Warning: Be wary of spoilers. On this page, titles alone can (and will) be Walking Spoilers.
Kansas City Shuffles in Literature.
- In "The Acquisitive Chuckle" (the first of Isaac Asimov's Black Widowers mysteries), the protagonist had been bankrupted by his crooked business partner, who was also an inveterate collector with more stuff than he could keep track of. The protagonist was seen leaving the ex-partner's house with a briefcase, while chuckling in the exact same way the ex-partner always did after acquiring something in a not-entirely-honest way. For years, the ex-partner went nuts trying to figure out just what had been stolen. What did the protagonist take? Only the ex-partner's peace of mind. The briefcase was empty.
- An African Millionaire by Grant Allen is about a conman who repeatedly targets a corrupt mining magnate with a series of increasingly elaborate scams. It doesn't take long for the mark to start expecting and looking out for the next con — at which point there's a con that depends on him thinking he's spotted the next con and taking certain actions to defeat it that actually play right into the conman's hands.
- The August Derleth short-short story, "A Battle Over the Teacups" is entirely about a Kansas City Shuffle. An elderly Chinese dignitary traveling on a train is accosted by a warlord who wants him dead. The dignitary offers tea, and openly adds a sweetener to his own cup. Then his niece (who is traveling with him) drops a tray and while the warlord is distracted, the dignitary clumsily pours something into the warlord's cup. The warlord insists that they trade cups before drinking. The dignitary objects, but finally acquiesces, and they trade cups and drink. The warlord is found dead in his compartment the next day — the "sweetener" was the poison, and the "poison" was simple sugar. By insisting on the cup trade, the warlord gave himself the poisoned cup.
- Taurau pulls one on Sabrina in Birthright (2017) during a game of Catur. He fools her into thinking he's using a beginner's strategy. Being a more advanced player, Sabrina immediately starts playing the counter-strategy—which Taurau's real strategy is designed to counter. The game is used to foreshadow Ko-Kraham pulling a similar strategy.
- If a hand in any part of Bridge in the Menagerie is shown from the viewpoint of Papa the Greek, and his opponent is the Hideous Hog, the reader can be certain that the Hog is running a hustle against the Greek in some fashion. Both are expert players that know all sort of clever tricky plays, but the Hog is very consistently the winner at being able to predict which tricky play is actually happening between the two. Part of the fun for the reader is trying to figure out the Hog's actual hand before the play of the hand is finished.
- In Carcinoma Angels Harrison Wintergreen reverses the Mexican smuggler joke on the main page. He drives his very nice car into Tijuana and buys some marijuana from a local. When he then crosses back into the USA, he's stopped and searched by the border guards who have, of course, been tipped off by Wintergreen's connection. They don't find the marijuana, which he threw away earlier, so they let him go, having just smuggled a very nice car into Mexico, sold it for several times what he paid for it and not paid a cent of import duty or capital gains tax.note
- In the Hercule Poirot novel Cards on the Table, Poirot asks one of the murder suspects a leading question, trying to get her to admit that she knew where the murder weapon was before the crime was committed. She deftly claims not to have noticed the weapon, whereupon Poirot nods and smiles and asks her to help him pick out some appropriate presents for his nieces back in Belgium. Poirot has no nieces back in Belgium; by asking the suspect to help choose presents - some of which have disappeared by the time she's done - he tricks her into demonstrating she's a compulsive thief, and thus reveals her motive for committing a previous murder.
- In Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, the President of the United States invents a convoluted device that would be used to kill flies. It is basically a walkway mounted on two miniature ladders on each side, with a cube of sugar hanging from the center of the walkway. As the President explains, the fly would climb up the first ladder and would be traversing the walkway when it would catch sight of the sugar cube and become tempted by it; just before it decided to make its way down the hanging string to eat the sugar, however, it would realize that there is a bowl of water directly beneath the hanging cube, meaning that the fly would drown if it fell. As a result, the fly would continue walking over to the second ladder, feeling smug that it had avoided the water trap - until it started to descend the second ladder and fell to its death because the President had left off one of the ladder's rungs near the top. (Also counts as Awesome, but Impractical.) It's parodious, too, since flies obviously aren't smart enough for such an overelaborate trick to work, and they can't fall to their deaths because they can, y'know, fly.
