Five Red Herrings

[sawyl]

After a largely futile day, Dorothy L Sayers saves the day with Five Red Herrings.

The day after quarrelling with practically everyone in Galloway, an local painter is found lying dead in a stream, his skull fracture by a fall. But thanks to the sharp-eyed Peter Wimsey, who happens to be holidaying in the area, the police quickly realise that man has been murdered and further, that the murder could only have been committed by an artist. Having narrowed their field to six, Wimsey and the police find that five of their suspects have vanished while the sixth turns up with a black eye and a pack of lies about his whereabouts.

The investigate unfolds through a plethora of details — train times, bicycles, ambiguous notes — leading each of the policemen involved in the case to form their own theory as to which of the six suspects committed the murder. These eventually come together in a final exciting climax during which the police each try to sell Lord Peter and the Procurator Fiscal on their own suspect, only for Wimsey to demonstrate the correctness of his own case through a dramatic reconstruction.

Five Red Herrings is definitely not my favourite Wimsey mystery. The six suspects feel insufficiently differentiated from each other, especially in the early stages and while reconstruction provides a strong ending to the book, the murderer's actual motives for the killing are so slight that although I was able to remember the who of the mystery from my last reading, I was completely unable to remember the why of it. But that's not to that there aren't things to like: Sayers does a good job of conjuring up the Galloway countryside and temperamental, artistic sensibilities of the people who've set up in Kirkcudbright and Gatehouse of Fleet.