Review: Five Red Herrings

Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The problem with this mystery story is that it's so full of its own machinery there's hardly room for anything else.

By "machinery" I mean the things that make it a mystery: suspects, clues, theories, alibis, evidence. The trouble is that there are six suspects (the actual murderer and the five red herrings of the title), and they're not very distinct from each other, so I had trouble keeping them straight, and the murderer is one of the ones who's even less distinct than some of the others. And all of them have some form of alibi, but several of them coincidentally and suspiciously left the village right after the crime was committed, and there are clues strewn hither and yon, and a lot of page time is spent discussing, in great detail, theories of how the crime could have been committed by any one of them. So when I finally got to the part where we find out which of them it was, and how it was done, I felt more relief that the book was nearly over than anything else.

It's unfortunate, because the best parts of a Dorothy L. Sayers book are usually the parts that aren't the mystery, and this one has hardly any of those. There's no Harriet Vane, no Miss Climpson, no Dowager Duchess, and only a couple of female characters at all, who play very minor roles. It feels much more like a Freeman Wills Crofts book than a Dorothy L. Sayers book, and that's not a compliment. It's well enough done of its type, but it's not what I was looking for from this author.

It's well enough executed that it still makes my recommendation list for 2024, but in the lowest tier.

I read a large print edition, in which the typesetter is careless with quotation marks and makes basically all the possible errors with them - not closing them, putting them in where they shouldn't be (both at the start of a sentence that isn't a quotation and at the end of some paragraphs where the same speaker continues in the next paragraph), and using the wrong one (double instead of single) for a quotation within a quotation. There are a few other minor typos as well.

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