I think the biggest example is in The ABC Murders. There are parallel 'criminals', so to speak, the true one, and the scapegoat, but the narrative is delivered in such a way as to make it seems that it is a given that the scapegoat character is responsible. We follow the scapegoat, and what he does, and, importantly, what he is feeling about himself, and all points to his guilt. A very complex approach, which probably, for most readers, works satisfactorily.
In her most celebrated work, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the whole narrative device misdirects the reader into looking away from the true perpetrator.
Most of the novels have red herrings in the form of characters who are given a mysterious past, or a secret, they wish to hide. Remember, in Roger Ackroyd, Poirot accuses all of the suspects of hiding something. My view is that the formula by which AC constructs her stories, is to start with a premise, someone wants something, or there is opportunity - for the latter, a good example is One, Two, Buckle My Shoe: AC thinks how easy for a dentist to kill someone who is lying prone. Then she writes in shady pasts, or suspicious characteristics for all the other characters she wants to be suspects. However, 'red herring' usually refers to a clue, a specific episode, perhaps: something which looks like a clue but which isn't. I suppose SPOILER ALERT, the judge being killed in And Then There Were None is a massive red herring. In Death on the Nile, Jacqueline SPOILER lies about seeing someone watching herself and Poirot from the bushes, and admits, later, that she was planting a red herring to keep him on his toes.In this novel, the red herring is important because SPOILER Jacqueline and Simon are not at war with one another, as it appears.
For misdirecting the reader, the fact that a police expert thinks that the poison pen letter writer is a repressed female is a significant item of misdirection of the reader.
Great answer, Griselda! I can only comment further on your last point and then add a general thought.
First, you mention the police assuming for good reasons that the writer is a female. I have noticed in several books that Agatha Christie misleads us intentionally about gender. Some examples in mind are A Murder is Announced, Lord Edgware Dies, and Mrs. McGinty. An alert reader might realize at once that he/she is being tricked, since all of a sudden a gender is being given to the suspect when nothing really has indicated it. I would consider this method of deceiving us as a red herring. More examples are welcome; I just gave the first ones I thought of.
Also, in some books, Mrs. McGinty again being an example, there is some question about one of the characters being a long lost criminal, victim, or relative of a victim. Agatha Christie will drop hints about characteristics that make multiple characters suspicious, as thought they might possibly be this person. Examples are hair color, appropriate age, vague background, and sometimes their names. This can also be considered as a red herring technique, because she is leading us to suspect certain characters while disregarding others.
I'd say "Five little pigs" is all red herrings - it could almost have been called "Five red herrings", except that that name is occupied by a Dorothy Sayers mystery story.
Yes, gender is often a misleader, as you say Tali. There is often a character dressing up as one of the opposite sex, as in Taken at the Flood, and some others I can't remember. I suppose thinking about AC's usual modus operendi, when she makes all the suspects have something suspiciously intriguing about them, it is pretty amazing to think of what she did with Murder on the Orient Express. There it is ok for us to suspect a character, the mystery revolves around something quite different! I think the suggestion that a character is mentally unstable, or has inherited the genes of someone who was is often a red herring.
Thanks folks i am loving your discussion on this, keep up the good work. I can see I will be re-reading some of them and looking at a different view of things.
For me, I think perhaps the biggest red herring was all the intrigue in The Blue Train about the gem itself, and where it came from. There was masses of bumpf about a mystery white haired figure, gem dealers who never finish a sentence, not to mention an unscrupulous continental count who is like a fairy tale character, and none of it had any real bearing on the plot. I have to say that I find exotic mystery figures tedious, and find there is a big difference between AC writing about real people, the like of which she knows, and then when she goes on about ballerinas, spies, international men of intrigue, whose lives are so unreal that they are like our modern day celebrities.
Of course, why didn't think earlier, SPOILER all the letters in The Moving Finger are red herrings, making the motive look one thing when it is something else. In ABC Murders, the map and the alphabetical order is a red herring. I know why I didn't think of them, these are red herrings planted by the villain to fool the police, not by Christie to fool the reader! Or perhaps, she kills two birds with one stone, and has us fooled by the murderer!
For me, I think perhaps the biggest red herring was all the intrigue in The Blue Train about the gem itself, and where it came from.
I agree with you that the story about the Heart of Fire jewel was too distracting, if I am reading your comment right. It does tie in with the story, but in this case, Griselda is right. If we focus on that instead of the real mystery, then we are not really trying to solve the murder in the way that we would expect to be doing. Of course, Agatha Christie is trying to fool us (and the police) but Blue Train stands out as a good example of a plot that could have been better written to avoid the two stories competing for our attention. It might have been two different books, there is so much thought and detail put into each crime. The Heart of Fire story has its own separate cast of characters, and it gets to be too much action going on for a 200 page mystery.