- At the end of Dawnshard, Rysn and the Sleepless set one of these up. They tell the general public that Rysn managed to defeat the challenges the Sleepless set on Aimia, winning the Soulcasters that the Sleepless had been guarding for millennia. They then tell the rulers of Roshar something much closer to the truth: that the Sleepless agreed to give Rysn the Soulcasters in exchange for training at imitating humans. Anyone digging for secrets will find that story, and stop before uncovering the real secret: that Rysn has bonded with one of the four Dawnshards, and that the Sleepless are protecting her against anyone who would seek to abuse her power.
- The Jorge Luis Borges story Death and the Compass, where Erik Lonnrot follows a Connect the Deaths around the city, only to find that his nemesis Red Scharlach made a series of fortuitous coincidences look like it had happened on purpose so Lonnrot would find him and Scharlach could kill him without trouble. Just before dying, Lonnrot suggests a simpler puzzle for Scharlach to use in case the two of them ever reincarnate.
- In Deltora Quest Endon's wife does this against his treacherous adviser. While they're on the top floor of a tall tower, she glances out the window and reacts as if she'd seen something, and then very unconvincingly claims she saw nothing. When the advisor moves over to the window to check, she shoves him out of the window and to his death. She really did see nothing, but she knew that he wouldn't accept that.
- Discworld:
- In Carpe Jugulum, the vampyres are well-aware of Granny Weatherwax's skill at "Borrowing" (the ability to put a part of her mind into another creature). Even after they suck Granny's blood and try to turn her into a vampire, they suspect Granny's used Borrowing to put part of herself elsewhere, either in Magrat's newborn daughter or into wishy-washy priest Mightily Oats. It turns out, Granny put herself into her own blood, meaning when the Magpyr clan members drank her blood, she was ready to tear down their mental defenses from the inside once she shrugged off the vampirism by Heroic Willpower.
- Commander Vimes created an undercover Watchman program, and enlisted Corporal Nobbs and Sergeant Detritus, neither of whom can act. In Maskerade, they attend the opera, and onlookers lambast their obvious disguises—unaware that the real undercover cop infiltrated the opera house ages ago. As Andre points out, no police presence at all would be suspicious, but an obvious police presence lures criminals into a false sense of security.
- Moist Von Lipwig, the protagonist of Going Postal and Making Money, is rather fond of this. In Postal he reminisces on using this with one of his old alternate identities, "lack-of-confidence trickster" Edwin Streep:He was so patently, obviously bad at running a bent Find-the-Lady game and other street scams that people positively queued up to trick the dumb trickster and walked away grinning... right up to the moment when they tried to spend the coins they'd scooped up so quickly... Later on they learned that Streep might be rubbish with a deck of cards but also that his lack was more than made up for by his exceptional skill as a pickpocket.
- Moist does this later on in the Clacks vs. Post race against the Grand Trunk. He knows that the Trunk's chairman, Reacher Gilt, is just as much a conman as he, so he provides him with a fake con to foil. First he turns up to the race with a broomstick that has silver stars painted on it, making it seem like it is a magic broomstick and he intends to win the race by flying. When Gilt points out that this is against the rules, Lipwig points out that each Clacks tower has a horse available to deliver messages when the towers break, and that using them would be cheating as well. Thus both methods are disqualified. Gilt naturally assumes that this was Moist's plan all along, but in actuality he doesn't intend to "win" at all. At the time his plan was to alter the message to one that deigned to damage the mechanisms in the tower, and it could be countered if they sent horses to warn later towers. He ends up changing the message along the way to reveal the Trunk's treachery in front of everyone, disguised as a message from beyond the grave, instead.
- Another that he does in the story is act desperate and try to pawn a diamond. The victim then tries to rip him off, but he palms it and substitutes a fake at the last second. At one point he tries to argue to his parole officer that it shouldn't count as wrong if the victim thought they were conning him, but nobody's buying it.
- Gilt is using a variant. The board of the Clacks know he helped them steal the company and that the way he's running it is intended to milk it of profits in the short term; this keeps them from realizing that he's robbing them blind.
- In Pyramids, after Teppic has spent some time deconstructing the Riddle of the Sphinx, he challenges the Sphinx to answer it. The Sphinx sees through this pretty easily ("You're supposed to tell me the answer"), in the process forgetting that Teppic already knows the answer from the previous discussion.
- A fairly regular occurrence in Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files.
