The Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers

The artists that Sayers met were Charles Oppenheimer, E A Taylor, David Sassoon, Hamish Paterson, A R Sturrock and Christian Jane Ferguson all of whom are described below. Mac introduced Sayers to several of his artist friends during their visits and even rented a house next-door to the painter Charles Oppenheimer in Kirkcudbright High Street. These two towns had thriving artistic communities. Dorothy Sayers and her husband, Mac Fleming, a keen painter, visited Gatehouse of Fleet and nearby Kirkcudbright many times in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The book is set in Dumfries and Galloway, SW Scotland. I gleaned most of the following information from the Gatehouse of Fleet website.

Artists that Dorothy Sayers met on her trips to Galloway But you know better than anybody that none of the people are in the least like the real people…” In spite of this, I suspect that she used some aspects of the painting styles of the artists she met. She says as much in the foreword of the book which is written as a letter to Joe Dignam, landlord of the Anworth Arms hotel (now the Ship Inn): “All the places are real places and all the trains are real trains, and all the landscapes are correct, except that I have run up a few new houses here and there. Of course, Sayers did not model any of her characters on one particular real person. I became interested to find out what artists Sayers might have met, what their paintings were like, and about the locations in the book (it is set in Scotland which makes it even more interesting for me!) I thought it would be fun to make some comparisons between the paintings and techniques of the real artists she met and the ones described in the book. Sayers must have done a fair amount of background research for the book because it includes fascinating details that only someone familiar with painting and painters would know. To solve this complex puzzle, Wimsey has to study the painting techniques and art materials of all seven painters (as well as tracking their whereabouts around the time of the murder, when most of them had gone missing). One of the six suspect painters murdered a painter victim the other five suspects are, of course, the ‘red herrings’. What particularly drew me to this book is that it features a murder victim and six suspects who are all painters. In 1931 Sayers published a Wimsey mystery called Five Red Herrings. Sayers (1893 – 1957) who created the detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. Five Red Herrings Cover of the 2016 Hodder and Stoughton paperback.

The Five Red Herrings by Dorothy L. Sayers