In the 74th Hunger Games, the Careers have Katniss trapped up a tree at one point and do nothing to take advantage of her unfavorable position other than sleeping under the tree. Obviously, this gives Katniss enough time to figure out an escape plan.
Later, when Clove manages to pin down Katniss, Clove mocks and tortures Katniss instead of killing her. It doesn't end well for Clove.
Older Than Television: In John Buchan's 1919 World War I spy thriller Mr. Standfast, the villain, having finally captured the hero Richard Hannay, explains his evil plans at great length before placing Hannay in an easily-escapable situation. Buchan was arguably the first writer of modern spy thrillers, and the young Ian Fleming was a fan.
Toward the end of the novel, Drummond is captured by the Big Bad Duumvirate. Peterson points out that he has a talent for getting out of hopeless situations, and is all for killing him on the spot, but Lakington refuses to give him a quick and simple death, and insists on keeping him alive until they have time to subject him to something painful and drawn-out. Which of course gives Drummond time to escape.
In the third novel, Peterson's henchman clubs Drummond and brings him, unconscious, to Peterson. When Peterson muses that Drummond needs to be killed, the henchman points out that they might as well do it there and then. Peterson, who by now has a highly personal grudge against Drummond, rejects the idea out of hand, in favour of waiting until Drummond has recovered consciousness so he will know defeat before his death. This gives Drummond time to escape, and inflict some nasty injuries on the henchman too.
The novels Men at Arms and Witches Abroad both explain that bad guys don't kill the good guys straight away because they want to gloat, and make sure the good guy knows he's been beaten. In the first book it serves to show Carrot as a Good Man because he straightforwardly kills the bad guy without explanation; in the second it gives Granny Weatherwax a "Not So Different" Remark moment, since she rather likes people she's defeated to know about it as well.
Lampshaded and neatly subverted in Mort. Mort, Princess Keli, the wizard Cutwell and others being surrounded by the villainous Duke, who Cutwell correctly identifies as "not the kind of man who ties you up in a cellar with just enough time for the mice to eat your ropes before the flood-waters rise. This is the kind of man who just kills you here and now." Also played straight in that the Duke is willing to offer them life-long banishment (we know how well that kind of thing turns out).
Unsurprisingly, this happens regularly in the James Bond novels. Some (like Mr. Big, who has actually put quite a bit of thought into it) are smarter about it than others (step forward, Donovan Grant). However, the highlight has to be The Man with the Golden Gun, when M of all people gets this treatment from Russia's newest assassin, James Bond.
In From Russia with Love, the SovietChessmaster Kronsteen lays a complicated and near-perfect trap for James Bond. Everything works as planned, all the pawns including Bond go through their predicted moves, and Bond ends up exactly where the Russians want him. But at the crucial moment the assassin Donovan Grant — an Irishman who hates the English — makes the fatal mistake of engaging in prolonged crowing, boasting and gloating instead of just going ahead with his assigned task of killing Bond. This gives Bond the chance to improvise a desperate spur-of-the-moment plan which works, enabling him to kill Donovan and use the information which Donovan carelessly revealed in order to catch the senior Soviet operative Rosa Klebb. However it should be noted that the whole reason for the elaborate plot was to create a scandal around Bond's death that would embarrass British Intelligence - if they'd simply wanted him dead, they could have had him quietly eliminated any number of ways in Istanbul - making all but the final, spoilered, instance of Bond Villain Stupidity a necessary part of the plan.
This is probably the defining trait of Dr Mabuse, a diabolical mastermind with a few self-destructive tendencies from a series of German novels and films. He has been called the direct forerunner to Blofeld. Observe the Meaningful Name: "m'abuse" is French for "abuse myself". Mabuse is his own worst enemy.
In A Taste for Death, Modesty and Willie are captured by the bad guys. The head villain of the group runs on It Amused Me and insists on keeping them alive to die in some slow and entertaining way, despite two of his underlings (who have lost to Modesty and Willie before) advocating that they should kill both straight away.
