TV shows, books, films, though I should say it has to be a part of a fictional work that’s trying to be “realistic” so stuff that’s parody or purposely meant to be over-the-top doesn’t count, and also has to be a human character since ghosts can do a hell of a lot of complicated murder mysteries.
Inspired by an episode of Monk I watched, where it turns out a man uncovers his wife’s suicide note from 20 years ago that she never went through went, and now wants to use that to kill her “scott-free” and inherit her money since he will plant the suicide note at the scene and since it would have her fingerprints and own writing it would be a “perfect crime”. In order to do this he literally has to recreate the events she says happened to her the day of her suicide in her note to ensure everything matches, and then kill an unrelated person who just happened to have read the note too so they can’t come out and potentially dispute the note.
In the movie “Malice”, there are a bunch of plot twists, but by the end I was like, wait, that was their plan all along? Spoiler:
Nicole Kidman and Dr. Alec Baldwin are lovers. Nicole Kidman has to find a chump to fall in love with, get Chump to marry her, then get pregnant. Then Nicole takes drugs to give herself a life-threatening lady-parts condition. Dr. Alec will operate on her, but will deliberately make a mistake which will render her sterile and terminate the pregnancy. Nicole and Chump will sue Dr. Alec for malpractice, with the idea being that his malpractice insurance will pay for it, then Nicole will dump Chump and Dr. Alec and Nicole will live happily ever after.
From the Wiki summary for the 1998 Columbo TV movie “Ashes to Ashes”:
Eric Prince, funeral director to the stars, murders gossip columnist Verity Chandler (Rue McClanahan) when she attends his latest funeral, that of actor and war hero Chuck Houston. Chandler threatens Prince that her next exposé will be about how 20 years earlier, he stole a valuable diamond from the body of a deceased silent film star. Prince bludgeons Chandler with a tool in his storage room, then hides the body in a compartment used for corpses. After the funeral, Prince takes the casket containing Houston’s body to the preparation room, where he puts Chandler’s body into the casket in its place. It next enters the cremation oven, and afterwards, the ashes are scattered by helicopter over the Hollywood hills. Prince then goes to Chandler’s house and fakes evidence of her abduction. So that no one will become suspicious, he cremates Houston’s body by piggybacking him onto another corpse scheduled to be cremated.
He’s foiled when it turns out Houston’s body contains a piece of shrapnel that survived cremation.But as pointed out on TV Tropes:
if Prince had simply crammed Verity and Houston into the same coffin, burned them both, and did nothing else, he would almost definitely get away with it, and simply need to dispose of the extra ashes.
A young wife shoots her scumbag husband, then takes off for a random journey through the city at night. As police look for her, the head detective learns the husband was already dead when he was shot, having been poisoned. With so many suspicious relatives and servants in the house, it might have been any one of them. However, it so happens that arsenic was a natural component of the husband’s favorite drink. Could it have been suicide instead? The wife is finally found and brought to the head detective. He actually does a call-out to Laura (1944) - a much better film which this one resembles – before making the big reveal: a different poison killed the husband. Someone’s a murderer!
Yeah, I also remember thinking wait, what? Really, that was the plan?
Dr. Alec Baldwin is going to trash his reputation as a doctor for a very risky chance at a big payout? It was a pretty big settlement, but if I recall it was probably no more than what he’d make lifetime as a doctor. Plus he’s entirely relying on Kidman’s character to not double-cross him and run off with the money.
And then if I recall correctly, their master plan was foiled because the patsy husband found out that he was sterile, and couldn’t have gotten her pregnant. Which wasn’t even part of the original plan, and Dr. Alec was mad at her for letting herself get pregnant, but she got greedy, figuring if she lost a baby the jury would award her even more.
The Columbo episode “It’s All in the Game” certainly qualifies as well. Most of the time, I assumed that Faye Dunaway and Claudia Christian were bisexual lovers that murder a man who was two-timing them. Dunaway then starts courting Columbo in an effort to divert him from solving the crime. Columbo plays along, but the plan doesn’t work. He gets Dunaway to confess to the crime by allowing Christian, who (surprise, surprise!) turns out to be her daughter, to flee to Europe.
This isn’t the only time Columbo lets a murderer go free. The first was in “Forgotten Lady” with Janet Leigh, and the second was in “Try and Catch Me,” where Mariette Hartley was an accomplice after the fact. (Though this may have been revealed only to the audience.)
The Three Body Problem (the Netflix show, I’ve not read the book) gets an honorable mention for this IMO. There is a subplot about trying to develop super high tech nanowire, which they do eventually manage to do defying the aliens who don’t want the human race to develop it. Having gone through this long elaborate process to develop the nanowire the use it for…
Killing a boat full of alien collaborators. Not a particularly high tech boat just a regular boat. They use this super high tech nanowire as basically a trip wire trap. They wait for the boat to pass a point on the river and string a bunch of the wire across the river so the boat and its passengers are cut up into tiny pieces. There is nothing about the attack that required the nanowire, or couldn’t be achieved with a low tech bomb or a bunch of people with guns, or, hell, a suitably ruthless and motivated bunch of people with machetes and gang plank.
I really enjoy the show but that plotline was so dumb.
As I said in another thread, the manga Detective Conan / Case Closed has all of these beat for absurd clues, convoluted dying messages, and murder schemes only a manga writer would have the imagination and patience to conceive, let alone execute.
Basically turning a hot spring into pudding temporarily so you can commit a murder with a seemingly unbreakable alibi is just the tip of the iceberg.
The assassination plot in season 1 of classic SDMB favorite 24 is certainly convoluted as hell.
Spoilers for a 25-year-old TV show ensue.
