Dorothy L. Sayers: The Five Red Herrings
Sep. 28th, 2024 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI wasn't planning to reread Five Red Herrings when we first visited Kirkcudbright. There were two reasons for this, and neither of them is sound.
The first was that I thought the book was not set in Kirkcudbright, but in nearby Gatehouse of Fleet, which we did not plan to visit. This misapprehension didn't survive that first trip. As I noted at the tme, Kirkudbright is proud to claim Sayers for its own, and the opening line of The Five Red Herrings, "If one lives in Galloway, one either fishes or paints," is much quoted around the town. I said then: But that's for another time, and this is that time. When I returned home I read the book, and discovered that though it moves between Kirkudbright and Gatehouse, (sometimes, with Lord Peter at the wheel, at alarmingly high speed) a number of locations in Kirkcudbright easily recognised, disguised thinly if at all. What's more,my edition comes with a map on its endpapers, which ranges across the whole of the area (the body is actually found well beyond Wigtown).
It was, admittedly, in Gatehouse of Fleet this April that I saw the artwork (a challenge to identify a number of Scottish books and authors) of which the panel on the right is a detail; and it was in Gatehouse that I picked up the leaflet about Galloway locations in The Five Red Herrings. This told me that the McClellan Arms, where Lord Peter drinks, and witnesses a dispute with the victim of the murder, is based on The Selkirk Arms, where I was staying; and that Bluegate Close, where Lord Peter is renting a studio, is Greengate Close (well, I could probably have worked that out). The text often makes it possible to follow his lordship around the town: "Wimsey made his way ast the Castle, up the little flight of steps and over the green by the harbour. The tide was dropping, and the long mud-flats of the estuary glimmered faintly in the pale midsummer night..." Yes, I've been there, and have noticed the expanse of mud at low tide. Other identifications are less certain. Of all the artists in Kirkcudbright, there is one, Gowan, whom Wimsey notes as "wealthy", who lives in a fine house (with a "handsome, panelled entrance-hall"): inevitably, I picture this as Broughton House, the home of E A Hornel. I don't suggest that Gowan is based on Hornel, but he lives in his house. Sayers spins a neat sub-plot from Gowan's magnificent beard, but it also serves to distinguish him from the clean-shaven Hornel (who was rather older than most of the artists identified as Sayers's models in this interesting post, but who was still alive at the time of publication). I was delighted to discover that Charles Oppenheimer, for whose work I have already expressed a particular enthusiasm, was Sayers's next door neighbour in Kirkcudbright, and that she gave his studio to Waters, one of her red herrings. (Did I read that she had observed Oppenheimer dropping a tube of paint into his pocket, or did I dream it? I can't now find that reference.)
The other reason why I did not take The Five Red Herrings to Galloway as holiday reading is that I think of it as the weakling of the litter, the Peter Wimsey mystery that doesn't really work. All that complicated messing about with train timetables and ticket punches, all those alibis that oblige the reader to focus on who was - or could have beeen - where, when: I never managed to keep up with this, and always resorted to ignoring it, and following other clues. And this is true. But how had I managed to miss that it is not a bug, it's a feature?
For Martin Edwards, the book stands apart from the other mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, because Sayers deliberately set out to write "a pure puzzle story". Needled by criticism of the earlier Strong Poison that it was too easy to spot the murderer, she told her publisher "Personally, I feel that it is only when the identity of the murderer is obvious that the reader can really concentrate on the question (much the most interesting) How did he do it?" Nonetheless, in The Five Red Herrings she claimed to be offering her readers the spot-the-murderer challenge they claimed to want.
