Suspect Is Hatless / Literature

• 87th Precinct: In Lady, Lady I Did It, a gunman opens fire in a crowded bookstore; killing several people. Despite there being multiple eyewitnesses, the police are unable to get an accurate description as most of them were focused on the gun. And, even then, the description of the gun varies greatly from person to person. It turns out, the gunman was using two quite different guns; one in each hand.
• In Around the World in Eighty Days, whatever description Inspector Fix was given about the robber, it's made obvious that it was not detailed enough, considering that he spent seventy-eight days chasing the wrong guy and in the meanwhile the rest of the London Police easily found the real thief.
• During the first two-thirds of the second Bill Bergson book by Astrid Lindgren, the main thing known about the murderer is that he had green trousers. Lampshaded by the police inspector who says that the only result of their investigation was that no one wore green trousers anymore.
• In The Dead Zone, Sheriff Bannerman mentions that all the description they have about the serial killer they are looking for is this: a boy thinks he might have seen "some guy" at the scene of the crime.
  Bannerman: "Some guy." We ought to put it out on the wire, what do you think? Be on the lookout for "some guy".
• Discworld:
  • In Maskerade, the angry mob is absolutely certain of the identity of the Ghost of the Ankh-Morpork Opera House; he's the guy in the mask. Granny Weatherwax has to point out the flaw in their logic, and when that doesn't work, she has to exploit that exact same flaw.
  • This came up earlier in Witches Abroad, where The Girl Who Fits This Slipper trope is pointed out to have this problem. The same slipper that fit Emberella could also fit, say, Nanny Ogg.
  • Also used in Going Postal, when Moist reflects on how tricky he was to describe.
    He was about...he was 'about'. He was about twenty, or about thirty. On Watch reports across the continent he was anywhere between, oh, six feet two inches tall and five feet nine inches tall, hair all shades from mid-brown to blond, and his lack of distinguishing features included his entire face. He was about... average.
    • Also from Going Postal. People apparently keep going into the library of Unseen University (which contains every book that exists and many that don't) to ask questions like "Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins".^note If they receive an answer, it's probably "Oook."
  • Likewise, when Ridcully's trying to bring to mind one of his staff - "You know, thingummy, got a funny name...". Of course, on the Discworld, this is no help at all.
  • In The Truth, William de Worde takes a statement from a robbery victim that includes "I shall recognize him if I see him again as not many people wear a stocking on their head."
• In Frederick Forsyth's novel, The Fist of God, the Israeli Mossad's analysts generate a psychological profile of the anonymous source who is feeding them top-level intelligence from inside the Iraqi government: "All they could guess was that Jericho was middle-aged, spoke little or hesitant English, and had a military or quasi-military background." Mossad's director grouses that the description narrows it down to "half the bloody Iraqi High Command, the top fifty in the Ba'ath Party, and John Doe's Cousin Fred."
• Cammie in The Gallagher Girls often describes herself as such.
• Jack Ryan:
  • A variation in Clear and Present Danger. The FBI actually have a detailed description of Felix Cortez. The problem is that his appearance is so generic (Latino male in his mid-30s to early 40s, average height and build, no Visual Distinguishing Marks) that a description is totally useless.
  • Without Remorse, also by Tom Clancy, made use of this trope as a plot point. Retired Navy SEAL turned Vigilante Man John Kelly hit on a nearly perfect disguise early on; on the rare occasions when the presence of an innocent bystander meant he couldn't simply Leave No Witnesses, the best description the police ever got was "a homeless guy". He did have one near-miss towards the end of the book, but even a trained police officer has trouble providing a detailed description of the suspect when a) it's the middle of the night on a poorly-lit street and b) he's being held at gunpoint.
• Several of the crime novels of PD James describe female characters as "hatless", which sounds an odd thing to remark on in a novel with a modern setting. However, James was born in 1920 and had been writing since the days when it was more remarkable for a woman's outfit not to include a hat.
