Time-Delayed Death

This happens in crime dramas a lot. Basically it involves a death exhibiting a standard pattern:


 * 1) Someone is injured.
 * 2) Unbeknown to the victim, some vital organ or other's been damaged and he's slowly dying of internal bleeding (alternatively, a careless surgeon may have left something in them after operating on them).
 * 3) The victim dies in an unrelated situation and Hilarity Ensues for the investigators.
 * 4) Double points if the place of death by coincidence happens to be the home of a sympathetic character with "prior convictions" or an enemy in high places, the victim gets into an argument before dying, or someone steals from him when he collapses.

When done properly, this can be a reasonable solution to a Locked Room Mystery. If it makes someone innocent look guilty, it can lead to Clear My Name for a protagonist, or even a Vigilante Execution for a passerby or Red Shirt. The latter is more common if the series focuses on the investigators. Note that being fatally wounded and not dying immediately isn't this trope. Parts 2 and 3 as mentioned above are necessary to count as this trope.

In Real Life, acute stress reaction shock is often responsible for this; a person may not realize that he has a serious wound until it is too late.

Not to be confused with Who Dunnit to Me?, in which the victim knows they're dying and tries to find the murderer before they go.

See also You Are Already Dead, for a form of killing technique in martial arts and other stories that works like this; and Secretly Dying for when someone is intentionally hiding that they're doomed. The Last Dance is a somewhat related trope.

Anime and Manga

 * Variation: In Hajime no Ippo,
 * Another variation occurs in Umineko no Naku Koro ni during the fourth arc, in which phones Battler, claiming that she's already dead/dying by half her head being smashed, letting Battler know that  died as well, and telling him to accept that the murderers are using magic. She's later found locked in her room next to the phone with half her head smashed. The anti-mystery explanation is that.
 * The probable mystery solution?

Literature

 * S.S. Van Dine's novel The Kennel Murder Case is a Locked Room Mystery in which the solution is that.
 * This is what happens to the murdered man in Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers
 * Subverted in  . The death merely looked like it had been delayed in that case, but it was still enough to get the police looking for an alibi for the completely wrong time.
 * Done as well in Randall Garrett's Too Many Magicians. Gets the argument bonus points, too.
 * Used (in combination with a few other things that complicate it) in the classic Locked Room Mystery The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr.
 * John Dickson Carr used this in a number of ways in other stories, since he wrote dozens of locked room mysteries. By the way, this novel is more commonly found as The Three Coffins.
 * Used in one of the earliest examples of the Locked Room Mystery, Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room.
 * In a story by John T Sladek, parodying the locked room genre, a writer describes (among others) a murder mystery plot in which the victim is surreptitiously stabbed with a long, very thin, needle. The victim suffers only minor discomfort until he dies of internal bleeding in his locked room some hours later.
 * Halo. Ghosts Of Onyx. . "Sir... I think I got nicked..."

Film

 * In the Cheap Detective, one of the villains has been bleeding to death for 40 years.

Live Action TV

 * CSI and its spinoffs love this trope:
 * CSI; A man who was punched in the back of the head in a bar fight, who later died of a brain hemorrhage in the bath.
 * CSI: NY; A woman who was in a car accident and died (from bleeding out due to lacerations on her spleen) in an apartment while feeding a friend's fish.
 * CSI: Miami; A woman who appeared to have died in a car accident actually died of toxic shock (from a sponge which was left in her after surgery) while driving.
 * Another CSI example: A boy who was tries to walk home, but collapses and dies... right under the tires of a cab. The cabbie then.
 * Variation on CSI: NY: A man who had a pair of forceps left in him after surgery to went insane from the toxic shock, but this didn't kill him directly. Instead he was.
 * A weird one: A gambler slowly dying of lead poisoning from the chocolate he consumed every night at the table was accelerated to right now by a stinger of eye drops left in his drink. (Quip to Black: "Literally, death by chocolate.")
 * There was an episode where a bull rider cracked a vertebrae after getting kicked in the head, only to die after
 * Another episode of CSI had an episode based on the case of Peter Porco mentioned in the Real Life section. The victim was a sports coach who was.
 * And one on Law and Order: a homeless man was hit and run by a high-end automobile, only to have it turn out he was already dying from a head wound earlier that night.
 * In an episode of Jonathan Creek, this trope was responsible for a dead woman ending up in a wardrobe: A pipe from some construction work fell on her head.
 * Seen in an episode of The Professionals where Doyle is accused of killing a suspect in custody.