- In White Night, Lara Raith suggested to a member of another family in the White Court that they should kill off weak female magical practitioners. She did this so that she could rope the other White Court family into the scheme because she knew that eventually Harry Dresden would get involved and generally smash everyone in sight before he realized she came up with the whole thing. He didn't realize until he'd already played straight into the plot because what this amounted to was a ruler of a vampire court deliberately getting their minions to try to supplant the ruler and then having them destroyed without having to lift a finger herself. And nearly dying in the process due to interference by Cowl's Outsider ghouls, but hey, no plan is perfect, right?
- In Small Favor, the Order of the Blackened Denarius kidnap a freeholding lord, a recent signatory to the Unseelie Accords, simultaneously threatening that lord, disrupting his power base, and placing the Order in violation of the Accords (thus challenging the weakened White Council to choose risking a multi-front war if they enforce the Accords, and offending the Unseelie Court if they don't). Harry manipulates the White Council into acting, selecting a particular character as arbiter which is what the Order wanted, as it made her vulnerable to a kidnap attempt.
- There's a less visible example (because it doesn't involve the protagonists) going on at the same time. There's an ongoing power struggle which resumes any time most of the Order get together, and while this plot stands to benefit the entire Order at each stage Nicodemus is clearly either increasing his own influence or setting up potential future problems for rivals. This is obvious to the rest of the Order, as is that they're all being given rope to oppose or betray his "side" without really ruining the plot, implying he's in some way preparing a personal "traitor sweep". What's not obvious is that the situation's set up to look for a member of the Order sabotaging the entire plot to do irreparable damage to their mutual goals - he suspects Outsider infiltration, and the situation is designed to spur such an infiltrator to act; nobody will be willing to get together afterwards to honestly compare who did what when if the damage looks like the fallout of "normal" betrayals. While it's unclear how much good it does him, Nicodemus walks away from the affair with confirmation of this and the identity of their puppet.
- In Skin Game, Mab charges Harry with repaying a debt to Nicodemus Archleone by helping him steal the Holy Grail from Hades' vault in the Underworld, along with a crew of other people Nicodemus hired for the job. After setting it up, Mab tells Harry that it's a setup: she only intends for Harry to help him get the Grail; she never said anything about what Harry would do after he got his hands on it. Both Harry and Nicodemus figure that the other is going to betray him as soon as Nicodemus obtains the Grail, so Harry asks for a second person to watch his back, while Nicodemus has secretly given Coins to Hannah Ascher and the Genoskwa (Lasciel and Ursiel, respectively), and hired Goodman Grey for the secondary reason of helping him kill Harry when it comes time. However, it is later revealed that Harry figured out that Grey was the only person Nicodemus could hire to get access to the location where the Way to Hades' vault could be opened, and secretly hired him first, with the purpose of turning on Nicodemus after he got the Grail. The resulting brouhaha leaves Nicodemus defeated and alone, with Deirdre dead by his hand (to get through the Gate of Blood), his power broken, and his reputation destroyed. Sure, he got the Grail, but he lost the item he really wanted: the knife that Christ was stabbed with while he was on the Cross, along with three other artifacts. It turns out the whole plot was a scheme by Mab and John Marcone, with Uriel and Hades' help, to get back at Nicodemus for the events of Small Favor.
- Battle Ground: It's revealed right before the epilogue that the entire battle between Ethniu and the Formor against Mab, the Accorded Nations, and the people of Chicago was a huge example of this being played on Harry himself. The plan was to keep the latter utterly distracted by placing every person he cares about in mortal danger so he wouldn't realize that taking Justine as his guest to Demonreach so she could see Thomas would allow Nemesis (who is possessing her) to use her as a Trojan Horse to accomplish what the Outsiders failed to do in Cold Days: bring The End of the World as We Know It by releasing Demonreach's apocalyptic prisoners. It's only thanks to Harry connecting the dots before he and Justine could arrive at the island that the worst didn't come to pass.
- Ardneh, from the Empire of the East trilogy by Fred Saberhagen loves to use this one. For example, in the first book, he lets Ekuman know that finding and controlling the mysterious "Elephant" super-weapon is the key to holding or losing the west coast. Ekuman concludes that the resistance plans to find the Elephant and use it to destroy him, and not unreasonably decides that he has to get it first. That turns out to be exactly how Ardneh liberates the entire west coast. In the second book, the demon Zapranoth worries that Ardneh might find out where his life is hidden, so he moves it to where he can better keep an eye on it and guard it. That turns out to be exactly how Ardneh destroys it. In the third book, Ardneh becomes much more powerful than ever before, which leads Wood and John Ominor to conclude that Ardneh will use that power to destroy their empire, so they free the demon-king Orcus, the only force powerful enough to stop Ardneh. That enables Ardneh to destroy both Orcus and the entire empire, along with most of the world's most powerful demons, in a single stroke.
