The Five Red Herrings (Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries (Audio))

Rating:
Summary: Have you heard of a good book??!!
Review: A contemporary of Dame Christie and also a female writer, Sayers' style is not unlike Christie's: a crime committed, suspects interviewed, their stories told, a "tea party" organised, during which the criminal is revealed. In this novel, the detective even offered a personal demonstration of the whole process of the crime. However, unlike Christie's Poirot or Miss Marple, Sayers' hero Lord Wimsey is not at all a remarkable character, and impresses me as rather annoying. I suppose that partly explains why Sayers never gained Dame Christie's popularity.

I remember I attacked a Carr's novel titled Blind Barber because of its excessive use of accent in writing. Now this book is really an eye opener: about 90% of the text is in illegible English, which makes reading a terrible suffering. And I really wonder how much pleasure it brings to the author to write in accented English. Thank God the story does not happen in the New World, otherwise readers would have to struggle with dozens of different accents.

Rating:
Summary: Overdone
Review: A long time fan of mystery stories, I was excited to try one by an author I had not read (and one who enjoyed such grand company in her Oxford years). However, "The Five Red Herrings" gave me much pause and I almost laid the book aside, unfinished. While I believe that Dorothy L. Sayers is a gifted writer, this novel is overdone in both style and story.

"The Five Red Herrings" begins with the mysterious death of Sandy Campbell, a Scottish artist, who was disliked by almost everyone, and had received threats from all of these people in the past, making them perfect suspects. When Lord Peter Wimsey examines the crime scene, he immediately suspects foul play (but Sayers leaves it to the reader to determine what aroused his suspicions). The police of Kirkcudbright are then set off in all directions to follow impossible leads and various red herrings involving six local artists who are all suspects to Campbell's murder. The story changes viewpoints numerous times as it follows one lead to another, and seems, at times, to go nowhere. When the reader does finally reach the conclusion and the murderer is revealed, instead of ending the story, Sayers continues on in a "fantasy sequence" of sorts, with Lord Peter Wimsey recreating the crime in order to justify his theory.

While "The Five Red Herrings" is entertaining, and manages to put the reader off the real killer, it is overdone. In trying to capture the dialect of Scotland (not to mention Scottish residents with lisps) Sayers sets an enormous challenge for her readers to understand pages of this dialect, but translates it herself in other pages. Had she been consistent, this might not have bugged me. Plus, the reader gets lost in all the true and false evidence, each artists' story, and what various witnesses have to say. Not to mention railroad timetables and the numerous theories that the policemen and detectives have put together - all of them wrong, of course, because only Lord Peter Wimsey could discover the truth. And although I rather fancied the recreation of the crime, since we'd had so many theories floating through the novel by that point, it caused the ending and confession of the murderer to seem rather more rushed than it should have.

Rating:
Summary: Dorothy Sayers Gets Hooked on Phonics
Review: As other reviewers have commented, this book has two strikes against it. First, Sayers transcribes most of the dialogue preserving the native Scottish accents of her characters. Occasionally she'll allow a character to have so thick a brogue that she'll simultaneously translate for the reader. However, it frequently takes several times through a conversation to make sure you're reading it properly. A glossary at the end of the book would have helped immensely (everybody say Imph'm). The other strike against the book is that five red herrings is a couple kippers too many. Combined with the dialectic nature of the book, there are simply too many people (suspects, police, railroad employees, servants, etc.) to keep track of at the same time.

Fortunately, Sayers doesn't get the fatal third strike. She weaves a complex web and sets master sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey in the middle of it. The obvious wit in her other novels is obscured somewhat by the accents, but enough shines through to keep the overall tone light. Bunter disappears about halfway through, but while he's on the scene he's as wonderful as ever. Tracking Farren and Wimsey's re-creation of the murderer's alibi were, for me, the high points of the story.

I'm sure Dorothy Sayers knew the risks she was taking in crafting such a detailed, complex mystery. That it doesn't entirely work for an American reader in the 21st Century probably isn't ruining her afterlife much. I've found myself hopelessly outclassed on several occasions when reading the Wimsey series, and under those circumstances I find it most helpful to get in Wimsey's Daimler with him and go along for the ride. The trip is always breathtaking (as most of Wimsey's passengers can attest), and while Lord Peter may know where he's going sooner than I do, he doesn't get there too far ahead of me. Don't let my criticisms of this book dissuade you from giving it a read; it's tough in parts, but well worth the effort.

