Five Red Herrings, by Dorothy L Sayers

A few months ago I started reading Five Red Herrings, by Dorothy L Sayers (this one would be book # 6 in the Lord Peter Wimsey series), but I couldn't get into it. Since I wanted to read the series in order, anyway, I just left it aside for a while.

The body was on the pointed rocks alongside the stream.The artist might have fallen from the cliff where he was painting, but there are too many suspicious elements -- particularly the medical evidence that proves he'd been dead nearly half a day, though eyewitnesses had seen him alive a scant hour earlier. And then there are the six prime suspects -- all of them artists, all of whom wished him dead. Five are red herrings, but one has created a masterpiece of murder that baffles everyone, including Lord Peter Wimsey.

Five Red Herrings is not bad, really, but it's definitely the weakest Sayers I've read so far. A C.

I'm not surprised I got stuck the first time I tried reading it, since the whole first half of the book was pretty hard going. The mystery was interesting, but two things kept bogging me down.

First, Sayers' insistence on writing dialogue phonetically. Anyone with the slightest accent gets this treatment with her. Usually it's only a working class character or two, so it's not much bother, but here we have a book set in Scotland, and thus full of Scottish characters, all of whom have all their words rendered exactly as they would have been pronounce, according to the author. This drove me mad. I had to resort to reading paragraphs out loud to get a grip on what was said. It got a bit better in the second half of the book, both because there was less of it and because I'd got a bit used to it, but I still get irritated just thinking about it.

The second reason I had a hard time was the damned train schedules and Sayers fascination with them. I tried to keep track of that stuff, but at one point I gave up. Enough. It also didn't help that the setting was a real place, and that the little map at the beginning was a dud, pretty impossible to read, so I never could get a handle on exactly who was where and what they would have to go past to get somewhere else. Thankfully, also after the first half, there was a bit less of this.

So we've got a first half which was almost unreadable and a second half that was pretty ok. To tell the truth, if I hadn't been trying to read the whole series in order, I would have given up for good on this one before it got better. LOL, maybe I should have: no mention of Harriet here! ;-)