I agree entirely, Madame Doyle, with how you insightfully phrase the dilemma. Additionally, Tali did point out to us some months ago that, according to AC biographical content, AC was unhappy at the time she wrote this work, and didn't feel very satisfied with how it came out. Perhaps her low spirits account for why the different threads don't go together well. For me, this work is a bit like those early ones written before she settled on her humdrum middle class fraternity for characters - some distressed and in straitened means, some well-padded against social decline and poverty - all of whom seem real. Maybe she really liked her heroine from The Blue Train by the end of the novel, and maybe she liked the idea of the little village she had been living in, and decided she's stick, in future, with humdrum experience. She maybe got to realise that she wasn't that great at bringing to life insanely rich and outlandish characters, or, maybe, life experience gave her opportunity to meet and study at close quarters characters like Linnet Ridgeway in Death on the Nile. I imagine AC, more prosperous now, feted for her success, on a cruise up the Nile, looking at passengers over long idle hours and having time to know them to their core. I know which modern day star I would like to play Linnet in a new movie: she isn't strictly speaking an actress - and I wouldn't be impolite and say who I mean - but, boy, does she seem to be like her in terms of drive, ambition, shrewdness, beauty and desire to have life just as she wants it.
It's true that the books with characters who are less glamorous and flashy are more appealing somehow. It's possible that we can understand them better and try to figure out what is going on. Also, the more we can like them, the more easily we will dismiss them as suspicious characters. We are more likely to believe their stories, I mean, because they are credible and not so outrageous. I also believe there is a natural inclination to dislike the kinds of characters you mention, Griselda, who are full of intrigue or extremely privileged. It seems that Agatha Christie does express a sort of contempt for Linnet Ridgeway in the way she ends the book while mirroring the beginning. The humdrum characters who disliked her in the beginning are quick to forget about her once they fold their newspapers. Nobody really cares that she is dead. She was just news, like the person you mention, whom I am pretty sure I can identify. I don't know too many celebrities, but you can't miss her.
AC does express that toughness and realism, doesn't she, about death, and it shows, I think, an uncompromising search for truth, such as Poirot has. I would slightly flinch, myself, from letting myself see, on a conscious level, that side of life, that humanity is less important than its vanity tells itself it is, but she won't stop until she has laid bare what she knows. I think the same ruthless insight was missing from the earlier works, and she had it more so, maybe,towards the end of her career, but she didn't convey it effectively, because she was a venerable old lady, and her writing was not as sharp as it had been.
Comments
In her most celebrated work, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the whole narrative device misdirects the reader into looking away from the true perpetrator.
Most of the novels have red herrings in the form of characters who are given a mysterious past, or a secret, they wish to hide. Remember, in Roger Ackroyd, Poirot accuses all of the suspects of hiding something. My view is that the formula by which AC constructs her stories, is to start with a premise, someone wants something, or there is opportunity - for the latter, a good example is One, Two, Buckle My Shoe: AC thinks how easy for a dentist to kill someone who is lying prone. Then she writes in shady pasts, or suspicious characteristics for all the other characters she wants to be suspects. However, 'red herring' usually refers to a clue, a specific episode, perhaps: something which looks like a clue but which isn't. I suppose SPOILER ALERT, the judge being killed in And Then There Were None is a massive red herring. In Death on the Nile, Jacqueline SPOILER lies about seeing someone watching herself and Poirot from the bushes, and admits, later, that she was planting a red herring to keep him on his toes.In this novel, the red herring is important because SPOILER Jacqueline and Simon are not at war with one another, as it appears.
For misdirecting the reader, the fact that a police expert thinks that the poison pen letter writer is a repressed female is a significant item of misdirection of the reader.
First, you mention the police assuming for good reasons that the writer is a female. I have noticed in several books that Agatha Christie misleads us intentionally about gender. Some examples in mind are A Murder is Announced, Lord Edgware Dies, and Mrs. McGinty. An alert reader might realize at once that he/she is being tricked, since all of a sudden a gender is being given to the suspect when nothing really has indicated it. I would consider this method of deceiving us as a red herring. More examples are welcome; I just gave the first ones I thought of.
Also, in some books, Mrs. McGinty again being an example, there is some question about one of the characters being a long lost criminal, victim, or relative of a victim. Agatha Christie will drop hints about characteristics that make multiple characters suspicious, as thought they might possibly be this person. Examples are hair color, appropriate age, vague background, and sometimes their names. This can also be considered as a red herring technique, because she is leading us to suspect certain characters while disregarding others.