Stating the Simple Solution in Literature.
- In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom denounces Huck's plan to liberate Jim from captivity by unlocking the shed's door and escaping by night as too simple and lacking flair, substituting it with an incredibly dangerous and over-the-top one instead.
- Animorphs: When they need to find out where Erek lives for the first time, the group throws out suggestions for how they can do that and include infiltrating the Sharing, stalking him at his school, looking for clues from where they last saw him, and having Ax hack into a computer via the Internet.Cassie: Those are all fine plans, but how about if we just look him up in the phone book?
[Beat]
Jake: [sheepishly] Or we could just look him up in the phone book. - In The Boys from Brazil, Josef Mengele insists that the Nazi conspirators should just kill nosy busybody investigator Ezra Lieberman. Mengele claims that no-one would pay attention to Lieberman's "paltry shreds of evidence", to which his superior replies, "If he dies suddenly, they would." Later, Mengele fails to take his own advice, giving the hero a Motive Rant instead of a bullet. He doesn't die — Ezra is a Failure Hero — but he winds up losing his only advantage in the climax.
- In the tie-in Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel What I Did on My Summer Vacation, the Big Bad suggests just killing the Slayer's friends. His advisor disagrees, saying that doing so is just suicide. You don't eat the Slayer's loved ones.
- Captain Underpants: In the fourth book, Professor Poopypants is Driven to Madness over people constantly making fun of his name and uses Shrink Rays and Humongous Mecha to hold the world hostage, threatening to shrink everyone in the world unless they change their names to ones just as silly as his. When Captain Underpants defeats him and he's being taken away by the police, George and Harold point out that he could have simply changed his own name instead, to which the Professor confesses that such a solution had never occurred to him. Sadly, the name he chooses to change to, Tippy Tinkletrousers, is just as unfortunate.
- In an unusual variation, in The Courts of the Morning it's the Diabolical Mastermind who points out the simple solution to the heroes. The heroes capture the Diabolical Mastermind about a third of the way in, as the first step of a complicated scheme that takes the rest of the novel to play out. When he starts to get an idea of what they're planning, he points out that it would be simpler and safer for them just to shoot him now. They reply that getting him out of the way isn't the only thing they're trying to achieve, and because they're the heroes their complicated scheme does end up achieving nearly everything they wanted.
- Discworld: In Maskerade, at the conclusion, Agnes, who is one of those people cursed with being sensible, asks the villain why they stayed in the opera house if they hate opera so much instead of just leaving. He glares at her like she asked a patently stupid question, and just goes on with his insane ranting. (There's perhaps an analogy to be made with the note earlier in the book that Granny Weatherwax hates theatre, but hate is an attractive force, so she attends every troupe of strolling players, mummery or even puppet show that comes to Lancre, and just glares at them.)
- The Dresden Files:
- In the novel Summer Knight, The Dragon notes that he had suggested just killing Harry several times during the course of the book (since this would have ruined the Big Bad's Batman Gambit, the Big Bad didn't listen). The trope is then inverted when the Big Bad immediately wants to kill Harry once He Has Outlived His Usefulness, but The Mole points out that just killing him would expose them to Harry's Dying Curse. This leads to them leaving Harry to drown in magical quicksand and escape while he's busy drowning. Which was The Mole's plan all along, as she was planning to betray the Big Bad.
- This happens again in the climax of Dead Beat when the Big Bad's advisor recommends he kill Harry. The Big Bad refuses, because Harry's Death Curse would ruin the spell he's currently trying to control. As he learns to his misfortune scant minutes later, being knocked out from behind by a freed Harry has just as bad an effect.
- In Eragon, the titular character is told by Brom that the reason why magic users don't do this is that the recipient of the attack always has just enough time to get in a similar attack before they croak; thus a kind of unwritten rule between magical duelists is that they have to bend the enemy's mind to their will before the finishing blow.
- Averted in the Fu Manchu novels, where no one ever questions Fu Manchu's use of ridiculously exotic murder plots, probably because, except when targeting the heroes, they usually work.
