- Sherlock Holmes (BBC Radio)
- In "The Case of the Determined Client," the client tampers with a crime scene to make it look as though her father had been murdered outright, rather than starting the fight with the man who killed him. When the police don't even notice her hints, she calls in Sherlock Holmes, who naturally sees not only the evidence she'd left but that she was the one who left it. She ruefully admits that she should have known better.
- Holmes accuses his client of this in "The Madness of Colonel Warburton", having concluded it's the only logical explanation. However, something the man lets slip in his outraged denial helps him realise there is another solution that he previously dismissed.
Comic Books
- Batman: Black and White: In "Fortunes", a private detective is hired to find a missing woman and finds her... dead. His client is the murderer, who hired him apparently on the basis that having an independent third party discover the body would make it less likely for suspicion to fall on her than if she'd "discovered" the murder herself; unfortunately for her, it doesn't take him long to see through the false clues planted at the crime scene and identify the real culprit.
- Parodied in the Sam Spayed: Babes and Bullets section of Garfield: His 9 Lives, in which Spayed immediately assumes his client killed her husband and is planning to double-cross him, he's just not sure why and how. (She didn't.)
- Randall Banticoff does this to Luke Cage in Luke Cage Noir, hiring Cage to investigate his wife's murder while arranging for him to take the rap for the crime - and die before a trial could potentially expose it as a frame job.
- Taken to the extreme in Sin City where Ava Lord hires private eye Dwight McCarthy to get evidence on her supposedly abusive husband who may be plotting to kill her. It ends up being a setup; she manipulates Dwight into killing her husband himself.
Film
- 8mm: It turns out that the attorney that contacted Tom in the investigation of an apparently genuine Snuff Film, Daniel Longdale, was in fact the one who commissioned the film for the late Mr. Christian. He had only contacted the private investigator when Mrs. Christian discovered the tape after her husband's death in order to placate her without getting police involved, and never thought Tom would actually succeed in discovering where the film came from. Once Tom starts getting too close to the truth, Longdale is forced to try and kill him, revealing his role in the murder.
- In the movie Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Ace is hired by an Englishman trying to harvest bat guano for fertilizer, who has to start a genocidal war between local African tribes to get it. Ace was hired as a means of establishing for the public that he had done everything he could to prevent the war. When Ace unexpectedly figures out who is behind the scheme to wipe out the innocent tribe, the Englishman decides to change his plans and set Ace up as a patsy for the whole thing.
- Played with somewhat in Basic. Former Army Ranger turned (possibly corrupt) DEA Agent Tom Hardy is called on by Colonel Styles, an old Army buddy, to investigate the mysterious disappearances and presumed deaths of a group of Ranger trainees and the infamous Drill Sergeant who was training them. Styles isn't involved in the disappearances, but he is the head of a drug smuggling operation going through his base, several of the missing trainees were part of the operation, and the Sergeant suspected something was up. So Styles brought Hardy in for an unofficial investigation/interrogation of the two survivors to find out what happened, and with the assumption that Hardy could be paid off if he stumbled onto anything that would incriminate him.
- In Black Dynamite, CIA agent O'Leary reinstates Black Dynamite's license to kill so he can hunt down the mafiosi responsible for killing his brother. However, the mafia did so on O'Leary's orders, which leads to Black Dynamite uncovering The Conspiracy O'Leary was part of.
- Happens to Jake Gittes at the start of Chinatown. He's hired by Evelyn Mulwray to investigate her husband Hollis, who she suspects of having an affair. Jake photographs Hollis with a young woman, and the photos are published in the paper the next day. It's not until the real Evelyn confronts him that Jake realizes the one he met was an actress, part of a ploy to ruin Hollis's career.
- High Crimes centers on the protagonist trying to prove that her husband was framed for committing war crimes during the Salvadoran Civil War by his superiors, who scapegoated him to cover up that they committed a political assassination that killed American citizens. She succeeds, only to find out in the end that he really did commit the crimes he was accused of.