- The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England: The protagonist, who's Trapped in Another World and slow to believe in its magic, quickly realizes that Thokk is just an old lady pretending to be a witch — he even catches her hiding behind a rock to plan a dramatic appearance. She's actually a goddess pretending to be an old lady pretending to be a witch.
- Gentleman Bastard: Locke Lamora attempts this one when he cons a nobleman into giving him money for a business venture. Two members of the Duke's secret police contact Locke's mark to alert him that his new business partner is actually a con man. The mark won't investigate Locke or their joint business venture any more since he knows it's all a scam, but at the same time Locke keeps receiving money because the mark is told that the police is about to make an arrest and if the money stops Locke will flee with all the money he already has. Obviously there will be no arrest, because the "secret police" is actually Locke and his accomplice.
- In The Girl from the Miracles District, the Big Bad's plan hinges on Nikita realizing that someone close to her is in danger, but thinking that it's one of her friends rather than her mother.
- Johannes Cabal the Necromancer: Having fallen one short in his wager with Satan to collect 100 souls in exchange for the return of his own, Johannes tries to renegotiate with the box of 99 signed contracts. Satan expects a hustle, immediately sees through his offer of "the box", and insists on the contents of the box, which Cabal reluctantly accepts. Only later does Satan realize that Johannes had already removed the two soul contracts he actually wanted.
- Emotional Allomancy in Mistborn either amplifies or weakens existing emotions in the target, and are commonly used to influence others. However, if the mark knows that they're being influenced, they'll probably reject any suggestions the Allomancer would make, which would also open the mark to reverse psychology, or reverse reverse psychology. Breeze, a known Soother, keeps his marks guessing on what he's doing.
- Wayne pulls one on a gondolier in the sequel Wax and Wayne. He wants to ride to a certain part of the city, so he dresses and acts like a rich lord, asking for the gondolier's service for the whole day for an inflated fee. His first request is to go to a bad part of the city, and he lets the accent slip from posh to slightly thuggish. The gondolier suspects that he's a mugger in disguise setting him up for a robbery, and quickly drops him off at the nearest port before rushing off—not bothering to ask for the fare.
- This is how the Bands of Mourning are guarded. At the center of the Temple of Doom, behind a hallway filled with traps is an ornate throne room. It appears to have been ransacked years ago, but investigating reveals that the treasure was never there. Falling into a safe pitfall trap reveals a second, plain chamber with a simple set of Bands, tricking you into thinking that you were too smart to take the decoy. Those Bands are also fake. The trick wasn't to make you stop looking, it was to make you explore the deadly temple in the first place. The real "Bands" are Hidden in Plain Sight right outside of the temple: it's the spearhead on the statue. Not for nothing was the builder the greatest Con Man in the Final Empire...
- President Snow pulls off a version of this in Mockingjay, the third book of The Hunger Games series. He is holding Peeta captured and shows him off on TV, letting Katniss understand that anything she does to help the rebellion will result in torture for Peeta, thereby attempting - and succeeding - to make it impossible for her to be the Mockingjay. Once District 13's leader Alma Coin realizes that Katniss is useless to their cause so long as she's worried sick about Peeta she sends in a team to retrieve him and take that ace out of Snow's deck. Turns out this is what Snow wanted them to do all along, as the torture he inflicted on Peeta included hijacking, a method of brainwashing that essentially turned Peeta into a human terminator focused only on killing Katniss.
- Most of the goings on in the Night Watch (Series) involve the good and evil chessmasters Geser and Zabulon (respectively) using the protagonist Anton as an Unwitting Pawn to pull off one of these. Typically, Geser tells Anton to do "w" and Zabulon will have a scheme trying to force Anton to do "x". Anton takes a third option and does "y", which is what Zabulon actually wanted him to choose. However, when things go well, Geser is able to pull off "z" which was his plan all along and which wouldn't have worked had he not instructed Anton to do "w".
- The book version of The Princess Bride has a Zoo of Death instead of the Pit of Despair. It has multiple levels of basement, and as you go down the enemies get scarier. One level has absolutely nothing in it. Just a long, black tunnel with the exit door at the other end. For Inigo and Fezzik, this is goddamn disturbing. Something should be happening! This is the level of the Enemies of Fear. The idea is that you panic, run for the opposite door, and let the venomous spider under the handle kill you. It ends up working too well; Fezzik just kept on running without bothering with the handle, and the spider was trampled without either of them ever noticing it.