- In the Gaunt's Ghosts novel Blood Pact, Eyl finally has Gaunt and Mabbon at his mercy and starts gloating. Mabbon tells Eyl that he should have just fired. By failing to do so, Eyl gets knocked away by Gaunt, then has his head ventilated by Larkin.
- Harry Potter:
- In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry and Ron get in trouble for stealing a Flying Car from Ron's dad to get to school after Dobby causes them to miss the train. Professor McGonagall points out to them that they had Hedwig and could have just sent a message asking for help, causing the two to realize they Didn't Think This Through.note
- In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Voldemort wants to capture Harry because spilling "the blood of an enemy" is required for a ritual that will let him come Back from the Dead. Pettigrew points out that there are a lot of people who consider Voldemort an enemy and suggests kidnapping someone less famous and well-guarded. Voldemort admits that this would be much easier, but insists on using Harry anyway because he wants to come back stronger than he was before.
- Later in the same book, several of Voldemort's Death Eaters suggest to Voldemort that they should just kill Harry Potter on the spot instead of arming him with a wand and killing him in a mock duel. He doesn't listen because his ego demands proof that he can win against a teenager while his minions don't care. Voldemort wises up in the next book, attempting the Killing Curse the moment he comes face-to-face with Harry. Luckily Dumbledore shows up just in time to save the day.
- Harry points out upon hearing that Voldemort can create Horcruxes that since he can turn any object into one, and the process makes the object largely indestructible, he could make the object completely impossible to find: i.e. take a random piece of garbage, turn it into a Horcrux, and bury it on the other side of the world. Dumbledore shoots this down by noting that while that would indeed be the smart thing to do, Voldemort is too egotistic to ever consider putting a bit of his soul inside any old object, and surmises that he would only use objects of great personal importance and hide them in places of similar importance.
- More mundanely, the Half-Blood Prince's textbook in the sixth book has "Just shove a bezoar down their throats" scrawled over an entire section about poison antidotes. Slughorn mentions that some poisons won't be countered this way, but still, the knowledge (as well as the bezoar itself) does prove useful later.
- In the first John Carter of Mars novel, Dejah Thoris explains that, while she really loves John Carter, she was forced to promise herself to an enemy prince. Her rules of honor forbid her to be with anyone else while her betrothed is still alive. John responds by drawing his sword and offering to take care of it. Unfortunately, she also can't be with a man who killed her fiancé.
- Legends & Lattes: Gallina thinks that Viv and her old adventuring party could wipe out the entirety of the gang attempting to extort Viv's coffee shop. Which Viv agrees is possible (though it'd be tricky to get them all before they torch the shop or attack one of Viv's employees), but not something she wants to do because she's put that life behind her.
- In P. G. Wodehouse's Mike and Psmith, when the title characters are preparing to face some dormitory invaders, Psmith launches into a dissertation on the tactics of Napoleon—which Mike interrupts by suggesting they just trip them up with string.Psmith: Yes, Napoleon would have done that, too.
- Modesty Blaise novels:
- In A Taste For Death, the second banana villain—who has been defeated by Modesty and Willie before—practically jumps up and down shouting, "Kill them now!" or (later) "They're up to something, kill them now!" But he's overruled by the main villain, whose guiding principle is It Amused Me and doesn't think that just killing them would be amusing enough.
- Major the Earl St. Maur, in The Night of Morningstar, argues for dropping Modesty and Willie over the side the instant the Watchmen finish determining whether or not our heroes managed to send a message before being captured. (They hadn't.) He is overruled by his superior Colonel Golitsyn, who wishes to keep Modesty and Willie alive for use in an elaborate disinformation plot.
- In Pact, the way that the metaphysics of the setting work encourage subtlety, manipulation, and elaborate traps to defer responsibility—an approach which is explicitly compared to playing the Bond villain. Those that choose not to care about the consequences of being straightforward, like Fell the illusionist/enchanter, are all the more dangerous because of this—it often doesn't matter if your opponent will take severe karmic backlash for their vulgar attack if said vulgar attack managed to kill you.Fell: Don't underestimate the value of a bullet.