- Jagged Edge. In this case we see things from the point-of-view of the killer's lawyer and her private investigator, which he'd have to hire anyway as he was being prosecuted for murder.
- Played With in Knives Out, where private detective Benoit Blanc is anonymously hired to investigate the seeming clear-cut suicide of Harlan Thrombey, so it is not clear who requested his aid, and to what end. As it turns out, Blanc was indeed hired by someone who intended to cause Harlan’s death, Ransom. Ransom learned that Harlan had altered his will to leave everything to his nurse Marta, so he tried to have her rendered ineligible for the inheritance by essentially tricking Marta into giving Harlan the wrong medication (by switching the labels on the phials), which would cause a fatal overdose and, Ransom hoped, cause her to be arrested for Harlan’s death and for the inheritance to revert back to a prior version of the will, where Harlan’s family would get everything. After Harlan did something that Ransom never expected and killed himself to protect Marta, Ransom hired Benoit hoping that his investigation would incriminate Marta in Harlan’s death. The plan failed because while Benoit soon determined that while Marta had a secret relating to Harlan's death, he correctly intuited that she wasn't a murderer, and that the motive of his anonymous employer was also questionable under the circumstances.
- Klute: One of the two people who hired John Klute (who has never investigated a missing person case before) is the actual killer and seems unsettled by how successful Klute's investigation is.
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003): The titular League is assembled by a man known only as "M" to stop the threat of The Fantom, who is attempting to set off a world war. They eventually learn that M is The Fantom, and also Professor James Moriarty; the entire thing is part of his plot to get them all together in one place so one of his allies can more easily steal samples of Hyde, Mina and Skinner's powers, and the blueprints for Nemo's technology, for use in his plans.
- In the Murder, She Wrote movie A Story to Die For, Jessica is trying to keep out of the case, but the killer gets her involved in the hope she can prove his protoge didn't do it without discovering who did. Naturally, this doesn't work out for him.
- The thriller No Way Out (1987) subverts this: Commander Tom Farrell, the man that Defense Secretary David Brice and his aide Scott Pritchard hire to investigate a murder that they are attempting to blame on a Soviet mole is the person they are trying to frame and knows that Brice is the one actually guilty of the murder.
- Zig-Zagged in Shamus (1973). Hardboiled Detective Shamus McCoy is hired by millionaire EJ Hume to find out who stole a shipment of diamonds being delivered to him. Shamus discovers the culprit is connected to an arms dealing operation willing to kill anyone who could expose it. Inevitably, it turns out Hume is the head of the arms dealing group, but he wasn't responsible for the robbery he hired Shamus to investigate. Rather, it was a treacherous underling.
- In the Conspiracy Thriller film Snake Eyes, the highly corrupt Atlantic City detective Rick Santoro is invited by his longtime friend Kevin Dunne to attend a championship boxing match, which Dunne will be attending as the head of the security detail for Secretary of Defense Charles Kirkland. Kirkland is assassinated at the fight, and late in the film Santoro learns that Dunne was part of the conspiracy to kill Kirkland. Dunne admits that he invited Santoro because he believed that Santoro's first instinct would be to cover for Dunne when Dunne "coincidentally" left his post to investigate something and the Secretary was killed while he was away (which he was right about, as that was the first thing Santoro did), and that even if Santoro tried to investigate the scene and didn't bungle it, his long history of corruption and taking bribes meant he could be paid off by a wealthy member of the conspiracy.
- In the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo, former police detective John Ferguson is hired by college acquaintance Gavin Elster to follow his wife due to her recent erratic behavior. This is part of a complex plot on Elster's part to pass the murder of his wife off as a suicide, and make Ferguson the perfect witness to swear that it truly was suicide.
Literature
- The Caves of Steel. Elijah Baley discovers that Commissioner Enderby, who assigned him the case, is the murderer. However during The Summation he points out that Enderby had good reasons for doing so; he's promised Elijah a promotion that he's desperate for, the two of them are old friends from way back, and if that doesn't work then he has blackmail material because Elijah's wife is secretly a member of a radical anti-robot organisation.
