Engineered Heroics in Literature.
- In Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident Big Bad Duumvirate Opal Koboi and Briar Cudgeon plan to stage a coup in faerie society by secretly arming the Bwa Kell goblin triad with illegal weapons while sabotaging the weapons of the Lower Elements Police. They then intend to restore the LEP's weapons at the last moment so that the coup fails, and manipulate the events that follow so that they end up looking like heroes while Opal's rival Foaly gets the blame for the coup.
- One of the Babylon 5 novels features Garibaldi hiring a bunch of thugs to "mug" Talia so that he can step in and "save" her. It fails to impress her.
- Played with in "The Case of the Discontented Soldier" by Agatha Christie, in which the situation is engineered by a third party playing matchmaker, and both the guy and girl are left with the honest belief that he genuinely saved her life.
- The villain in Tamora Pierce's The Circle Opens novel Cold Fire is a firefighting expert whose skills are basically the only thing he has in his life. Unfortunately for him, he's been so successful at getting the fire rate down that people are starting to take him for granted and not listening to him...so of course he starts setting more fires to teach them a lesson.
- Encyclopedia Brown — Encyclopedia catches a guy in the act when he notices that his glasses emerge unscathed despite putting them in a place that supposedly took a lot of punches. Encyclopedia whispered this in Sally's ear. She wasn't pleased.
- In the children's book The Gruffalo, the Guile Hero mouse plays this trope brilliantly, fending off various predators by pretending that he's going to hang out with a bigger and more dangerous predator than them, which he's invented, and which he says preys on each of them. When he then, to his surprise, meets said Big Bad and realises that Big Bad wants to eat him, he succeeds in persuading it to follow him through the forest, in the course of which he meets all the predators he earlier scared off, and they are duly convinced that he really is the Big Bad's friend. The mouse having thus demonstrated that he's the scariest creature in the forest, the Big Bad runs off in terror.
- In Heaven Official’s Blessing: Tian Guan Ci Fu, during the flashback to Xie Lian's second ascension, Top God Jun Wu rescues Xie Lian from Big Bad and Supreme Ghost Bai Wuxiang and fights an impressive duel against Bai Wuxiang to the villain's apparently final death. It's later revealed that Bai Wuxiang is a magical construct remotely-controlled by Jun Wu.
- Journey to Chaos: In A Mage's Power, This is Plan A for the Big Bad, Duke Selen Esrah. He's hoping a Rescue Romance will rekindle the relationship between his son and his ex-girlfriend, Princess Kasile. He hires some rogues to do the kidnapping, infiltrates them with a couple of his own guards to guard against betrayal, and then sends down his son. The problem is that his son is captured despite his efforts, and someone else gets the credit.
- Happens in P. G. Wodehouse's Love Among The Chickens, but backfires upon the 'hero' when the guy he paid to upset the boat spills the beans.
- Bertie Wooster has tried to set this up on several occasions to make one of his friends look good, usually the chronically lovesick Bingo Little. In one story, he shoves the young brother of Bingo's latest love interest out of a boat so Bingo can save him; it fails because a) Bingo has fallen for a completely different girl in the meantime and didn't feel that informing Bertie of the change of plans was needed, b) the brother is perfectly capable of saving himself anyway, and c) the girl misinterprets the whole thing as a particularly bad attempt for Bertie to play the hero but falls for him because he's so adorably inept.
- The main characters of The Saga of the Noble Dead are a pair of con artists who stage fake vampire hunts to scam people out of money. The plot is kicked off when they accidentally blunder into the lair of an actual vampire clan and have to become hunters for real.
- Sam Holt: In What I Tell You Three Times is False, the villain—a struggling actor who is passionate about playing Sherlock Holmes—commits a murder just so that he can solve it and the publicity will give him an In-Universe Career Resurrection.
- In Christopher Pike's Spellbound, the heroine's boyfriend, who is suspected of killing his previous girlfriend, decides to rescue his reputation by setting the heroine up to fall in a river and then dramatically saving her. It doesn't work out; another character rescues her first, and then the heroine figures out what happened and reveals it in open court.
- In the Star Wars Legends novel The Last Command, starship thief Niles Ferrier contrives to infiltrate Talon Karrde's nascent Smugglers' Alliance by bribing Imperial soldiers into attacking the group's debut gathering, so that he can maneuver himself into a position to help repel the attack. It works, although Karrde remains suspicious.
- The Legend of Sun Knight:
- The Church of the God of Light contracts a necromancer to send an undead creature to attack the capital about once a month. Sun Knight and his predecessor regards this as entertainment for the masses and stress relief for themselves. All this is Played for Laughs.
- Downplayed in the duel for the princess, where the hero doesn't know of the engineering. The royal knight Elijah loves the princess, but while the princess loves him back, she was placed in a political match with the head of a neighboring religion. Sun resolves this politically tricky situation by arranging a public event where the princess would be attacked by a monster, and only Elijah would be able to perform a Diving Save. Such an act of devotion in front of many important witnesses cannot be denied, so the head concedes the marriage (although Sun has to provide concessions to everyone else involved).
