The Sport of Catching Red Herrings

Red herrings swim happily about in mystery fiction pools and challenge readers to net them. FYI, the origin of the term "red herring"--in this case meaning a clue that leads mystery readers towards a false conclusion--is supposedly based on the use of a kipper (a pungent, reddish smoked fish) to train hounds, either to follow a scent despite distractions or to divert them from the correct scent. Most authors are not so obligingly obvious as Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, where he creates the red herring Bishop Aringarosa, a highly suspicious cleric, and names him for a red/pink (rosa) herring (aringa) in Italian! Apropos of the dog training origin of "red herring," Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, about a family supposedly cursed by a demonic hound, contains famous red herrings in an escaped convict and a sketchy butler. However, Agatha Christie is really the queen of red herrings. Just a few examples: In The ABC Murders, the alphabetical order of murders is a red herring planted by the killer to fool the police (and the reader), while The Moving Finger's poison pen letters are red herrings that fail to hid the murderer's true motive from the sharp-eyed Miss Marple. In Death on the Nile, when an heiress is murdered on a Nile cruise packed with suspects, Hercules Poirot uses his "little grey cells" to spot red herrings like the bad blood between the heiress's husband and jilted fiancee. Another good example is found in The Withdrawing Room by bestseller Charlotte MacLeod. The red herrings begin with Barnwell Augustus Quiffen, an obnoxious old lodger at young Sarah Keeling's Beacon Hill boardinghouse full of eccentrics. Quiffen dies suddenly by falling under a train, but a bag lady appears to tell Sarah that it was no accident, that she saw an unknown person push Quiffen to his death. Next the lodger replacing Quiffen is murdered in a random street mugging. Sarah and her friend Max Bittersohn investigate, uncovering a carefully planned crime. In more recent fiction, red herrings dart through last year's New York Times' bestseller I Let You Go, a debut novel by Clare Mackintosh. The novel begins with a grim prologue about the hit-and-run death of a 5-year-old boy in Bristol, leaving police with few clues to a crime witnessed only by the boy's distraught single mother. The story is next narrated by Jenna Gray, who has escaped to an isolated shack on the Welsh coast to try to forget her traumatic memories, while another narrative follows the police doggedly investigating. Spoiler alert: There's a big plot twist ahead! For more examples of red herrings in popular books, TV shows, movies and even video games, check out https://literaryterms.net/red-herring/