- In Chet and Bernie: The Sound and the Furry, Chet recalls a time when a shady figure hiring Bernie to find a missing and heavily insured ring accidentally dropped it out of his pocket during the initial interview. Chet seized him by the pant leg without having to take a step and it holds the record for their fastest-solved case.
- The Cuckoo's Calling: John Bristow hired Cormoran Strike to investigate his stepsister's death, in the hopes of deflecting suspicion from himself.
- In the Carl Hiaasen novel Double Whammy, R.J. Decker, a former newspaper photographer turned Private Detective, is hired by Dennis Gault to prove Dickie Lockhart, a top tournament fisherman, has been winning all of those tournaments because he cheats. Except Gault has Lockhart murdered and frames R.J. for his murder.
- It has happened to Hercule Poirot, in Peril at End House, Lord Edgeware Dies, and the short story "The Veiled Lady" — with honorable mention to The Murder on the Links, where this was attempted but the person doing the hiring was murdered before Poirot had even arrived. At least all of these are duly explained, unlike "The Hunter's Lodge Mystery" story where the decision to call in Poirot doesn't seem to follow any logic.
- Nero Wolfe once required a client to sign a statement promising to pay in full, even if he turned out to be the guilty one. It turned out to be a good precaution.
- In Anthony Berkeley's The Piccadilly Murder, Mr Chitterwick, the detective, is the key witness in the prosecution of a man for murder. The accused man's friends and wife urge Mr Chitterwick to investigate more thoroughly, saying they're sure there's been a miscarriage of justice. The friends are genuine; the wife is the real killer. She only meant to reinforce Mr Chitterwick's determination to do his public duty and convict her husband. But she overdoes her pleading, he agrees to investigate, and the whole truth comes out.
- Seven Stars: In the chapter "The Dog Story", private detective Jerome Rhodes is hired to track down a woman named Mimsy Mountmain, whom his client says is the meatspace identity of a notorious cybercriminal. As a precaution, he also starts investigating his client in case she has an ulterior motive. He eventually figures out that his client is Mimsy Mountmain, and that his precautionary investigation has revealed to her the location of the woman in whose name she hired him — her one remaining serious rival.
- Sherlock Holmes:
- The Ur-Example is probably the story The Adventure of the Retired Colourman. A quote from the end of the story:
"You certainly seem to have met every difficulty," said the inspector. "Of course, he was bound to call us in, but why he should have gone to you I can't understand."
"Pure swank!" Holmes answered. "He felt so clever and so sure of himself that he imagined no one could touch him. He could say to any suspicious neighbour, 'Look at the steps I have taken. I have consulted not only the police but even Sherlock Holmes.'" - Alluded to in another story where Holmes reminds Watson of the time a Villain with Good Publicity wanted them to clear his name, referring to him as "a terrible murderer" who looked like "a Sunday school-attending young man".
- The novel The Devil's Dust by James Lovegrove opens with Holmes turning down a case because he guessed that the client was attempting this, neatly deconstructing the case presented to reveal that he’s already worked out the prospective client intends to blame recent lost property on a non-existent twin brother. Holmes doesn't even bother to take action after the man leaves, confident that this would-be client will give himself away to the authorities on his own eventually.
- In the novella The Scroll of the Dead by David Stuart Davies, an eminent Egyptologist is secretly working with two murderous aristocratic occultists who believe that the eponymous scroll will give them immortality ... if they can find it. After failing to decipher the scroll that reveals its location, they arrange a Faked Kidnapping, and send the Egyptologist's daughter to seek Holmes's help in "finding" her father, leading him to find a copy of the location scroll in their abandoned hideout, as they believe — correctly — that his skill in codebreaking will succeed where knowledge of Ancient Egypt has failed.
