The Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers
This was, in some ways, a bit jarring after the last Wimsey novel. Set in Galloway, it focuses on the seemingly accidental death of a painter. The police are perfectly willing to dismiss the death as an accident with little or no investigation, but Wimsey says that something in painting proves that it was murder, without explaining what the something is.
Unlike Strong Poison there’s no emotional attachment to the case for Wimsey. The victim, by all accounts, was an unpleasant person, and the six suspects are all decent people. His main motivation here isn’t to save an innocent or, it seems, even to punish the guilty, but to keep the innocent suspects from living under a cloud of suspicion. No mention is made of the fairly major changes in both Wimsey and Parker’s lives in Strong Poison, unless it was a passing mention that I missed. Unless you count Galloway being a popular place for artists at the time, there’s also no strong evidence of Sayers’s tendency to address social issues and movements of the time, or of Wimsey’s mental problems. None of this, incidentally, is to say that any of that is bad. The book seems to have been written for fun, which the foreword supports. (That, and being written because a friend wanted her to set a story there.)
Most of the book actually isn’t told from Wimsey’s point of view, and there are stretches where he’s completely absent. Instead, we spend more time in the heads of the various investigators looking into the case. For most of the book, the reader doesn’t know much more than the narrator at the time, and usually less than Wimsey does, even more so than usual. In some ways, the book is set up more to make the reader the detective than Wimsey. When theories are put forth, the only information provided is what the reader has seen given before, and the reader isn’t given anything extra to fill in the holes, or anything to help guide conclusions, just a lot of possibilities. No helping hand is offered until Wimsey reveals all. In a lot of ways, it’s probably the purest “Who done it?” of the series. So far, at least.
Unlike Strong Poison there’s no emotional attachment to the case for Wimsey. The victim, by all accounts, was an unpleasant person, and the six suspects are all decent people. His main motivation here isn’t to save an innocent or, it seems, even to punish the guilty, but to keep the innocent suspects from living under a cloud of suspicion. No mention is made of the fairly major changes in both Wimsey and Parker’s lives in Strong Poison, unless it was a passing mention that I missed. Unless you count Galloway being a popular place for artists at the time, there’s also no strong evidence of Sayers’s tendency to address social issues and movements of the time, or of Wimsey’s mental problems. None of this, incidentally, is to say that any of that is bad. The book seems to have been written for fun, which the foreword supports. (That, and being written because a friend wanted her to set a story there.)
Most of the book actually isn’t told from Wimsey’s point of view, and there are stretches where he’s completely absent. Instead, we spend more time in the heads of the various investigators looking into the case. For most of the book, the reader doesn’t know much more than the narrator at the time, and usually less than Wimsey does, even more so than usual. In some ways, the book is set up more to make the reader the detective than Wimsey. When theories are put forth, the only information provided is what the reader has seen given before, and the reader isn’t given anything extra to fill in the holes, or anything to help guide conclusions, just a lot of possibilities. No helping hand is offered until Wimsey reveals all. In a lot of ways, it’s probably the purest “Who done it?” of the series. So far, at least.