In The Impossible Virgin, Modesty and Willie are captured by the bad guys. The head villain decides to keep Modesty alive because he believes he can brainwash her into a useful subordinate. He decides Willie is too dangerous and has to go, but picks an elaborate death in order to increase the psychological effect on Modesty; there is no body and it eventually turns out that Willie survived. Meanwhile, the head villain is done in by one of his own subordinates who hates Modesty and doesn't want her in the organization. The new head villain sets Modesty up for a gory death, and fully intends to stick around to watch the whole thing, but reluctantly has to leave to deal with an emergency caused by the returned Willie, giving Modesty a chance to escape.
In The Night of Morningstar, Modesty and Willie are captured by the terrorist organization they've been investigating. The Big Bad's second-in-command is in favor of killing them straight away to make sure they don't cause any more trouble, but the Big Bad sets his heart on an elaborate scheme in which they'll be kept alive until the terrorists' next, imminent, attack and used in a Deceased Fall-Guy Gambit. Modesty escapes from her restraints and she and Willie sink the villainous plot.
Warrior Cats: Originally, it was believed that the only reason Tigerstar doesn't go into Firestar's dreams and kill him was because he couldn't. However, Word of God revealed that he can, but he just doesn't want to.
Iceclaw: If Tigerstar can harm cats like he can and walk in their dreams, why doesn't he just do it to Firestar, take revenge, and get it over with? Vicky: Because Tigerstar wants a long-drawn out kind of vengeance, involving as many cats as possible, so that Firestar truly suffers. ...
Happens in Harry Potter. Since Voldemort likes to establish a sense of grace and grandeur into his actions, he doesn't just kill Harry and be done with it.
Near the end of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry has been disarmed, gagged, and tied securely to a gravestone. Rather than simply killing Harry after using his blood to regain his body, Voldemort not only has Wormtail cut him loose and give him back his wand, but insists on fighting him in a one-to-one duel and forbids interference from any of his Death Eaters, for no other reason than to prove, once and for all, that he is the stronger of the two. The final result of this is that Harry manages to escape and tell the world about his return (not that many people listen at first).
Uncharacteristically occurs with Grand Admiral Thrawn, usually one of the smarter people in Star Wars Legends. He has just betrayed Mara Jade by tricking her into revealing Talon Karrde's location, leading to his arrest by Imperials who will torture him if he doesn't hand over important intel, and then smugly mouths off to her face about it. Mara predictably goes berserk and attempts to attack Thrawn, at first physically then through the Force. Both of these fail, leaving Thrawn with the question of what to do with a still visibly enraged and always emotionally unstable Jade. Instead of killing her, he allows her to live, and lets her out of his sight aboard his ship before letting her go. Jade then predictably hacks into the computer network of Thrawn's ship, uses it to find Luke Skywalker, and saves him. The next one-and-a-half books can be accurately described as Jade sticking it to Thrawn which eventually leads to his plans collapsing and his death.
Thrawn had figured that she was in a hopeless situation; no one among her old smuggling associates would trust her. This was an error on his part; she was able to convince Aves (one of Karrde's trusted associates) to lend her a Skipray Blastboat and an ysalamir, which she used to retrieve Luke from Jomark (and confront the insane Jedi Master there). Once Thrawn realized his mistake, he was quick to take steps to limit the damage, but the measures (most prominently, the attempt to stop Karrde's escape in Dark Force Rising and the attempt to kill or discredit her in The Last Command) ultimately ended up being inadequate.
The Jennifer Morgue had a very… unique case. Realizing that he is a mad genius billionaire with access to world-ending technology and a strong desire to actually use it, the Big Bad sets up a geas that makes the tropes of a Bond movie reality. He plans to make it so that the only person who stands a chance of thwarting his plan is a solitary British secret agent... and if one of those manages to get through, then he'll shut off the geas so that said agent is nothing more than a solitary man hundreds of miles away from any back-up who can easily be killed. Small problem: despite all his precautions, the Big Bad completely fails to realize by the end that the geas he thought he ended is still operating, even when he's got the hero and his fellow agent bound up and prefers to monologue at them rather than just kill them. He failed to account for the fact that the Bond villain never gets to the last step of the plan, and if the last step of the plan is "stop being a Bond villain"...well, you see the issue here. (He also failed to account for the possibility the geas might not care about gender when "casting" a Bond, and so focuses on the wrong British agent.).