• Novels based on the series Monk:
  • Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu has a hit-and-run where the witnesses can't seem to agree on what model of car was being driven, only that it's a sedan. Monk figures out that this is because the killer smeared mud all over the car to make it hard to identify;
  • Lampshaded in Mr. Monk and the Dirty Cop: Monk recalls that his old law professor at UC Berkeley staged an incident during his lectures, having an anonymous person rush into the room, point a gun at the professor, then run out; afterwards, the students could be expected to give conflicting descriptions of the gunman, illustrating the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Of course the lesson was less effective when Adrian Monk was in the class, since he has a photographic memory.
• In Naples '44 by Norman Lewis the author (a Field Security officer in WW2 Italy) often complains of the vague descriptions sent for (mandatory) inclusion in their Black Book of dangerous subversives. One suspect was even described as having "the face of a hypocrite"!
• In the ancient joke book Philogelos, a Cumean (an idiot, per the ancient National Stereotype) goes to an embalmer to identify his son's body. His most identifiable trait? "He had a cough."
• Phoenix Force. Someone is trying to revive the ancient Thuggee cult in India. The Thugs strangle an American journalist but leave his wife unharmed. She describes the attackers as 'Indians', which isn't very helpful.
• Relativity:
  • In "Highway Robbery", a suspect is described as "he had a mustache." This ends up subverting this trope because it actually turns out to be a vital clue.
  • The trope is played straight in "Master Blankard's Pawn", when one witness describes a thief as being "ugly", and a second witness gives the slightly more helpful description, "He was dressed in winter colors but he was definitely an autumn."
• In the first Sammy Keyes book, the heroine sees a murderer but can only tell police that the man is of average height and weight, looking about thirty.
• In The Shadow of the Lion, a policeman is looking for "a boy...with dark, curly hair". In Venice. The amount of detail in the description is commented on by the person being asked.
• Sherlock Holmes:
  • In The Valley of Fear, the court system in the eponymous Wretched Hive browbeats the witnesses into reducing their testimony to "the perpetrator had a beard". (This was 1875.) It's standard enough practice that members of the local crime network regard getting arrested for felonies the way urban hooligans regard a night's lock-up for disorderly conduct - an inconvenience at worst and a rite of passage at best.
  • The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton, after Holmes and Watson burglarize the titular blackmailer's house, witness his murder and barely get away. Then there's the meeting with Lestrade:
    "We have their footmarks, we have their description; it's ten to one that we trace them. [...] He was a middle-sized, strongly-built man- square jaw, thick neck, moustache, a mask over his eyes."
    "That's rather vague," said Sherlock Holmes. "Why, it might be a description of Watson!"
    "It's true," said the inspector, with much amusement. "It might be a description of Watson."
  • Invoked in The Hound of the Baskervilles, when Watson supposes Holmes knew he was hiding in the hut by his footprint. Holmes corrects him by showing it was with Watson's particular brand of cigarette (which are made by a London tobacconist, and can't be bought locally around Baskerville Hall).
• In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a Scotland Yard sketcher tries to make a drawing of Mr. Hyde after he becomes a suspect in a murder, though they can't quite get one due to inconsistent descriptions, which finally agree on him saying he was deformed, but nothing was quite wrong with him. This became something of a Subverted Trope over time, as modern audiences became more familiar with the Uncanny Valley.
• Michael Moore points out in his book Stupid White Men that every crime he ever hears about seems to be committed by an unidentified black man. This leads to Moore theorising that every reported crime in America is actually being committed by the same man.
• In The Survivalist series by Jerry Ahern, a military officer offers to use La Résistance network to help John Rourke find his wife and children. Rourke starts to write out a description, only to rewrite it when he realises that words like "beautiful" or "cute" are too vague and subjective to be helpful.
• In The Voyage of Alice, one of the first books in Alice, Girl from the Future series, many characters describe the suspected Big Bad as "a human wearing a hat". At best – "wearing a hat, elderly and thin". And even that turns out to be a disguise.

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