Tabletop Games

 * Played With in Dungeons and Dragons. There's a monk ability allowing them to punch someone and kill them whenever they want within a few weeks.

Video Games

 * Final Fantasy has Countdown or Condemned or Doom or Slow-Death. Basically it consists of a countdown over a character's head; in real-time games, this is usually done by time, though in turn-based games, it's always done by turn. There's also sometimes a "turn to stone" variant.
 * Pokémon has Perish Song, which works like this.
 * In World of Warcraft, fire mages have the Cauterize talent, which heals a mage by burning a fatal wound. The downside is that the burning itself will kill the mage if they don't get proper healing within the next 6 seconds.
 * Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney features a killer who sent . Said poison however is slow-acting, so after he went on to have an interview with a journalist. During this interview he took a swig of the coffee his daughter made for him, only to drop down dead from the earlier poisoning straight after  making it seem like he died from a poisoned mug of coffee.

Real Life

 * Harry Houdini died of a ruptured appendix shortly after one of his shows. Before that show, a man came backstage and tried to test Houdini's "abs of steel" by punching him in the abdomen several times. This led to the well-known (but false) Urban Legend that the man's punches caused Houdini's burst appendix.
 * In an especially creepy Real Life example, murder victim Peter Porco, after taking several blows from an axe to his head, woke up, went about his daily routine of making coffee and fetching the morning paper, then finally collapsed back into unconsciousness and died, apparently unaware the entire time that he was bleeding to death, or even injured, due to brain damage. The entire scenario, as well as the subsequent murder trial, made 48 Hours Mystery and Forensic Files.
 * Natasha Richardson was lucid after a seemingly minor head injury, but developed a headache hours later.
 * In 1963 boxer Davey Moore was punched in the face during a fight. Falling, he struck the base of his neck on a ringside rope and lost by a knockout, but shortly recovered and was well enough to give a ringside interview to the press. He subsequently passed out in his dressing room and died some hours later.
 * Victims of paracetamol overdose can appear perfectly healthy for several hours despite suffering irreversible liver damage.
 * Acute liver failure in general can be a bit like this. It's almost always caused by viral infection or poisoning (usually overdoses of acetaminophen or magic mushrooms, especially if combined with alcohol). The early symptoms are seemingly benign: nausea, diarrhea, abdominal pains, loss of appetite, and fatigue, which even taken together can be easily mistaken for food poisoning or a stomach virus. It's only after it progresses that the more obvious symptoms appear: jaundice, agony, abdominal swelling, and coma. It can be treated, but it generally requires a liver transplant, and someone who isn't pay attention may not get to the hospital in time.
 * Radiation poisoning.
 * Ingestion of ethylene glycol (antifreeze) initially produces symptoms very much like plain old alcohol intoxication. But the body then proceeds to break ethylene glycol down into toxic chemicals, and death ensues probably within 12 to 36 hours after consumption.
 * Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary was stabbed through the heart with a sharpened nail file in 1898 while walking down a pier to board a ship--but the nail file was very thin and made a very narrow wound, and no one saw any external bleeding because of the tight corset the Empress was wearing. She actually got up after her assailant ran away, continued walking down the pier, and boarded the ship. After boarding the ship she whispered "What has happened to me?" and collapsed into unconsciousness, dying of internal bleeding shortly thereafter.
 * Depressed skull fractures. They can often cause a hemorrhage into the brain, causing this trope.
 * Events like this happened so often in England when dueling was still legal that there's still a law on the books: it's not murder if your victim took more than a year to die.
 * The death of Virginia Rappe in 1921 from a ruptured bladder (most likely caused by back-alley abortions) led to the arrest and prosecution of comic actor Fatty Arbuckle for her alleged murder. Although he was acquitted of all charges, it still destroyed his career and led directly to the imposition of the Hays Code on Hollywood.