Basic Trope: Crime shows typically revolve around murder cases.
- Straight: Alice, the protagonist, is a police detective who investigates homicides and innocent-seeming "accidents" that turn out to be murder.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice only looks into deaths that have been narrowed down to murder, and not one episode goes by where Everybody Lives.
- Someone's clearly hanging by a noose. Alice still claims that it was a murder by forced hanging, even with a Suicide Note that reads: "Goodbye, Cruel World!"
- Downplayed:
- There are a few episodes with no body count every now and then, in which case the main crime is a kidnapping or robbery.
- A few murder cases are depraved indifference murders such as a drug dealer using a toxic filler to cut his drugs.
- Justified:
- Alice is a homicide detective, so every episode that focuses on a crime focuses on homicide.
- Murder Is the Best Solution
- Inverted:
- Bob, the protagonist, is a low-ranking consultant who is called in to solve all of the cases that are too minor for the big shots to waste their time on.
- Even though Alice is a renowned detective in the violent city of Tropistan, and nearly all murder cases are assigned to her, we see surprisingly few murder investigations in the series.
- Subverted: In several episodes, the "murder" was a case of Accidental Murder, or, well, manslaughter.
- Double Subverted: In several episodes, the murder is set up to look so spontaneous that it can only be judged as manslaughter, but Alice sees through the killer's intentions and gets them arrested.
- Parodied:
- Alice is assigned to a bank robbery case. Instead, she forges murder evidence and tries to get the suspect blamed on that, since solving murders is really all she knows how to do.
- Alice gets a bank robber arrested for murdering money, with all of the regular murder charges.
- Zig Zagged: It at first looks like murder but then turns out to be a suicide or an assault. However the investigation reveals clues that expose a murderer from another case who was either attacked out of revenge or set up to be the killer in the current case so someone still gets arrested for murder.
- Averted:
- The show either never deals with murder cases, or they're just one of the many types of crime that the protagonists are shown to solve.
- The work isn't about crime at all.
- Enforced:
- "Death is dramatic, mysteries are dramatic, so murder mysteries are extremely dramatic. Get to it."
- It's harder to write mysteries where the victim of the crime is still alive to tell their side of the story, so the writers stick exclusively (or almost exclusively) to murders.
- Lampshaded: "Another murder? Man, it's like the people here are just itching to see blood fall out of people."
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Alice's superiors deliberately assign her to minor cases as often as possible because they fear she might become jaded from all the murders she has to solve.
- Discussed: "Yes, this really was just a successful robbery where no-one got hurt. It's not that unlikely, we're not in Hollywood."
- Conversed: "Why's this show all about murders? I mean, what happened to robberies? And hostage situations? It's like the writers aren't aware that there are crimes other than homicide!"
- Deconstructed:
- Having to solve murders on a regular basis entails dealing with the grief of the victims' loved ones and figuring out methods and motives for murder that sometimes prove exceptionally horrifying, and all of it takes a toll on Alice's mental health.
- The fact there are this many murder cases over such a short timeframe to begin with is indicative of how high the crime rate has gotten, and the story starts delving into the corrupt and inept government, the resulting social unrest and the dangerous mindsets embedded in the local culture that enable violence to become so commonplace.
- Alice receives a case of manslaughter and misinterprets it as murder. She pieces things together so that the culprit is found guilty of murder anyway and given an undeserved death sentence.
- Reconstructed: Alice sees a therapist regularly to keep her job related mental health issues in check.
- Played For Drama: Alice cannot come to terms with her close friend's suicide, and tries, to no avail, to prove that there was a killer.
Back to Always Murder, found dead in its apartment building at 8 PM, riddled with gunshots.