Up to a point: but she does this by offering the reader an abundance of suspects, all of whom have been heard to threaten the victim - with more or less seriousness, and perhaps in the heat of the moment, but plausibly enough to make them believable culprits within the conventions of detective fiction. My memory of the book wasn't entirely faulty: it doesn't have the emotional heft of the great Wimsey novels. This is Sayers having fun: you want a conventional detectve puzzle? Then let's play with the conventions of the detective puzzle... Lord Peter says as much: "One of these days I shall write a book in which two men are seen to walk down a cul-de-sac, and there is a shot and one man is found murdered and the other runs away with a gun in his hand, and after twenty chapters stinking with red herrings, it turns out that the man with the gun did it after all." Sayers looks straight at the camera and tells the viewer what she is doing, and I was so charmed by it that I misremembered the context, and thought Wimsey was talking to the police. It was only as I paged back and forth through the book looking for the quotation, that I realised he was actually talking to Ferguson, one of his suspects, who is quite a crime fiction enthusiast, and it is on his shelves that Wimsey finds - or rather, fails to find, having spotted it there earlier, J.J. Connington’s The Two Tickets Puzzle. This real - and, it seems, easily obtainable - novel, suggests the answer to The Five Red Herrings's trickier than usual 'How did he do it?'. It contains, as Lord Peter explains, a description of how a railway ticket can be altered to mislead about the journey taken - though Sayers goes one better by requiring her culprit to counterfeit the more complex marks used by the Scottish railways.
For better or for worse, then, The Five Red Herrings shows its genre fiction credentials by engaging in conversation with and about other works of genre fiction. People compare events to those of a novel, or reject compareisons to "the very worst tradition of the lowest style of detective fiction." I felt that Sayers was too busy having fun to worry about whether her narrative is believable. There are, as I've said, identifiable locations; and there are individual scenes which feel three-dimensional. But when the entire investigative team - from the local constable to the Fiscal homself, not excluding the Chief Constable - take turns at concocting a solutions to the mystery (each of which is neatly demolished by his Lordship) ot's ompossible not to feel that some sort of game is being played. Which is a criticism often levelled at detective fiction, that entertainment is being spun out of the very unpleasant matter of murder.
Does The Five Red Herrings side-step this accusation by making the victim such an unpleasant person, a bit of a pantomime villain? There is a price for the credibility of those multiple suspects: someone who so many people want to murder gains less of the reader's sympathy. This makes it easier to treat the pursuit as a game, but the reader ought to want the culprit to be caught! Yet, as Wimsey points out very early in the case (Chapter II ends with Wimsey agreeing that if he identifies the murderer, he will tell the police), "...ten to one he'll be some bloke I know and like much better than Campbell. Still, it doesn't do to murder people, however offinsive." There's something genuine going on here...
Anything else I might say gets tangled up in revelations about the solution of the puzzle: and while I'm pretty thick-skinned about spoilers, you have to draw the line somewhere. Besides, this is quite long enough already.
The first was that I thought the book was not set in Kirkcudbright, but in nearby Gatehouse of Fleet, which we did not plan to visit. This misapprehension didn't survive that first trip. As I noted at the tme, Kirkudbright is proud to claim Sayers for its own, and the opening line of The Five Red Herrings, "If one lives in Galloway, one either fishes or paints," is much quoted around the town. I said then: But that's for another time, and this is that time. When I returned home I read the book, and discovered that though it moves between Kirkudbright and Gatehouse, (sometimes, with Lord Peter at the wheel, at alarmingly high speed) a number of locations in Kirkcudbright easily recognised, disguised thinly if at all. What's more,my edition comes with a map on its endpapers, which ranges across the whole of the area (the body is actually found well beyond Wigtown).
It was, admittedly, in Gatehouse of Fleet this April that I saw the artwork (a challenge to identify a number of Scottish books and authors) of which the panel on the right is a detail; and it was in Gatehouse that I picked up the leaflet about Galloway locations in The Five Red Herrings. This told me that the McClellan Arms, where Lord Peter drinks, and witnesses a dispute with the victim of the murder, is based on The Selkirk Arms, where I was staying; and that Bluegate Close, where Lord Peter is renting a studio, is Greengate Close (well, I could probably have worked that out). The text often makes it possible to follow his lordship around the town: "Wimsey made his way ast the Castle, up the little flight of steps and over the green by the harbour. The tide was dropping, and the long mud-flats of the estuary glimmered faintly in the pale midsummer night..." Yes, I've been there, and have noticed the expanse of mud at low tide. Other identifications are less certain. Of all the artists in Kirkcudbright, there is one, Gowan, whom Wimsey notes as "wealthy", who lives in a fine house (with a "handsome, panelled entrance-hall"): inevitably, I picture this as Broughton House, the home of E A Hornel. I don't suggest that Gowan is based on Hornel, but he lives in his house. Sayers spins a neat sub-plot from Gowan's magnificent beard, but it also serves to distinguish him from the clean-shaven Hornel (who was rather older than most of the artists identified as Sayers's models in this interesting post, but who was still alive at the time of publication). I was delighted to discover that Charles Oppenheimer, for whose work I have already expressed a particular enthusiasm, was Sayers's next door neighbour in Kirkcudbright, and that she gave his studio to Waters, one of her red herrings. (Did I read that she had observed Oppenheimer dropping a tube of paint into his pocket, or did I dream it? I can't now find that reference.)