Rating:
Summary: For Die-Hard Sayers Fans Only
Review: At her best, Dorothy Sayers was able to juggle a complex writing style, complex characters, and complex plot to tremendous effect--and such novels as GAUDY NIGHT and BUSMAN'S HONEYMOON have remained landmarks of the murder mystery genre for well over sixty years. But some of Sayers' work has a tendency toward incessant clutter--and no where is that more apparent than in this 1931 novel, which finds Lord Peter investigating a suspicious death in Scotland.

The plot of THE FIVE RED HERRINGS begins with some promise: the victim is a man despised by virtually everyone in town, so no one is greatly shocked when his body is found in a creek at the bottom of a ravine. But the story soon acquires a mechanical feeling: of six possible suspects, HALF are unexpectedly and mysteriously out of town--and tracking them down allows Sayers to indulge her love of time-tables and train schedules to the nth degree. It makes for some very dry narrative indeed. At the same time, Sayers attempts to duplicate the Scottish accent of the locals on the page itself, and the result is page after page of phonetic spellings and oddly placed aphostrophes. It is more than a little off-putting.

In spite of these drawbacks, the book does have its graces, chiefly in Sayers' knack for turning a witty phrase and in her ever-developing portrait of Lord Peter Wimsey. And to do Sayers justice, the gimmicky plot and the emphasis on time-tables, etc. is rather typical of 1920s and 1930s murder mysteries. Such books often have a great deal of period charm, but frankly, THE FIVE RED HERRINGS is not among them. Die-hard Sayers fans will certainly want to read this novel, and many will get a good degree of pleasure from it... but newcomers to Dorothy Sayers' work should start with one of her later successes, and I specifically recommend MURDER MUST ADVERTISE to them instead.

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Summary: Red Herrings or Mare's Nest?
Review: I don't have a timeline in front of me, but I believe that Dorothy L. Sayers derived her Lord Peter Wimsey character from S.S. Van Dine's Philo Vance or was it the other way around? Maybe Philo Vance came first. Like Vance, Wimsey is a dandified, man-about-town with disposable income and an in with the police, and both use phrases like "don't you know," "interestin'" and "upon my word." For some reason, both are tolerated by police when nosing into crime scenes and showing off obnoxiously. But Vance is American (the stories written in NYC mostly in the Village) and Wimsey is British through-and-through. And obviously, Sayers was influenced by Arthur Conan Doyle as well and often tries to make Wimsey as clever as Holmes (which he isn't.)

Anyway, I'm reading all the Sayers/Wimsey books right now. This is her 7th Wimsey book, I believe, and has a basically good idea where an unpopular artist in Scotland is murdered and five artists are suspects. The problem is that Sayers, who is very erudite, tries to be too clever and doesn't succeed with the smoothness that Agatha Christie had. Christie was amazing, spinning out book after book with ingenious plots and murderers who were often impossible to guess. But Sayers really isn't as gifted as a mystery writer as Christie. She's much more self-indulgent, so in spite of her intellect or maybe because of it, she runs into trouble, winding up overly anal and overly clever and bogging down her plotline. Still, her books are great fun, just the same.

On the plus side, Dorothy L. Sayers uses rich description to create a feeling of a whole world. The dialects, for me, were a plus -- adding to the authenticity of the characters and region, but then, it was overkill, because at one point she adds a character who speaks with a lisp. And he says things like "puth-thycalith" (push-cyclist) as all these other characters are using words like "noo he gaers" or whatever, so it gets really ridiculous. But all these things are part of the book's charm, too.

On the other side of the excess are the train schedules. In order to be clever, Sayers has obviously the train schedules of every conceivable route known to man in Scotland in front of her as she is working out this plot and she banters them all around as possible routes a suspect might have taken. Again, this becomes hilarious when all the characters seem to have this whole network of train schedules memorized, so they can throw them around in conversation and at one point, an entire group of people is arguing what trains go where when like a "Who's On First" routine.

