The Five Red Herrings

The sixth Lord Peter Wimsey novel, published in 1931 and in the United States the same year as Suspicious Characters. It is set in Galloway, in south-west Scotland, among artists and anglers. Sandy Campbell, a talented painter and a quarrelsome drunk, is found dead in a stream beside a still-wet painting, apparently after a fall; Wimsey, on a fishing holiday nearby, sees that something is missing from the scene and concludes that the picture was painted by another hand. Six local artists had quarrelled with the dead man; one is the murderer and five are the red herrings of the title. The investigation turns on railway timetables, bicycles and alibis, and Sayers famously leaves out the clue Wimsey names to the police, inviting the reader to supply it.