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: The White Witch could have saved herself a lot of trouble if she'd just killed Edmund as soon as she met him. But in this case it's justified, since Edmund did not appear to represent any sort of threat personally, and she had a reasonable-seeming plan to use him to destroy her other enemies. She was in fact undone not by a flaw in her plan per se but by Divine mercy. As Aslan points out, her knowledge went only back to the beginning of Time. She was unaware of key things that happened before that. At one point she is about to kill him, realizing that he's no longer necessary to her plans, and in the middle of sharpening her knife when Edmund (currently tied to a tree) is rescued. The only reason the Witch initially kept Edmund alive was because she learned he had two sisters and a brother, fitting the prophecy that two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve would reclaim Narnia, and thus hoped to get all four dead or petrified and be done with it. Her plan almost did work at one point, when the other three Pevensie siblings seriously gave thought to breaking into the Witch's castle to save Edmund, but were talked out of it by the Beavers. She finally gives up on the plan when the three Pevensie siblings reach Caire Paravel thus making their capture impossible, and realizes that simply killing Edmund would stop the prophecy from being fulfilled. By that point, the other assassins she'd sent to kill the children failed, and were used to track down and save Edmund.
Most if not all of the villains in the The Twilight Saga fall victim to this. Probably the most egregious are the Volturi. In New Moon, the only reason they don't want to kill Bella is because she looks like she'll make for an interesting vampire. Instead of just biting her then and there and holding her captive to brainwash her into being a member of their guard (which Breaking Dawn says is what they want from her), they decide to let her go back to Forks, and according to Edward will probably forget about her for thirty years or so, giving the Cullens plenty of time to turn her on their own terms, or hide her. In Breaking Dawn, their goal was apparently to use Renesmee as an excuse to kill the Cullens/force some of them to join the guard. Instead of quickly going to Forks and doing the job, they spend a full month heading over (thus giving Alice a chance to see it and warn the family) and bring a ton of witnesses, which means they have to put on a show of being fair and let the Cullens go. The witnesses aren't even necessary, since Word of God says that the vampires generally accept the rule of the Volturi as right.
In Crescendo, Rixon spends the entire book psychologically tormenting Nora, before getting ready to sacrifice her for a ritual. Given how she's unaware and unprotected for about 99% of the book, that he doesn't manage to pull it off is really astonishing. Nora even asks why he went through such an unnecessary and elaborate ruse instead of simply shooting her in the head while she was asleep. The only answer he gives is that the sacrifice is an important moment, and he wanted it to be enjoyable for him. He then kindly holds off on killing Nora while she asks him more questions about his plan, allowing Patch to conveniently show up and save her.
In Dragonlance, Verminaard, the Big Bad in Dragons of Autumn Twilight, manipulated Flamestrike, a Giant Red Dragon mother grieving for the loss of her children during the War Against The Gods, into guarding his prisoners' children because in her senility and grief she came to regard and love the human children as if they were her own.own, and would willingly watch over them at all times. When he had the Heroes of The Lance, the escaping prisoners and their children cornered and dead to rights, Verminaard somehow believed it was a bright idea to shout on the top of his lungs "I will destroy the children!" within earshot of said Red Dragon who has come to love said children. Cue Flamestrike bursting out of her lair in motherly-rage to protect her beloved "children", turning the tide of the battle in the Heroes of the Lance's favor.
In John le Carré's spy novels, Karla (the brilliant and ruthless Soviet spymaster) knows how dangerous to his plans George Smiley is but does nothing about it. Even his mole "Gerald" admits as much after Smiley captures him. There are two more novels where Smiley defeats Karla again and again, even leading to Karla having to surrender himself to the West. Karla could easily have assassinated Smiley but never did. He could have gotten away with it, even without a cover plan but (since Smiley had the most unfaithful wife in fiction) he could easily have made it look like a crime of passion like murder/suicide. However, Karla is not an active participant in The Honourable Schoolboy, and in both Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People, Smiley is retired and not a factor as far as Karla knows. In Le Carré’s books, much like the real world (at least at the time) murder is a big deal and something that he would use only under desperate circumstances, such as those of Smiley’s People. There’s no good reason for him to try and have Smiley killed.
In Relativity, a villain named Rasmas manages to trap all of the heroes in a typically elaborate deathtrap. Unfortunately, he's inside the trap with them when he springs it.Guess what the heroes have to do next? Justified in "Candy Corn": The villains are actually stupid (not just "Bond Villain Stupid"), but they don't kill or even unmask the hero because they want to give him as a gift to their boss.
