Status
Call number
Library's review
Wimsey afslører Ferguson som den skyldige, men måske mere i uagtsomt manddrab end i mord.
Ganske underholdende drillerier mellem malerne og mellem politifolkene og de lokale redder bogen fra at drukne i togkøreplaner og tuber med maling.
Genres
Publication
Description
Fiction. Mystery. HTML: "Beyond question one of the most skillful mystery writers . . . offers a first rate piece of work. . . . Lord Peter Wimsey [is] at his amusing best. . . . The book is a treat" (The New York Times). The majestic landscape of the Scottish coast has attracted artists and fishermen for centuries. In the idyllic village of Kirkcudbright, every resident and visitor has 2 things in common: They either fish or paint (or do both), and they all hate Sandy Campbell. Though a fair painter, he is a rotten human being, and cannot enter a pub without raising the blood pressure of everybody there. No one weeps when he dies. Campbell's body is found at the bottom of a steep hill, and his easel stands at the top, suggesting that he took a tumble while painting. But something about the death doesn't sit right with gentleman sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. No one in Kirkcudbright liked Campbell, and 6 hated him enough to become suspects; 5 are innocent, and the other is the perpetrator of the most ingenious murder Lord Peter has ever encountered. The Five Red Herrings is the 7th book in the Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries, but you may enjoy the series by reading the books in any order. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Dorothy L. Sayers including rare images from the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College..… (more)
User reviews
Very disappointing.
By Dorothy Sayers
Since I enjoy both mystery novels and works by modern Christian authors, I was curious about the fiction of Dorothy Sayers. She is well-known for her novels featuring the detective Lord Peter Wimsey. She also wrote Christian essays and plays as well as a
The plot involves a murder that takes place in a small town in Scotland in which many artists live and work. One of them, a man named Campbell, is not well liked and quickly turns up dead. Peter Wimsey happens to be staying in the area and comes to the conclusion that Campbell was murdered. Based on the evidence at the scene, one of the local artists committed the murder. Naturally, all of the suspects have a motive as well as an alibi so it’s up to Wimsey to discover the truth.
The biggest problem I had with the novel is Sayers’ choice of phonetically spelling out the heavy Scottish accents of many of the characters. This results in lots of apostrophes and makes reading the dialogue tiresome and difficult. Since the entire novel takes place in Scotland, nearly every chapter is filled with hard to read accents. Robert Louis Stevenson did something similar in Kidnapped, but that novel was a picnic to read compared to Herrings.
Another problem is the use of train timetables as a plot device. There are endless discussions of when this train leaves this town and arrives at the next and which character could have taken which train and how long it would take to get there. It’s all ridiculously confusing. The various stories told by the suspects are lengthy and confusing. Even the real story of how the murder was committed is long and too reliant on a very specific timetable of events thus making it implausible.
Finally, I don’t know how he is portrayed in the other novels, but Wmsey comes across as an arrogant, disagreeable know-it-all. I realize that many of the great fictional detectives, like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot are arrogant, but at least I like them. I’m not sure about Wimsey yet.
I read a few reviews on Amazon.com and noted that I’m not the only one who found the accents and timetables frustrating. Apparently, Sayers wrote better mysteries than this one and I won’t let my dislike of The Five Red Herrings discourage me from reading other Sayers’ works.
At first I found the suspects hard to tell apart (all were male painters with nothing in particular for me to seize on by way of distinguishing), but I didn't worry about it, and it didn't matter, eventually they fell into place as "the one with the wife," "the one with the beard," etc.
And don't even bother trying to maintain a sense of the oft-cited train schedule--that's a joke, really, like the Californians on SNL who are experts on their local highway system. The characters in this novel are always saying things like "but he canna have made it to Strathmashie by 10:45 unless he took the 8:15 to Inverey and transferred to the Flichity train at 9:30." They know the schedule, so you don't have to. There are pages of it, and each time the characters earnestly began debate train times, I just giggle. I think that was the intended reaction.
(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).
I'll admit, this one was a bit of a slog for me. Reading before bed, it was all too easy to drift off to sleep when the police started discussing train time-tables. There were far too many trains, towns, bicycles, and suspects, and they were far too difficult to tell apart. Wimsey doesn't shine as much in this one as in previous books, and after all of the character work in Strong Poison, this detached and relatively unemotional Lord Peter is a bit of a let-down. Still, it's Lord Peter, so worth a read!
Keeps you on your toes. Very ingenous.
The Five Red
Character development isn’t all that strong, either. In the last book, we met Harriet Vane, so I would have thought that she’d at least be mentioned—not so much in this book. Lord Peter Wimsey, however, is a shadow of his former self, and he fades into the background most of the time. And Bunter, his faithful sidekick, only gets a brief scene. To be honest, I just didn’t care all that much about the mystery or who committed the crime, so much so that I bailed on this book about 300 pages in.
