Revealing something about somebody through their personal effects, often posthumously, in Literature.
- In one of the Able Team novels, someone searches the pockets of a Columbian cartel soldier and finds a Fatal Family Photo. He says it reminds him of when he had to do this trope with dead friends during the Vietnam War. Carl Lyons cuts him off, saying the man he killed is just an enemy.
- The Alice Network: Implied and exploited. When the Asshole Victim is killed, the murderer leaves a photo of him surrounded by swastika-wearing German officers in the hopes that the police won’t investigate too closely after the Personal Effects Reveal shows how awful he was. We don't get to see the police going through the murdered man's belongings, but it looks like the murderer was right about what the police would think of her victim — she's never caught, after all.
- All Quiet on the Western Front has a couple of these - one where Paul Bäumer goes through the wallet of a French soldier he killed, and the other where he returns home and to his old room, and it's like it belongs to a completely strange person who in effect is no more. And near the end he also goes through Kat's stuff after he dies.
- Apt to happen when coping with deceased characters in the Aunt Dimity series. A few examples:
- In addition to finding the correspondence between her mother and Dimity, Lori also finds a heart-shaped locket in a box with an initial on the lid. She mistakes the letter for a "W" for Dimity's surname when it was actually an "M" for Bobby MacLaren's. He gave Dimity the locket when he proposed marriage.
- Fr. Bright and Lori go through the knapsack that was found on the vagrant who collapsed in the cottage's driveway. They follow the clues in the military decorations and other items to learn more about the man, who proves to be Christopher Anscombe-Smith, known as "Kit".
- In Aunt Dimity and the Next of Kin, when Lori enters Miss Beacham's apartment in response to her dying instructions, she is shocked to find the flat opulently furnished with antiques. She also finds a family photo album that shows the gradual decline of Miss Beacham's family.
- Ruth and Louise Pym find a letter from their older brother announcing the birth of his son many decades after the deaths of their brother (who was killed at Gallipoli in 1915) and their parents. This find prompts them to ask Lori to locate their brother's family before they die.
- Lori and Cameron enter the apartment of the recently deceased A.J. and Edmund Pym in search of information on them and Edmund's daughter Bree. They find some old family photographs of Aubrey senior and his wife, Aubrey and A.J. at A.J.'s baptism, as well as Edmund, his wife, and young Bree herself.
- Much of what prompts Michael Noonan in Bag of Bones to suspect that his late wife was keeping secrets from him came from various personal effects of hers (a home pregnancy testing kit, plastic owls, desk calendar entries) he finds after her death. It turns out that not only was she pregnant with her and Mike's first child, she had discovered that Dark Score Lake, where she and Mike had a vacation home, was the site of a brutal rape and murder nearly a hundred years before, but never had the chance to tell her husband either of these things before she unexpectedly died of a brain aneurysm.
- In A Brother's Price, the Princesses' husband Keifer has been dead for six years. At the end of that time, they are engaged to a new young man and show him Keifer's quarters, including the secret passage to the gardens... which they find, between all the used match sticks and old mud tracked in different shoe sizes, that he'd been using regularly. To cheat on them. With his sister. The new man digs through Keifer's belongings and finds a code book implicating his family in a recent theft of cannons, and revealing that he poisoned the Princesses' father.
- The Cat Who... Series: In book #12 (The Cat Who Knew a Cardinal), while going through Hilary VanBrook's belongings with the executor of his estate, Qwill uncovers evidence that he was involved in a money-counterfeiting scheme.
- Chocoholic Mysteries: Early in Castle Clue, Lee is going through a garage full of twenty-five years' worth of accumulation from TenHuis Chocolade. Most of it gets pitched or given away, but the last cabinet drawer contains items belonging to Lee's aunt Nettie from her high school years, including a trophy from a talent show. Lee's delivery of it to Nettie and her friends is what kicks off the latest mystery, since they won the trophy the night that Dan Rice, who was hosting the talent show, was found dead.
- Discworld: Lords and Ladies has Granny Weatherwax apparently sacrifice her life fighting the Queen of the Elves. Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick go through her possessions, which contain two surprises. The first is a bundle of letters, strongly implied to be love letters from Mustrum Ridcully, which she claimed to have never received, but apparently actually hung onto for decades. The second is a letter addressed to Nanny: it's the card she holds when "Borrowing" that reads "I aten't dead", and reveals that she found a way to survive after all.
- Dragon Bones has a premortal example: Ward doesn't even know his father is dying when the local Friendly Ghost, Oreg, turns up and hands him his father's ring. It is revealed that Oreg is much more than a harmless ghost, and always serves the head of the family as slave. Ward is not surprised that his father kept secrets, as the man was so paranoid he almost killed Ward to prevent attempts of Klingon Promotion. His father is still alive and makes him swear to give the ring to his heir when the time comes.
- In The Five People You Meet in Heaven, one of the main character's coworkers has to go through his stuff and notes how empty his apartment was.
- In the Hercule Poirot mystery Murder in Mesopotamia, Anne Johnston, cleaning up the papers in the office after the murder of Louise, discovers early drafts of the death threats sent to Louise. The drafts were obviously written by Louise's husband.
- Looking for Alaska has Pudge and the Colonel going through Alaska's room in order to throw out her alcohol and try to invoke this.
- A particularly sad example occurs in Vivian Vande Velde's book Remembering Raquel, a Scrapbook Story told in Anachronic Order where multiple people describe how they were affected by a teenage girl's death. At one point we get the story from the view of the ambulance driver, who says she "let Raquel go" after finding a Do Not Resuscitate form in her bag and assuming it's what she would have wanted. As the story progresses, more of the same forms are found in her notebook, her locker, and her room, and her father eventually realizes that she'd been stealing them from her mother's hospital room so her mother wouldn't let herself die.
- In Faulkner's short story A Rose for Emily, inhabitants of a small Southern town find her husband's possessions (she bought for him for their wedding) after her death. Their long since deceased owner is still technically present...
- In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40,000 Horus Heresy novel Horus Rising when Captain Loken goes through Jubal's effects, he finds a badge of a lodge. Loken deeply disapproving of the notion of lodges, this leads to some complications.
- In James Swallow's The Flight of the Eisenstein, Garro finds that the bolter given to him had belonged to his dead comrade Pyr Rahl; he reflects on how the Death Guard pass on their effects from one man to the next, to remember the dead. Then he sees the belongings of his dead housecarl Kaleb, which no one else would want to claim. Though tempted to throw it all out and so be free, that would be ignoble. He goes through it and finds that Kaleb belonged to the cult that worshipped the Emperor. It makes a great many things about him make sense.
- The Wrong Side of Goodbye: Detective Harry Bosch is combing through Dominic's Army footlocker, undisturbed since Dominic's death in Vietnam nearly half a century before, when he gets his big break—some photos that turn out to be Dominic's girlfriend and unborn child. This allows Harry to track them down.