Justified in Pact, where the laws of karma mean that declaring what you're going to do (preferably to someone that you don't nominally control) gives you power, and leaving someone to die in a complicated death trap lets you defer karmic responsibility for their murder.
Ty: You’re telling me the universe encourages being the Bond villain?
In Frostbite, Isaiah had Christian Ozera, Mia Rinaldi, Rose Hathaway, Mason Ashford, and Eddie Castile captured and chose to keep them alive for days. This allowed them to escape and fight back against him. Leading to his death.
Marcus Didius Falco. Justified in The Jupiter Myth. The Big Bad Florius manages to escape by taking Petro hostage and leaving him in a death trap so that the heroes must spend time rescuing him instead of pursuing Florius.
An Enforced Trope for the Bene-Tleilaxu in Dune. The Tleilaxu follow a code of honor that mandates that whenever they plan to kill somebody, they must always leave the victim some kind of opening to escape if only they're smart enough to notice it. This is due to their strong Social Darwinist beliefs, the logic being that if the victim is smart enough to escape the Death Trap, then they deserve to live.
Many of the villains in the Alex Rider series fall victim to this; Dr Grief plans to dissect Alex alive in a science class the following morning, giving him a window of opportunity in which to escape, Winston Yu hands him over to his snakehead to harvest his vital organs with similar results (albeit with the justification that Alex destroyed a large amount of extremely expensive equipment whilst attempting to escape, and this will allow Yu to recoup his losses), and Desmond McCain leaves him to be torn apart by crocodiles. However, Razim of Scorpia Rising (the final book in the series for many years, before writer Anthony Horowitz had a change of heart and decided to revive the series) manages to justify the trope in an unusual way: his plan not only requires Alex to be kept alive up until a certain point, it is absolutely vital that he is completely unmarked and unharmed until then.
Played hilariously straight in Alice, Girl from the Future. In The Kindness Ray novel, the local villain uses the aforementioned ray (which have a side-effect to induce living thing growth) to create a giant monster, which he unleashed against the heroes. He never realized that under the influence of the kindness ray, his monster would be absolutely unwilling to harm anyone.
Lampshaded and justified in Worm, when Taylor is teleported into a burning building, shot and left for dead while gunmen surround the building to make sure she doesn't get out. Afterwards, Taylor wonders why the villain responsible went to all that trouble when he could have just teleported her to a bomb and detonated it. Later on, she outright asks Coil why he didn't do this, and he admits that he attempted the bomb plan repeatedly, and even tried teleporting her into a vat of acid, but the teleporter was built by Leet and went wrong whenever a bomb or acid was involved due to Leet's power actively sabotaging him. Coil was forced to keep changing the parameters of the scenario until he found a combination that wouldn't set off the inbuilt malfunction of the teleporter, and then Coil ran out of time due to the narrow window of opportunity and had to go with the burning building plan.
Only Ashes Remain: The villain Henry successfully captures the heroine Nita with no one around to save her or stop him or his 2 henchmen from killing her, he fully plans to kill her, she's tied up and defenseless, he and his 2 henchmen all have guns... and instead of killing her when he has the chance, he leaves her alive and lures his apprentice and her love interest Kovit to the location to teach him a lesson about Conflicting Loyalty. You can guess how it ends...
Egil's Saga: After Egil and his companions have been captured in on a viking raid in Courland, the leader of the Courlanders (a "powerful and wealthy man") wants to put the captives to death "one by one" at once. His grown-up son persuades him to wait until the next day, as it's already becoming dark, and "they would not be able to enjoy torturing them". Sure enough, Egil and the others escape from their prison during the night and rob and burn down the rich man's farmstead.
Starter Villain (2023): Jake Baldwin usually just liquefied captured spies in barrels of acid, though most of the executions were staged as Death Faked for You was one of his business's "premium" services. When Jake's successor Charlie is interrogating a CIA agent, the agent asks if he can be executed in a more theatrical way, only for Charlie's assistant to explain the problems with each of his suggestions (sharks don't like eating humans, lava is NOT boiling Kool-Aid, and the laser is in a clean room).