- Ranger's Apprentice: After challenging Deparnieux to a duel, Halt practices shooting arrows through a helmet balanced on a lance as Horace rides toward him at full gallop. The two see Deparnieux watching them at it, and Halt does stick to that method in the first part of the duel. Deparnieux, an experienced fighter, changes from a full charge to a slower approach with his shield up to deflect arrows from his face, smugly confident he has thwarted Halt's plan. Then the ranger lets fly with a special arrow designed to pierce armor and hits him in the chest before he knows what's happening.
- Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Vera Miligan seems to love this trope.
- Oliver realizes moments too late when he and Nanao fight that her Hiding Behind Your Bangs hairstyle is too obviously hiding that something is special about her left eye, namely that it's the transplanted eye of a basilisk. It's misdirection from the fact that she has a second basilisk eye in the palm of her left hand.
- Team Miligan's strategy in their combat league finals match boils down to Miligan repeatedly swapping her familiar Milihand between herself and Lynette and sometimes even hiding it underground, so that the opposing team can never be sure where it is and thereby guard against the paralytic gaze from its basilisk eye. Which, much like her Hiding Behind Your Bangs hairstyle, is all a distraction from the fact she's had her primary basilisk eye removed from her left eye socket and reimplanted in her back!
- In Ringworld's Children, protector-stage Louis Wu intentionally reveals the existence of his son Wembleth to Tunesmith just before escaping, thus leading Tunesmith to believe that Louis is going to try to smuggle Wembleth off the Ringworld and leaving Tunesmith with no way to control Louis (since Wembleth's life is the leverage Tunesmith has over Louis, or so Tunesmith thinks). Louis's actual plan is to smuggle himself and the Hindmost off the Ringworld and out of Tunesmith's control, since he (Louis) believes that hiding amongst the Ringworld's billions of inhabitants is actually the safest place for Wembleth to be.
- In Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
- Zhuge Liang's "Empty Fortress Strategy", which relied on Sima Yi thinking that Zhuge Liang was not willing to take such a risk as revealing an actual weakness. (Sima Yi's son Zhao saw through it but was overruled, and in any case Zhuge Liang admitted that he would have been completely screwed had Sima Yi drawn the same conclusion.)
- Used as part of Cao Cao's Humiliation Conga. Cao Cao, while fleeing from ambush after ambush, comes to a fork in the road. On one fork, is a quantity of smoke, as if from an army's cooking fires. That is the fork that Cao Cao takes, as he knows that his opponent is too smart to really allow his position to be given away like that. Of course, his opponents knew that Cao Cao would head towards the smoke, so the path Cao Cao took had an ambush waiting.
- Sir Apropos of Nothing: Apropos' army advances on a fort held by the Mad King Meander and sees Meander singing alone atop the wall, apparently repeating the same Empty Fort Gambit that Apropos himself had helped him pull off in the previous book. Delighted that Meander has apparently lost the last of his wits along with the last of his army, Apropos orders his troops towards the gates... and Meander's army, camouflaged in the mud of the battlefield, rise up behind them.
- The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin is essentially a massive sequence of these, mostly revolving around the destruction of the wall of Yath, where the resident Eldritch Abominations try and bait each other into making fatal decisions.
- The novelization of Total Recall (1990) sees Hauser undergo Adaptational Heroism and being genuine in turning against Cohaagen, the whole "memory wipe and placed under the identity of 'Quaid' on Earth" plan being a ploy he cooked up to get to the alien device and free Mars.
- The seventh volume of The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign is essentially an extended example of this. Kyousuke meets and contracts with Aoi, to use her to summon a being capable of defeating the White Queen. However, it turns out that the Queen disguised herself as Aoi, and she launches a surprise attack that rips off Kyousuke's right arm. But it then turns out that Kyousuke realized the deception, and hid a fake arm in his sleeve, anticipating this attack. He's able to complete his summoning and seemingly destroy the Queen. And then it's revealed that the Queen didn't just manage to survive, but this was her plan all along. She deliberately allowed Kyousuke to create and summon something capable of defeating her, because that being would inevitably become an even greater threat to the world than she was. This leaves Kyousuke with no choice but to work with her to defeat what he's unleashed. Not only that, but the real reason she disguised herself as Aoi was to test if she and Kyousuke could work together effectively... which also succeeds.
