I'm looking for stories in which the hero consciously decides to kill an innocent.

The subject line seems clear enough, but I’ll add a few things if y’all don’t mind.

[ul]
[li]I’m only interested in literature. Film, television, & comic books can go elsewhere.*[/li][li]I’m also only interested in stories with heroic protagonists–characters who are fundamentally on the side of truth & justice. No villain protagonists need apply, nor villains-turned-heroes in their pre-reform days.†[/li][li]Lastly I’m looking for deliberate decisions to kill the innocent, not sacrifices forced on the hero by his inability to be in two places at once… That is, cases in which the hero has to allow one person to die because he’s busy saving a million are not what I’m looking for; rather, I’m hoping y’all will post instances in which a hero solves a cold equation by deliberately and personally pulling the trigger or swinging the sword on somebody who probably doesn’t deserve death.‡[/li][/ul]

Thoughts, anyone?

  • Assuming the thread gets any legs at all, I fully expect this qualification to be ignored by post 15 but I’m including it anyway so I can get the feckless bitching out of the way now.
    † This will likely be ignored by post 18.
    ‡ I just like foototes.

You do know about “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin, right?

Another one would be *Changes *by Jim Butcher, book 12 of The Dresden Files.

Of course not. My use of the phrase was just a bizarre coincidence. Any statements to the contrary are bald-faced calumnies put about by my enemies and should be ignored. :wink:

Can I trouble you for some details?

Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, depending on how “heroic” one regards Raskolnikov.

In the Belisarius alt-history series, at one point when in the Malwa Empire Belsarius is presented with the rebellious lord of Ranapur and his family, and told to demonstrate “how Romans deal with enemies”. He knows he can’t just let them go and protesting would just get him and his allies killed gruesomely, so instead of giving the Malwa a torture-show like they want & expect he just says “Valentinian”, and Valentinian promptly cuts off all their heads. And Belisarius announces that “this is the Roman way with enemies”, a rather pointed comment given that he considers the Malwa enemies although they don’t know it yet…

You had a similar thread back in the day, so I’ll post the same answer as earlier. in “Curse of Chalion” Ista and her husband drowned their dear friend, in an failed attempt to remove the curse from their family.

Several example spring to mind. Louis Wu purpously kills a Pak Protector and then kills millions of people on the Ringworld. Star tells a group of bickering diplomats that the problem would be solved if they just killed one stubborn dude, then orders the guards to take him out back and shoot him. They do, in Glory Road.

Boy ain’t a hero whatsodamnever. He’s hardly on the side of truth and justice. The old moneylender may have been a bitch, but that doesn’t matter. He wants to take her cash, not to help anybody else, and only chooses the old woman because he figures nobody will miss her.

I’m not looking simply for protagonists who commit an evil act. I’m looking for heroes who do so.

In Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, Thomas Cromwell engineers the evidence that gets Anne Boleyn executed, even though he doesn’t seem to believe that she is really guilty of the things she’s charged with. He has a vendetta against all the people she is accused of adultery and treason with, though. I don’t know if Cromwell counts as a hero, but we are supposed to feel some connection to him.

How about Of Mice and Men? George might not be what you have in mind as a hero exactly, although he is on the side of decency and kindness as I recall (Jeez, has it really been over 20 years since I read that book?!) Spoilering in an abundance of caution:

He kills Lennie to spare Lennie the lynching that’s headed his way. He retells Lennie the beloved story about the farm, giving him one last happy memory, before shooting him in the back of the head. There are probably lots of other mercy killings like this in literature.

SPOILERS for *Changes *by Jim Butcher

[SPOILER]OK, so this is the twelfth book in the series, so the backstory is more than somewhat ponderous, but the hero, Dresden, is fighting a nation of vampires, who have kidnapped his daughter. The girl’s mother has been partially turned into a vampire. The vampires have started up a ritual that will culminate in a human sacrifice; the ritual will kill anyone related to the sacrificee. The hero’s daughter is the designated sacrifice.

Dresden winds up sacrificing the girl’s mother, his long-time lover, in the place of the daughter; due to the semi-vampiric nature of the mother, her relatives are the vampires instead of her human kin (including the daughter, I guess). Dresden’s actions result in the near-total elimination of the vampire nation. Since there is a 13th and 14th book, this causes other complications.

I don’t know that this will help you. The series is well-worth reading, though.[/SPOILER]

Another mercy killing: In Last of the Mohicans, Hawkeye shoots a friend in the head to save him from being burned alive.

I don’t recall that. Is that in the book?

This is really lame, and again questions what a hero is, but in Harry Potter

Snape kills Dumbledore to maintain his cover as a Voldemort loyalist. No, I don’t know why I spoilered it

Hero? Hah. The pilot and his organization/company have been clearly running a trap to lure in the unwary so that they could off them in cold blood.

They KNOW that stowaways are fairly common, so much so that every pilot has a blaster to kill them. But they don’t bother with a armed guard, or a lock on the door, or a more explicit sign, a warning light or even a pre-flight check-in- something that has been standard since Orville told Wilbur “All Clear”.

Nope. The pilot and his org wanted hapless dudes to wander in so as to kill them. Just that they were hoping for another scruffy homeless guy or “low-life” …not a cute teen.

Hero? Hardly. Cold blooded murderers. :stuck_out_tongue:

Note, insolence, file, blah blah blah.

Pretending that you’re not merely trying to wind people up for yuks (something I would never do, any more than I would pretend not to have read this story earlier in the thread :cool: ) ) your assertion is not supported by the text. “The Cold Equations” is told entirely from the pilot’s point of view; we are privy to his thoughts from the first moment he is aware of Marilyn’s (the stowaway) presence until the end of the tale. He clearly is not motivated by any sort of villainous, evil, selfish desire. Marilyn’s death was a result of bad management systems and the overall callousness of the universe, not human malice.

You may of course be referring to a televised version of the story; I am told that at least two were made under the Twilight Zone’s aegis. But I haven’t seen them and thus by Rhymer Rules they do not exist, very much like Star Trek V: My God, Why Couldn’t Shatner Have Just Taken Hookers?

Fail Safe. It was a book first. The president, portrayed as a good man, orders the nuking of New York to keep the USSR from attacking after the accidental destruction of Moscow. There had to be some innocent people in New York.

Two, one classic, one not.

Not: Harry Turtledoves Colonization series.

Sam Yeager discovers that the United States secretly attacked starships of The Race while under peace. He reveals it and President Earl Warren agrees to allow The Race to nuke Indianapolis as recompense. Either Warren or Yeager should be considered as characters who cause innocents to die in cold blooded calculation.

From Hamlet (no spoilers for God’s sake): What the hell did Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do to earn THAT, anyway? Hamlet was a bastard.

Of Mice and Men

Ursual K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” doesn’t quite kill an innocent, but they deliberately torture one, and the torture goes on indefinitely.

Sophie’s Choice, though it’s not really Sophie’s choice to do it.

In Frederick Forsythe’s Icon, IIRC, a possible claimant to the Russian throne is deemed expendable by a group seeking to restore the monarchy (the good guys) and assassinated so that their man can become tsar.

The first Gunslinger book.