History Main / SuicideByAssassin

* The ''Anime/Golgo13'' movie opens with the titular hit man shooting a corporate executive's son as he was about to inherit the company, the father spends the rest of the film trying to hunt down and kill Golgo 13 in revenge. At one point someone tries to point out that it's kind of pointless to seek revenge against a hired gun, instead of whoever hired him, and even later it turns out that the father found a suicide note.

* In ''ComicBook/{{Diabolik}}'' this is revealed to be how [[spoiler:Gustavo Garian]] planned to die once he discovered he was terminally ill. In a variant, this was more of an afterthought: he, with help from other Diabolik victims, had hired the assassins to kill Diabolik, and it's implied he had set up the second hit on himself because the money they had raised was enough for two hits and he didn't want to waste it once he had seen Diabolik's death. Then, believing the assassins had succeeded in killing Diabolik before being killed by Eva in retaliation, he shoots himself.
* ''ComicBook/SinCity'': The short story, "The Customer Is Always Right" has a woman who meets a handsome stranger on a balcony and the two engage in flirtatious banter. As they kiss, he shoots her with a silenced pistol and it's indicated that she hired him to kill her, possibly to escape an even worse situation.

* In the Star Wars sequel trilogy fanfic ''[[https://archiveofourown.org/works/13460913 The Burden of Hope]]'', Leia hires Boba Fett to "lift the burden of hope" from her following the deaths of Han and Luke. [[spoiler:To her surprise, he instead [[SexForSolace talks her out of it]].]]

[[folder:Film]]

* In Creator/GillianFlynn's novel ''Literature/DarkPlaces'', [[PunnyName The Angel of Debt]] is theorized to be this, killing off people who are snowed in by debt so their families can collect the insurance money. [[spoiler:He's real, and this is how Patty -- and, accidentally, Debby -- died. This is notably the only death that Calvin Diehl, the "angel", feels sorry about.]]

* ''Hit Man'' by Lawrence Block: One of the contracts involves a wealthy businessman who has a terminal illness so he decides to hire a hitman, thinking that a [[GetItOverWith sudden unexpected death would be better]]. However the suspense of waiting for his death turns out to be worse. So the hitman tells him he will call off the hit, but secretly decides to carry it out anyway so the businessman will have the death he wanted.
* In Creator/RobertSheckley's novel ''Immortality, Inc'', a rich guy, wishing to die in style, hires hunters to hunt and kill him. He can hunt and kill them back. The catch is, there's a scientific (and very expensive!) process to ensure that someone will have an afterlife and without said process, to have one's soul survive death is almost a Million-to-One Chance. The rich guy has a guaranteed afterlife and doesn't fear death, while the hunters mostly don't.
* At the climax of ''Trouble with Lichen'', by Creator/JohnWyndham, Diana Brackley is shot dead by a protestor who is angry about the societal changes threatened by the antigerone. Except that it turns out the hitman was employed by her and was firing blanks, the aim being to let her disappear from the public eye, continue her research into ways to mass produce the antigerone, ''and'' become a martyr for the cause.

* ''Series/CriminalMinds'': In one episode, an unsub hires a hitman for a string of revenge killings targeting people he feels escaped justice. The last name on the list is his own, [[TerminallyIllCriminal because he's dying]]. The team figures it out, but not in time to stop them.
* One episode of ''Series/CSIMiami'' had a billionaire construct a rifle with a lock-on {{Roboteching}} ability and give it to his former business partner so he would kill him. He was already dying of cancer and was concerned about what his cut-throat partners would do once he was gone. For example: that rifle, which he developed for the U.S. military, had a lot of flaws that he had never been able to solve and that tended to ''make the rifle explode on the user's face'' when they happened... but said partners wanted to sell it wide-spread regardless. He promised him he would inherit the company if he did it.

* ''Series/{{Elementary}}'': In the episode "You Do it to Yourself" the victim hired a hitman to kill him, to frame his assistant who was sleeping with his wife. He did this because he was dying of eye cancer, and had the hitman [[EyeScream shoot his eyes]] to cover this up.

* ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'': In "Body Parts", Quark thinks he's dying so he auctions off his own body parts according to Ferengi tradition. When he discovers that he'll live afterwards, he hires Garak to kill him so that he could honor his contract with the buyer, [[IntimidatingRevenueService FCA Liquidator]] Brunt. However, all the different methods that Garak demonstrates or suggests don't appeal to Quark. Ultimately he chickens out, and he lost his business license ([[StatusQuoIsGod briefly]]) as a result.

[[folder:Myth and Legends]]

[[folder:Web Media]]
* {{Defied|Trope}} on the ''WebVideo/PiratesSMP''; the rulebook of the Bounty Guild has a clause explicitly forbidding this.
* PlayedWith in ''Webcomic/SomethingPositive''. Avigadro knows that his nephew's fiancée, Kharisma, wants to kill him for his money, so he makes a deal out of boredom -- he'll change his will to make Kharisma his sole heir and then change it back in a few months; until then, she's free to try and kill him in a way that won't leave any evidence, while he deals with the challenge of staying alive. [[spoiler:He winds up dying of natural causes just before the deadline, but either never changed his will or already changed it back. Even worse for Kharisma, the police find the evidence from her failed attempts]]...

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'': In "The Tip of the Zoidberg", the Professor and Zoidberg made a deal in their Army days that Zoidberg would kill the Professor when he began to succumb to a disease he caught then.
* PlayedWith in ''WesternAnimation/{{Gargoyles}}'' -- [[MagnificentBastard Xanatos]] actually hires [[PsychoForHire Jackal and Hyena]] to kill him, but naturally, [[XanatosGambit it's part of a scheme]] that he has every intention of surviving.

As a DeathTrope, spoilers are unmarked.

!!Examples

[[folder:Anime and Manga]]

* In Creator/GillianFlynn's novel ''Literature/DarkPlaces'', [[PunnyName The Angel of Debt]] is theorized to be this, killing off people who are so snowed in by debt so their families can collect the insurance money. [[spoiler:He's real, and this is how Patty -- and, accidentally, Debby, died. This is notably the only death that Calvin Diehl, the "angel", feels sorry about.]]

* In the ''Literature/HammersSlammers'' story "A Death in Peacetime", set after their coup of Nieuw Friesland a mysterious masked stranger hires some former Slammers to kill Joachim Steuben, Colonel Hammer's psychopathic bodyguard who became his head of StateSec. The stranger then leaves a "good-luck charm", a coin from Newland on a chain, with the payment. After Steuben's death President Hammer notes that he wasn't wearing his lucky piece, a coin from his homeworld, Newland.
* ''Hit Man'' by Lawrence Block: One of the contracts involves a wealthy businessman who had a terminal illness so he decides to hire a hitman, thinking that a [[GetItOverWith sudden unexpected death would be better]]. However the suspense of waiting for his death turns out to be worse. So the hitman tells him he will call off the hit, but secretly decides to carry it out anyway so the businessman will have the death he wanted.
* In Creator/RobertSheckley's novel ''Immortality, Inc'', a rich guy, wishing to die in style, hires hunters to hunt and kill him. He can hunt and kill them back. The catch is, there's the scientific (and very expensive!) process to ensure that someone will have an afterlife and without said process, to have one's soul survive death is almost a Million-to-One Chance. The rich guy has guaranteed afterlife and doesn't fear death, while the hunters mostly don't.