Ah, the Wimsey book I never liked. I like it better now, but I still think it lacks something of the other books. Wimsey is in Scotland, presumably getting away from it all (it, by now, meaning Harriet Vane,
So we end up with six suspects, all painters, and the novel goes into excruciating detail examining the movements and motives of each of them. Railway timetables and other kinds of timetable are much in evidence, making this a hard read. In addition many of the characters speak in broad Scots, and peersonally ah'm no verra guid at followin' sich a mess o' dialogue, ye ken. Worse, we even have one witness who talkth like thith - I think Sayers is indicating here that the gentleman is Jewish, as she was cheerfully bigoted after the manner of her generation.
And yet if you have the patience to wade through the Scots and the timetables and all the business about bicycles, it's a very clever mystery. Although Wimsey solves it NOT on the strength of all the miles and miles of careful reconstruction of the crime but on the strength of the aforementioned unspoken clue, which means that basically the entire middle 4/5 of the book is a RED HERRING, so yeesh.
For Wimsey devotees there are also some nice little character touches, foreshadowing the deepening of character that was to come in the other Wimsey/Vane books. So for me it was fun to encounter what almost came across as new information. And, of course, cleverly written, although the older I get the more I notice the instability of POV that haunts the books. But, you see, DLS had the trick of making us into drooling Wimsey fans, showing the power of a damn good character to make up for any amount of technical faults.
Here's a jolly example of the accentising:
The mon was deid before he got intae the burn. 'Twas the scart on the heid that did it.
Two hundred and eighty-four pages of it.
Timing and train schedules are very
This was a fun and intelligent mystery. Sir Peter is in fine form, and as he assists the police as they work through their lists of suspects, he has his eyes open for the one thing that will decide for once and for all which one of the suspects is the actual murderer. The final clue? Well, that would be telling, but it’s wise to bear in mind that both the victim and the suspects were all artists.
Subjects
Language
Original language
Original publication date
Physical description
Local notes
Omslaget viser øjenpartiet af et mandsansigt
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
Oversat fra engelsk "Five red herrings" af Henning Næsted
Dette eksemplar er meget skævt beskåret i bogblokken
Side 7: Waters var englænder. Han stammede fra en velstående proprietærfamilie og var, som alle englændere, rede til at beundre og rose alle udlændinge undtagen sydeuropæere og niggere, men, som alle englændere, kunne han ikke lide at høre dem rose sig selv.
Side 7: Det forekom ham uanstændigt at nogen på et offentligt sted pralede højt af sit eget land - det var omtrent som at udbrede sig om sin egen kones legemlige fortrin i herreværelset.
Side 7: Han lyttede med det overbærende, stive smil, som udlændinge, i øvrigt ganske med rette, opfatter som et udtryk for selvtilfredshed, der er så urokkelig, at den ikke engang behøver retfærdiggøre sig selv.
Side 11: Campbell har kun boet i Gatehouse i to somre, men han har allerede fået sat splid i hele byen. Han er en ren djævel, når han er fuld, og han er en skidt fyr, når han er ædru.
Side 18: Det var en pragtfuld dag hen mod slutningen af august, og Wimseys sjæl spandt inden i ham, mens han kørte hen ad vejen. Strækningen fra Kirkeudbright til Newton-Stewart er så smuk og så afvekslende, at det er vanskeligt at finde noget, der kan overgå den, og når så dertil kom, at himlen var fuld af strålende sol og glidende, hvide skyer, hækkende fulde af blomster, vejen glimrende anlagt, motoren i fineste stand, og udsigt til et godt lig ved vejs ende, så kunne Lord Peter ikke ønske sig nogen større lykke. Han var en mand, der holdt af enkle glæder.
Side 66: Jeg kan male i alle andre menneskers stil end min egen.
Side 67: Hver eneste af hele bundtet har en evne, jeg savner, og det er det, at de kun har en eneste tanke i hovet - stakkels dem.
Side 228: Det er noget af et mirakel, at De ikke spiser Deres farver og smører leverpostejen på lærredet.
Side 235: Han ville aldrig have vovet at tiltale den store mr. Gowan i Kirkcudbright i den tone, men han kunne ikke føle nogen respekt for denne sjuskede fremmede.
Side 261: Der er masser af mennesker, der er villige til at huske en hel del mere, end de har set.
Side 269: De minder mig om den tjener på en af kanalbådene, der sagde til en passager: De kan ikke kaste op her.
Other editions
Similar in this library
Series
Pages
DDC/MDS
813 |