- The novel Master of Lies by Philip Purser-Hallard features a variation of this, when the forgers Holmes is investigating attempt to plant fake evidence that Mycroft Holmes is behind the forgery ring and Holmes killed Watson to protect his brother's reputation, only for Watson and Mrs Hudson to thwart their assassination attempt. While Holmes and Watson, accompanied by their police contact Stanley Hopkins, study the fake manuscript written by the forgers, they soon determine that this manuscript was written based on Watson's notes on the current case, which were stolen a couple of days ago. Based on this, all three note that the scenes featuring Hopkins are basically accurate to what he remembers (allowing for minor discrepancies like Watson obviously not being able to exactly quote what everyone said), where other parts of the manuscript have either been subtly altered or are complete fiction. This leads Holmes to observe that the forgers' intention was for Hopkins to find the manuscript after Watson's death and treat it as genuine evidence of a crime, with Hopkins serving as the Patsy and arresting Holmes for the murder.
- In the novel Breath of God by Guy Adams Holmes is not so much hired as warned by the Occult Detective Dr Silence that the supernatural force that has already killed two men has named him as a future victim. It eventually transpires that Silence is himself part of the conspiracy that killed these people, with the goal of forcing everyone to believe in magic again even if it kills them, and that Holmes was dragged into the situation partly because they thought he'd involve himself in an "impossible" crime anyway and they'd rather he did so under supervision, and partly so they could say "Look, even the arch-rationalist is taking this seriously". However, they underestimated just how much of a rationalist Holmes was; in The Summation, he says that, unable to come up with a mundane explanation for Silence's story, he had always approached the case with his default assumption being that it was simply a lie.
- The Ur-Example is probably the story The Adventure of the Retired Colourman. A quote from the end of the story:
- In the first Sister Fidelma story, "The High King's Sword", the abbot is encouraged to request Fidelma by the criminals, who realise that unless a clever and scrupulous dalaigh is involved, one of them will be condemned as the most likely suspect without anyone really investigating enough to find their carefully planted frame-up.
- Who Censored Roger Rabbit?: Roger hired Eddie Valiant to investigate his boss - so that Roger would have someone to frame when he killed his boss. In the final chapter Eddie admits that the plan would have worked were it not for two complications that Roger had no way of seeing coming.
Live-Action TV
- Brooklyn Nine-Nine: When Pimento is fired from the NYPD, Holt suggests he could become a private investigator. Pimento immediately imagines such a scenario playing out.
Pimento: Private Eye huh? "I'm afraid I've got some bad news, your wife is cheating on you. You killed your wife? And you're framing me?!?! I left my prints all over that crime scene! You're an evil geniu..." Yeah, I like this. This could work.
- Cold Case had an interesting variation: A professor was accused, but never proven guilty, of the murder of one of his female students. Because of this he was discredited and fired by the university. He went to the team to have them reopen the case, only for them to figure out it was him all along, and this time they gathered enough evidence to arrest and convict him. Oops.
- Columbo
- In "A Friend in Deed" the Villain of the Week is the Deputy Police Commissioner. He specifically requested Columbo for the case, having somehow failed to notice that the "bumbling" detective had a nearly spotless track record, having only failed to close one case in the entire series (also be fair, Columbo claims that he only solves about half of his cases and may be speaking truthfully. We just so happen to see his triumphs).
- In "Columbo Cries Wolf", Columbo is fooled into investigating a celebrity disappearance and suspected murder that turns out to be a publicity stunt. One of the two conspirators then murders the other and hides the body, assuming that Columbo won't risk making a fool of himself again. Columbo is not so easily deterred.
- Another police example is the CSI fourth season episode Suckers where a casino owner attempts to fake a huge robbery for the insurance money.
- Lampshaded in Dark Justice: a not-so-bright gigolo and his girlfriend hire a female detective to solve the murder of the rich woman he was living off. The detective easily proves it was these two who did the deed, and asks why she was hired. The gigolo says he thought no-one would suspect him if he did.
Detective: It was done in Jagged Edge!Girlfriend (to gigolo boyfriend): I wanted to see that movie, but you said no!
- In the Elementary episode "The Visions of Norman P. Horowitz", Sherlock is contacted by Horowitz's brother, not to investigate his death by accidental overdose, but because before he died he predicted a series of deaths that is coming true, and Sherlock is on the list. Sherlock naturally feels he has to prove Horowitz could not predict the future, and someone killed these people to make it look as if he could. It was the brother, and the whole point of the exercise was to draw the attention of former Holmes client (and vague associate of Horowitz) Henry Baskerville, so he'd pay silly money for the rest of Horowitz's "predictions".