The other reason why I did not take The Five Red Herrings to Galloway as holiday reading is that I think of it as the weakling of the litter, the Peter Wimsey mystery that doesn't really work. All that complicated messing about with train timetables and ticket punches, all those alibis that oblige the reader to focus on who was - or could have beeen - where, when: I never managed to keep up with this, and always resorted to ignoring it, and following other clues. And this is true. But how had I managed to miss that it is not a bug, it's a feature?
For Martin Edwards, the book stands apart from the other mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, because Sayers deliberately set out to write "a pure puzzle story". Needled by criticism of the earlier Strong Poison that it was too easy to spot the murderer, she told her publisher "Personally, I feel that it is only when the identity of the murderer is obvious that the reader can really concentrate on the question (much the most interesting) How did he do it?" Nonetheless, in The Five Red Herrings she claimed to be offering her readers the spot-the-murderer challenge they claimed to want.
Up to a point: but she does this by offering the reader an abundance of suspects, all of whom have been heard to threaten the victim - with more or less seriousness, and perhaps in the heat of the moment, but plausibly enough to make them believable culprits within the conventions of detective fiction. My memory of the book wasn't entirely faulty: it doesn't have the emotional heft of the great Wimsey novels. This is Sayers having fun: you want a conventional detectve puzzle? Then let's play with the conventions of the detective puzzle... Lord Peter says as much: "One of these days I shall write a book in which two men are seen to walk down a cul-de-sac, and there is a shot and one man is found murdered and the other runs away with a gun in his hand, and after twenty chapters stinking with red herrings, it turns out that the man with the gun did it after all." Sayers looks straight at the camera and tells the viewer what she is doing, and I was so charmed by it that I misremembered the context, and thought Wimsey was talking to the police. It was only as I paged back and forth through the book looking for the quotation, that I realised he was actually talking to Ferguson, one of his suspects, who is quite a crime fiction enthusiast, and it is on his shelves that Wimsey finds - or rather, fails to find, having spotted it there earlier, J.J. Connington’s The Two Tickets Puzzle. This real - and, it seems, easily obtainable - novel, suggests the answer to The Five Red Herrings's trickier than usual 'How did he do it?'. It contains, as Lord Peter explains, a description of how a railway ticket can be altered to mislead about the journey taken - though Sayers goes one better by requiring her culprit to counterfeit the more complex marks used by the Scottish railways.
For better or for worse, then, The Five Red Herrings shows its genre fiction credentials by engaging in conversation with and about other works of genre fiction. People compare events to those of a novel, or reject compareisons to "the very worst tradition of the lowest style of detective fiction." I felt that Sayers was too busy having fun to worry about whether her narrative is believable. There are, as I've said, identifiable locations; and there are individual scenes which feel three-dimensional. But when the entire investigative team - from the local constable to the Fiscal homself, not excluding the Chief Constable - take turns at concocting a solutions to the mystery (each of which is neatly demolished by his Lordship) ot's ompossible not to feel that some sort of game is being played. Which is a criticism often levelled at detective fiction, that entertainment is being spun out of the very unpleasant matter of murder.
Does The Five Red Herrings side-step this accusation by making the victim such an unpleasant person, a bit of a pantomime villain? There is a price for the credibility of those multiple suspects: someone who so many people want to murder gains less of the reader's sympathy. This makes it easier to treat the pursuit as a game, but the reader ought to want the culprit to be caught! Yet, as Wimsey points out very early in the case (Chapter II ends with Wimsey agreeing that if he identifies the murderer, he will tell the police), "...ten to one he'll be some bloke I know and like much better than Campbell. Still, it doesn't do to murder people, however offinsive." There's something genuine going on here...
Anything else I might say gets tangled up in revelations about the solution of the puzzle: and while I'm pretty thick-skinned about spoilers, you have to draw the line somewhere. Besides, this is quite long enough already.
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Date: 2024-10-04 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-05 10:27 am (UTC)