In 1931’s The Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey is vacationing in Galloway, Scotland, where painters love to go to paint landscapes and fishermen to catch fish. The morning after a big fight with the quarrelsome drunkard Sandy Campbell at the pub, Campbell’s body is found in a stream, with a still-wet canvas nearby. It appears that Campbell fell in and drowned when he stepped back to examine his painting. However, Lord Peter determines that someone killed Campbell and created a painting that imitates Campbell’s style to create the appearance that he was working that morning. Lord Peter makes a list of six potential suspects capable of doing the crime:
1. Michael Waters, 28
2. Hugh Farren, 29
3. Matthew Gowan, 46
4. Jock Graham, 36
5. Henry Stracham, 38
6. John Ferguson, 36
As only one is the murderer, the other five are red herrings, hence the title. The title also has a double meaning because the area of Scotland where the book takes place is popular with both painters and fishermen.
For the rest of the book, the police and Lord Peter check up on each of the six, spending enormous amounts of time checking time tables on the trains and talking to everyone related to the six suspects. Most have scattered in their bohemian lifestyle, leading the police to suspect the various ones in turn. As they break the alibis of each one, the investigators must find other ways to get to the bottom of the case.
The Five Red Herrings was one of the few Sayers books that I had previously been unable to find an audio copy of. Finally I paid a great sum to get it on CD, as the U.S. version of Audible does not contain half the Lord Peter Wimsey books, despite the fact that the UK version has them all. Though I am happy to have been able to add to my collection of Sayers’s books, I was disappointed in the quality of the book. I found the many time tables to get confusing and, further, overly tedious. These details made the book hard to follow at times and rather boring, especially since when listening to a book, one can’t skim over the details. The alibis seem to involve multiple bicycles, and that gets extra confusing telling them apart too.
The other major challenge of this book is that the six suspects are so similar that they are tricky at times to distinguish from each other. Though each does have his own unique features, all serve as painters, and all have had fights with Campbell. With the six having so much in common, I found myself getting confused among them too often.
I did appreciate the characters of Lord Peter and Bunter, but I would have liked tu have seen more of Bunter and missed Wimsey’s interaction with Detective Chief Inspector Charles Parker, who makes a cameo appearance in London, but not with Lord Peter. Lord Peter remains his unique, jovial self who takes pleasure in assisting the police at detecting from his own angles. Bunter serves as the always- proper manservant, with Lord Peter’s making the statement about him that Bunter knows everything. However, I missed getting to see Bunter perform his role as Lord Peter’s detection sidekick who performs the forensics for his master.
Patrick Malahide performs the audio edition of The Five Red Herrings. It is always hard for readers to adjust to a new narrator after getting used to someone else’s performing many books in a series, so Malahide already had a challenge in following Ian Carmichael, and the great quality of that prior narrator’s work adds further to the difficulty of Malahide’s task. This was a challenge that Malahide did not meet. My biggest challenge as a listener was understanding the strength of the Scottish accent used in the recording. I understand that Sayers wrote using a Scottish dialect, offering the narrator the challenge of trying to interpret her phonetics and reproduce their sounds. Malahide does a good job of interpreting the speech and using a Scottish accent. The only problem is that he does this too well! As an American, I find the Scottish dialect used in the audio performance to be tricky to understand. Many cozy mysteries are set in Scotland, using Scottish accents, but they use softer accents in order to allow us listeners to understand more easily. Malahide would have done better to follow their example.
Out of all the books written by Dorothy L. Sayers, I like The Five Red Herrings the least. The details of all the train time tables and other issues related to breaking alibis got tiresome, and I had trouble keeping all the suspects straight. I enjoyed seeing Lord Peter and Bunter but would have liked to see even more of this delightful pair and also some of the other characters we’ve come to know well and love. I give this book three stars.
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