- Happens so frequently in Jonathan Creek that merely soliciting his services should be ample proof of guilt. The episode "Daemon's Roost" is a big one, because he didn't figure it out; there's a Flash Back to the Striped Unicorn case, in which a man carefully stages his wife's murder so that it initially appears as if only he could have done it, but there's a brilliant explanation otherwise for Jonathan to find. Jonathan only realises the truth after the man's second wife calls him in on another case, six years later.
- Limitless: In the episode "Arm-aggedon", Boyle's friend called him due to being arrested for strangling his wife with his robotic arm, which he claimed was being hacked. While it's revealed that robotic arms made by the company were being hacked, the hackings had nothing to do with the murder, and that Boyle's friend was actually guilty of his crime.
- Monk: In "Mr. Monk and the Leper", Monk is hired by the presumed-dead Derek Bronson - who has been voluntarily missing on account of his severe, horrifically disfiguring leprosy for seven years - to break into his old house and steal some letters that would show he had been cheating on his wife (saying they would “destroy her” if she ever found them). It turns out to be a hoax, the real Derek is dead (likely murdered by his wife) but he left his fortune to his sister and nephews, so to keep him from being declared legally dead said wife orchestrated the whole thing so that Monk (by this point in the series a celebrity who’s probably the most respected man in California) would later testify that he’d seen Derek alive. To this end she hires (and later kills) an imposter to impersonate her husband, with the leprosy angle exploiting Monk’s intense germophobia to keep him from getting a good look at the man or becoming too invested in the case.
- A weird one in Murder, She Wrote: The murderer is a DA, who killed one of the defendants in a major fraud case. Earlier, he tried to phone her and accidentally called Jessica's number. To cover this up, the DA subpeonas Jessica and refuses to believe she has no idea what it's about. So Jessica has to solve the murder to avoid being found in contempt of court.
- Murdoch Mysteries
- A convoluted one in the episode "Murdoch Appreciation Society". The killer wants to frame the professor who expelled him from medical school for the murder of a man who's donated his brain to science. But he knows that if the death doesn't look suspicious, the corpse will go straight to the professor and there won't be a proper post mortem. On the other hand, if it does look like an obvious murder, Murdoch will realise the professor is being framed. So he joins the eponymous Appreciation Society and convinces them to stage a fake murder so they can watch Murdoch work, using a body he can steal from the medical school. So not only does Murdoch get involved but there's an extra layer of false explanation (the fake murder) for him to disprove, and it looks like the professor would have committed a perfect crime except for the Society's interference.
- Invoked Trope in "A Study in Pink": When evidence is mounting that Murdoch's childhood friend, the private detective Freddie Pink might be a murderer, she protests that she's the one who called the police. He suggests she might be attempting this, and she says she'd surely know his methods well enough to anticipate him seeing through it, unless he thinks she was anticipating him concluding that she wouldn't do it because he'd see through it... It turns out there was no murder, although Freddie was protecting a client who had killed her husband in self-defence, and had been framed by his family so she'd be forced to explain things in court.
- Poirot:
- In one of the episodes, a shifty old lady tried to abuse Capt. Hastings in this way; she had the sense not to go to Poirot directly.
- In "Three Act Tragedy", Sir Charles Cartwright begs Poirot to take the case and assists him with the investigation, despite being the culprit. It is an Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole that makes the whole scheme look like Suicidal Overconfidence, since in the original book, the innocent Mr. Satterthwaite, who was Adapted Out, was the one who got Poirot involved.
- The Professionals
- In "Not A Very Civil Civil Servant", CI5 is given a watching brief on a corruption trial over the objections of its boss George Cowley. The corrupt bureaucrat who arranged this tries to end the brief after the accused are acquitted—but that's only because a witness 'committed suicide', and now Cowley is no longer in a mood to drop the matter. Turns out giving such a task to a Badass Bureaucrat with a virtually unlimited brief of his own is a bad idea.