But all of this analness aside, the story is still great fun in a way that Golden Age mysteries alone are. It presents a classic puzzle, a mess of suspects, a somewhat conceited detective, and tongue-in-cheek humor -- and even better, a time when trains ruled. I enjoyed it immensely. Sayers might not be my own top choice for mystery plotting, but she is still a superb writer with a great command of the language and a good sense of fun. Her work can still be savored and Wimsey remains memorable.

Rating:
Summary: Too complicated for its own good.
Review: If you're considering buying a Dorothy Sayers/Peter Wimsey mystery and haven't read any of her books before, please don't start with this one. Begin with _Busman's Honeymoon_ or _Clouds of Witness_ or _Gaudy Night_. This is a very particular little byway in the Wimsey books and doesn't give a good idea of the series as a whole.

If you're a Peter Wimsey fan already _The Five Red Herrings_ is an interesting digression, albeit an overly-complicated one. There's such a maze of accents and motives and characters and train schedules that you really have to work to follow the plot. I was frustrated enough in the beginning to want to put the book down, but once I'd persevered half way through the book I found that it started fall more comfortably in place. I have to admit that I gave up trying to follow all the nonsense with the bicycles and such, but you didn't really need to understand it to finish the book.

In summary: Not my favorite Wimsey (it pains me to give any of them three stars), nice Scottish accents, funny artist characters, and *way* too many train schedules.

Rating:
Summary: A love/hate book
Review: This book has more twists and turns of plot than five ordinary mysteries. Sayers first sets up her situation: one very unpopular artist and six other artists who hate his guts. Then the unpopular artist is found dead. Five of the others are red herrings; the sixth is a murderer. Enter Lord Peter and the police force. Half-way through the book the solution is presented to the reader, only to be blown out of the water when some tiny clue is found. So a new theory is constructed, and meets the same fate. As does the next, and the next, and the next....Some will put the book down permanently at theory 3. Others will be tortured and teased with unsatisfied interest--isn't that what a mystery is supposed to do?--and delighted with the way Sayers indirectly blasts overly-confident thinking in general. There are very few people who don't occasionally need to be reminded of the need to know a lot about something before judging it. This slipperiness is not the book's only potentially irritating characteristic, however; it also features train schedules and timetables. Fans of Freeman Wills Crofts will be in their element; others will loathe these parts of the book. I don't care for train schedules myself, in or out of a mystery, but for some reason--Sayers's skill, perhaps?--I did not find these annoying. As readers of Sayers expect, the style is, well, stylish, and Sayers does a beautiful job of putting her characters' accents on paper. And the solution is, of course, fair--no last gasp bits of information conviniently hitherto unmentioned.

Rating:
Summary: A More Complex Sayers
Review: This was the first Dorothy L. Sayers books I read and it took me FOREVER to read it. Not that it's a long book, it's just extremely confusing. One of the things I like about mysteries is trying to figure out whodunit, and with this book that was practically impossible. One of the other reviewers used the phrase "incessant clutter" and I have to agree with them.
On the other hand, the idea was good. An artist dies, and six people absolutely hate him. Five are red herrings. Also, Wimsey is a rather likeable character, so I give it two stars. Definitely not my favorite mystery book.

Rating:
Summary: Authentic in Scotland and Arctic Alaska
Review: This was the first Dorothy Sayers story I saw on television in the original series aired on Public TV. And it is one of her best.
Like all of her mysteries, it gives the reader an in-depth view of a fascinating time and place --this time Scotland. I loved all the little details, including full portraits of bicycles used by the local folks.
Also use of the Scottish language and accents. They were a bit difficult to follow the first time, but I tried again. As a resident of an Inupiat Eskimo community in the Alaskan Arctic, I know the value of local language as a very basic means of communication and an expression of cultural identity.
The book carefully weaves in a basic course in painting, and makes it a factor in description and possible solution of the murder. (I'll say no more)
So if you can't get to Arctic Alaska, or Scotland, in the near future, or take an extensive art course, buy this book. Read it at your leisure and enjoy!