The villain, a Serbian war criminal, hires two guys to seduce Jack Bauer’s teenage daughter and her best friend at 1 in the morning, then kidnap them. Meanwhile, another henchman kills the friend’s dad and, impersonating him, contacts Jack’s wife to enlist her help in tracking them down. When the friend manages to escape but winds up critically wounded at the hospital, her fake dad gets access to her room and kills her to silence her, then kidnaps Jack’s wife and takes her to where their daughter is being held hostage, at which point the villain’s lieutenant contacts Jack and blackmails him with his family’s lives to help a sniper get into the rally where presidential candidate David Palmer is speaking so the sniper can shoot him, then get Jack’s prints on the gun so he’ll be implicated and go to prison for killing the senator. (Of course, it doesn’t work and the villains are defeated because Jack Bauer is Just That Awesome.)
Also, the entire plot is being orchestrated on the villain’s behalf by Jack’s subordinate at CTU who he previously cheated on his wife with.
One of the seasons involves terrorists having a woman seduce an Air Force pilot, then force him to smuggle a man onto his Air Force base. Man then impersonates said pilot, takes his place during a training mission with the F-117 Stealth fighter, the stealth fighter then flies to where Air Force One is and shoots it down, but that’s not even the main plot because terrorists then go to the wreckage of Air Force One, steal the nuclear briefcase from the President’s body, use that to find out where a nearby truck carrying a nuclear weapon is, hijack that truck, make a cruise missile and finally fire that nuclear weapon into Los Angeles.
True story: the screenwriters who were assigned to adapt Raymond Chandler’s novel sent Chandler a telegram because they couldn’t figure out who had committed one of the murders - and he replied that he didn’t know, either.
Fortunately, it misses the city and harmlessly explodes in the ocean after Jack’s climactic fistfight with Arnold Vosloo.
I’m not sure whether that was the season that ended with Chinese ninjas kidnapping and extraditing him to a prison camp, or the season where he was clinically dead, came back to life, then wandered off into exile while the piano theme from The Incredible Hulk (which, now that I listen to it, is the same basic melody as “Superheroes” from Rocky Horror) played.
Not exactly a murder mystery, but people do get murdered in the course of the show-- ‘Billionaire’s Bunker’ made by the makers of the much more successful, but also very convoluted ‘Money Heist’. (BB was canceled after the one season).
Basic plot: an exclusive, posh bunker is built to shelter billionaires in comfort, in the event of nuclear war. When world political tensions rise and war seems imminent, the billionaires who signed up are summoned to the bunker just in case. Soon after they arrive in the bunker, WWIII begins and the nukes are launched. There’s a twist at the end of ep.1:
They faked nuclear war to scam the billionaires out of money.
To prep for this the group of scammers:
Built (or repurposed?) a secret underground bunker with the supplies and lavish accoutrements of a 5 star hotel.
Hired a movie director to fake the outside nuclear destruction scenes.
One of the scammers was a super genius who created an advanced AI program that could deep-fake the billionaires on video calls making money deals that the scammers pocketed.
They had created at least one fake company complete with an office full of fake workers to scam an investor on the outside.
For the scam to work the scammers had to hope:
Real-world political tensions got bad enough to convince the billionaires to sign on and actually come to the bunker
The faked nuclear war video scenes shown convinced everybody in the bunker and scared them enough to buy the scenario.
That the deep-fake AI video calls to the outside world were convincing enough, and nobody from the outside world got suspicious.
That they could run an entire underground city successfully and keep the couple hundred billionaires and their family members alive (at least long enough for the AI to learn their personality quirks)
And most importantly, that the ridiculously enormous expense of all that setup paid off by profiting from the scam at all.
I know folks sometimes give Bond movies a pass when it comes to plot elements making all the sense in the world, but: even by its own logic, consider The Living Daylights.
Imagine I tell you I came up with a brilliant plan to murder somebody. Step one, I say, is that I sent a hired killer to murder 004. That’s sort of my thing, I explain; I have hired killers. Anyway, then I asked 004’s boss to smuggle me out of a communist country at the height of the Cold War, so I could (a) then lie to him about whodunit and (b) then have another of my hired killers murder their way in to the safe house or whatever and abduct me back across the Iron Curtain; that way, 007 would get told to kill my target, right? 007 dicked around for a while, so I eventually had my hired killer murder someone else to really motivate him. And 007 kept dicking around, so I sent my hired killer to go to a banquet where my target was speaking: lining up a kill shot, just in case 007 didn’t show up to shoot the guy. But then 007 did show up to shoot the guy, bang bang bang, one moment before my hired killer would’ve used the exact same method to pull the trigger!
So, I sum up with a grin, it’s a plan that only works if I already have hired killers — and if everything that could go wrong goes right, all it does is redundantly put an extra killer there — and if it goes wrong, then 007 is going to come gunning for me. Man, how brainy am I for not just skipping all that other stuff and simply having my hired killer pull a trigger like he was about to? Oh, you’ll have to excuse me; it looks like 007 is here!
A plan doomed to failure, but one that an idiotic husband might think would work.
In another episode of Monk, a creative writing teacher decides that Sharona’s story has the perfect plan for a murder- all she has to do is make everyone think Sharona,is crazy, so no one will believe her when she (Sharona) recognizes the method. This make-everyone-think-Sharona-is-crazy plan depends on setting up several scenes to freak Sharona out, any one of which might be seen by someone else, totally blowing up the plan
I’ve got another episode of Monk that made me mad:
The killer tricked the victim into driving into a dead end alley where he was ambushed. How did he do that? By reprogramming the victim’s car navigation system!
Exactly at that time, I was working on navigation software and data for cars. So I knew how ridiculous that was. To reprogram the road data so that a specific wrong route would be presented.