- In "Everest Was Also Conquered", a Whitehall mandarin who was a mentor of Cowley asks CI5 to look into a Deathbed Confession to murder. Turns out he was part of the conspiracy and wanted to find out how secure he was.
- In "When the Heat Cools Off", Doyle is approached by the daughter of a man convicted of killing Doyle's police partner, claiming that he was framed. Doyle convinces Cowley to let them investigate, but it turns out the new evidence has been fabricated and he really was guilty.
- In The '90s remake, a fake FBI agent uses CI5 to track down and kill someone in witness protection.
- An episode of Simon & Simon deals with the detectives being hired by a magician into a case, and they discover that the ex wife of the magician did it. Later, they discover it was all the magician ruse. Then he explains:
So it was just like a standard Stage Magician trick: You guys are the public, you must be smart enough to figure out the distraction, but not smart enough to discover the real trick.
- In Sledge Hammer!: the episode "Play It Again, Sledge" has a women hire Sledge as private investigator, to make him an eyewitness of her "self-defence" murder.
Newspaper Comics
- Parodied in one of the "Tracer Bullet" strips of Calvin and Hobbes. In Calvin's fantasies, he's being used as the fall-guy for a room being ransacked; in real life, Calvin was at least partially responsible (and may have been entirely responsible depending on whether you think Hobbes is alive).
Radio
- Parodied in the Noir Episode of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, in which Finnemore is hired by a Femme Fatale in what turns out to be just one step of an overly-complicated and self-contradictory cover-up by a Sidney Greenstreet type who, it eventually transpires, has neglected to actually commit a crime first.
- The Wayne and Shuster radio (later TV) sketch "Rinse the Blood Off My Toga" has Roman private eye Flavius Maximus hired by Brutus to investigate Julius Caesar's murder. He thinks his client is a fruitcake when Brutus keeps dropping blatant hints that he's not to be trusted, but eventually works it out when witnesses keep dropping dead around him.
Flavius: I put two and two together and it came out IV.
Video Games
- Ace Attorney had a lawyer patsy: in case 2 of Apollo Justice, the title character is hired by the guilty party to help the innocent defendant, because the flyers for Apollo's practice made him seem likely to be incompetent.
- Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc features this as its fifth chapter. The mastermind plants the corpse of “Junko Enoshima”, the only person killed for a rule violation, disguised in a disguise previously used to almost murder the protagonist Makoto (and knock him out from behind prior, but he only saw the disguise when the mastermind tried to murder him before being stopped). The body is rigged to blow up when someone attempts to remove the mask, preventing identification of the body. As all are present and accounted for and the mastermind’s robot mascot Monokuma is offline for a time, it’s assumed the body is of the mastermind themself but when Monokuma comes back online the only possibility is the hidden 16th student Mukuro Ikusaba that the Ultimate Detective Kyoko Kirigiri had discovered evidence of. However, almost all evidence (planted by the mastermind) implicates either Kyoko or Makoto in her murder as those two were really the only people actually solving prior murders, making them the biggest threat. The mastermind’s plan backfires however as Makoto covers up the key evidence that the mastermind had established to implicate only Kyoko, allowing himself to be convicted. He’s sent to be executed, but rescued by the believed-destroyed AI Alter Ego and dumped in the trash, which Kyoko rescues him from. The corpse is actually the 16th student, but she was disguised as Junko at the time, as Junko is the real mastermind.
- Scott Shelby in Heavy Rain who is the Origami killer.
- In Jack Orlando, it looks like Orlando is lucky to be allowed to try to prove his own innocence, but since the Inspector is actually in on the crime, Orlando isn't meant to get anywhere. Part way through the game, Orlando gets in trouble again and is told to wait for the Inspector - but if he does, the Inspector decides that he's making too much progress and locks him up, resulting in a Non-Standard Game Over.
