Reading: Five Red Herrings

[white_hart]

When I first wanted to read Sayers, and asked for advice on where to start, several people told me to avoid Five Red Herrings, with the result that though I picked up a second-hand copy years I ended up skipping it when I was reading my way through the books (easily done, when there was more Peter/Harriet in prospect) and didn't get round to it until now, six years after reading all the rest.

Actually, I rather liked it. Not as much as the Harriet Vane books, of course, and not as much as Murder Must Advertise or the The Nine Tailors, but at least as much as any of the others. I could have done with fewer phonetically-rendered Scottish accents, but it was a nice twisty mystery with a cast of interesting and three-dimensional characters (I found myself particularly enjoying one rather stroppy potential suspect who I couldn't help seeing as a dead ringer for one of my stroppier academic colleagues). I doubt I'll return to it again and again, but I enjoyed reading it and have definitely read worse books.

On the "worse books" front, I put Five Red Herrings back on the shelf yesterday morning and, prompted by a vague thought inspired by the excellent recent Radio 4 adaptation of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit that I should read more Jeanette Winterson, picked up Written on the Body, which I had tried to read in about 1994 and couldn't get on with, thinking that maybe I'd have more success now. I got so pissed off with it I had to stop reading halfway home because I simply couldn't bear to carry on. I may have been very wrong about very many things when I was 20, but "Jeanette Winterson's writing is all style and no substance" clearly wasn't one of them. Also, it's basically literary PWP, and I actually have no interest at all in that.

Comments

[nineveh_uk]

I wasn't overwhelmed by FRH the first time I read it, but I find myself enjoying it more each time (possibly because telling everyone apart gets easier with repeated readings). I like that it includes a range of police characters, including the young constable.

[white_hart]

I did find myself occasionally flipping back to Peter's handy list of suspects, but the characters were a lot easier to tell apart than the ones in the Edmund Crispin I read last week, and there was no casual misogyny either. I did like the police characters - it felt like a plausible police investigation, which isn't always the case in detective novels.

[tree_and_leaf]

I'm slightly irritated by the bit where the narrator refuses to tell us what Peter has found that indicates murder, but I can overlook it because he does tell the Superintendent - the narrator may be playing games, but Peter isn't trying to one-up the police.

[ironed_orchid]

I find I like some Winterson books and not others. The Passion is probably my favourite, it has story and characters and history and mythic elements all rolled up together.

[white_hart]

I seem to remember enjoying The Passion, though I can't remember much about it now. Maybe I should re-read it.

[ylla.livejournal.com]

I was already thinking about Five Red Herrings earlier this week when someone else mentioned it - and I reread it quite recently. It was actually the first one I bought, in a village thrift shop, having never heard of Sayers or Wimsey, because I went 'ooh, Galloway! Ooh, a map of train lines!' - train timetables being one of my favourite things, and planning journeys to places I will probably never actually go one of my standard cheering-myself-up pastimes!

I still like it - I enjoy anything that's full of details of how people lived, and I like the muddle of characters and the way they link together and their views on each other's lives and work.

It was Gaudy Night that I bounced off hard, a few years later, having tried to read it because everyone said it was brilliant. I don't think I realised that the two things were related until I tried GN again about five years later and got on a lot better.

[white_hart]

I didn't come to Sayers until quite late, having bounced off Busman's Honeymoon as a child (not at all the right one to start with!), and I loved Guady Night when I got to it, but then again by then I was living in Oxford and working round the corner from Shrewsbury College.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

My history of reading Sayers is an odd one; I started with Thrones, Dominations when adaese was reading it in manuscript, then worked my way through the Harriet Vane ones backwards, then read the others.