- In Pale during a practical lesson on binding at the Blue Heron Institute, the teacher Marie Durocher tells the class she'll let loose a dangerous bound Other at the end of the lesson, and leaves them to improvise means of binding. Lucy Eilingson uses her Morph Weapon to form a gun, and asks what happens if she threatens to shoot Durocher, who is impressed and commends Lucy, as this would be an implicit binding by way of threatening her life, but in fact the intended lesson is to Know When to Fold 'Em and leave the room before the lesson ends.
- The Scarlet Pimpernel:
- Proof that this always has been and always will be an essential part of the Super Hero formula: In The Elusive Pimpernel, one of Baroness Orczy's sequels to the Super Hero Trope Codifier, while Chauvelin is practically orgasming over his overly-complicated plans to make the Scarlet Pimpernel suffer an intricate Fate Worse than Death, his assigned Number Two Collot d'Herbois suggests they just shoot him."Collot d'Herbois, incredulous, half-contemptuous, did not altogether approve of these schemes, which seemed to him wild and uncanny; he liked the direct simplicity of a summary trial, of the guillotine, or of his own well stage-managed 'Noyades'. He did not feel that any ridicule or dishonour would necessarily paralyse a man in his efforts at intrigue, and would have liked to set Chauvelin's authority aside, to behead the woman upstairs and then to take his chance of capturing the man later on."
- By the time of Lord Tony's Wife, it's Chauvelin who's advocating quick executions of aristos rather than putting them through elaborate public humiliation. The longer they're alive, he reasons, the more chance the Pimpernel has to rescue them.
- Proof that this always has been and always will be an essential part of the Super Hero formula: In The Elusive Pimpernel, one of Baroness Orczy's sequels to the Super Hero Trope Codifier, while Chauvelin is practically orgasming over his overly-complicated plans to make the Scarlet Pimpernel suffer an intricate Fate Worse than Death, his assigned Number Two Collot d'Herbois suggests they just shoot him.
- Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: "Harold" is about two farmhands named Thomas and Alfred who make a scarecrow that they either play around with or abuse. But when the scarecrow starts coming to life and grunting, they get scared. Thomas gets an idea on how to get rid of it.Thomas: Let's throw him in the fire, and that'll be that.
Alfred: Let's not do anything stupid. - Late in 17 and Gone, Lauren realizes that if she really was having visions, the quickest way for the girls to be found would be to tell her where to find them instead of deepening the mysteries.
- The Stormlight Archive: Highprince Dalinar Kholin is plagued by recurring visions of the era of the long-lost Knights Radiant. Unsure whether he is losing his mind or receiving genuinely supernatural visions, he's on the verge of abdicating when his younger son points out that they could simply research the visions to see if the places and people Dalinar is seeing actually existed.
- Wax and Wayne:
- Justified in The Bands of Mourning. The titular Bands are a legendary artifact said to grant the wearer all thirty-two Allomantic and Feruchemic powers, which can normally only be inherited at birth or stolen via Hemalurgy. When Wax discovers a civilization that created armbands that can grant powers to anyone, he asks why they seek the Bands if they can just strap thirty-two armbands to someone, and is politely told that they can't. The vast majority of Allomancers and Feruchemists only have one power, and powers from different people interfere with each other. Wearing two armbands does nothing, and scientists only recently discovered how to put four peoples' powers in one band. The Bands can grant all thirty-two powers because they were made by someone who had thirty-two powers, which is vanishingly rare.
- Justified again in regards to the Temple of Doom the immortal Sovereign commissioned to house the Bands for safekeeping. Wax points out that a giant castle full of traps would only attract thieves, and a better way to keep treasure safe is to store it in a discreet cave. Later, he realizes that a treasure stored in a cave would pose problems for an immortal in the long run; what if he forgot which cave, or the terrain changed while he was gone?