- In the third chapter of Limbo of the Lost, after being wrongfully accused of stealing souls, Briggs is accounted for by collector O'Negus, freed, and appointed detective by the mayor to determine who is actually stealing the souls. It turns out that the soul taker is posing as the mayor, and O'Negus is one of his accomplices.
- Non-detective variation: In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Olga is first seen in the Plant Chapter contacting Solidus by radio, alerting him to the presence of "a ninja." Much later, it is revealed that she's the ninja.
- Amateur Adventure Game example: the AGS adventure game Murder in a Wheel features a freelance detective who has to solve the murder of a pet hamster only to find himself in this situation.
- Occurs in Nancy Drew: The Deadly Device; believing Nancy Drew to be less-than-competent, the murderer hires her to investigate the death of a scientist and colleague of his. He finds out that it’s a very bad idea to try to make Nancy Drew a patsy — the hard way.
- In the online game Sleuth: Noir, you play a Private Detective hired to investigate murders because the police are far too incompetent for such investigations to be left to them. The person who hired you is just as valid a suspect as any other person of interest who comes up in the case, and can be the culprit just as easily as anyone else if they don't have an alibi or give you a false one.
Web Original
- Black Jack Justice:
- "Justice For Some" has Jack and Trixie hired by a man as incognito security at a showing of his family's heirloom jewelry. In the course of the episode no less than three notorious thieves show up at the event and, when the jewels go missing, they're immediately suspected. The only problem is that one had gone straight, another was scoping out the artwork in another room, and Jack managed to nab the third when the lights went out, ensuring he couldn't have done anything. The whole thing turns out to have been a plot by their client to steal the gems himself for the money, while one of the real thieves was set up for the crime.
- "The Reunion" features a woman, Edie, hiring the detectives to help facilitate a reunion with her estranged twin sister, Jane. The patsy comes in when it's revealed that Edie is Jane. Jane murdered Edie in the heat of the moment and tried to pretend to make up, with Jack and Trixie as witnesses, so that she wouldn't be suspected when Evie was missed. Small inconsistencies in the situation trigger Jack's radar, making him suspicious throughout until he's able to confirm the truth while confronting Jane.
- "The Do-Nothing Detectives" features a man named Raymond Davis giving Jack and Trixie $1,000 to cease working for their client Angela Barnes... who neither of them had ever actually met. The odd behavior is explained by the idea that Jack and Trixie would be witnesses when Angela Barnes turned up dead by suicide after apparently murdering their client. The man who hired them is killed by Angela Barnes and the real Raymond Davis, making sure to mess up the man's face so he couldn't be readily identified as not the man Jack and Trixie met. The whole thing falls apart because the whole situation is so suspicious Jack just has to investigate it despite their job literally being to do no such thing.
Western Animation
- This trope has been used several times on Archer. For example, on one occassion the agency is hired by a Cardinal to protect the Pope, only to learn that the Cardinal who hired them was relying on their incompetence and infighting to make them fail. The Cardinal hoped that afterwards he would look innocent, and could point to hiring the agency to show he was taking the threat seriously and tried to prevent the Pope's death.
- Used in the two part Batman Beyond episode "The Call." Superman asks for Batman's help uncovering a traitor in the JLU. Guess who the (Brainwashed and Crazy) traitor is?
- In the Dog City episode "The Great Dane Curse", Candice Dane hired Ace to find out who's trying to kill her, and then disappeared, leaving Ace as the prime suspect in her murder. It eventually transpires that she faked her death to escape her controlling father.
- Scooby-Doo:
- Notably used in Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost where Ben Ravencroft invites the gang to Oakhaven, while planning to summon the ghost of his evil ancestor.
- Specifically Ravencroft aksed them to help him to find said ancestor's spell book, claiming that it's a journal of her work as a healer. When Daphne wonders about the deception, Velma is quick to deduce that, if Mystery Inc. knew what he was really looking for, they'd never agree to help.
- Lampshaded in one episode of Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?: "And I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids ... who, like an idiot, I called here!"
- Notably used in Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost where Ben Ravencroft invites the gang to Oakhaven, while planning to summon the ghost of his evil ancestor.