Catch Of The Day:
Red Herrings. The Red Herring is a staple of crime fiction. It's so important that it even lends its name to the monthly magazine for members of the Crime Writers' Association.
The term can be traced back to 1807 when the polemicist William Cobbett told of having used the pungent smell of a smoked herring to distract hounds that were chasing a rabbit.
Its purpose is to distract or side-track the characters and/or the reader.
Red Herrings can be intentional or unintentional (a coincidence).
There are lots of variants of this narrative trick, but here are three broad categories and examples of their use:
Distraction.
Intentional: Cash and jewellery are stolen in a burglary to distract from the fact that the burglar was after an incriminating letter.
Unintentional: A murder victim’s bag is stolen – somebody found the body and decided to help themselves to their bag.
A suspect that turns out to be innocent.
Intentional: The killer hides the murder weapon in someone else’s wheelie bin.
Unintentional: The young man in a hoodie caught on CCTV running away from the crime scene was just trying to catch a bus.
A suspect that is apparently ruled out, but who turns out to be guilty.
Intentional: The suspect apparently has a cast-iron alibi, but it later transpires that the alibi is manufactured.
Unintentional: Husband was spotted on a local shop's CCTV at time of murder, so can't have killed his wife. But the timestamp on the CCTV hadn't been updated when the clocks changed.


A Red Herring is composed of two parts and the placement of these parts within the story is crucial to its effectiveness.
Part One is the setting of the Red Herring. You can place this anywhere in the story - and a novel may well have multiple red herrings that come into being throughout the tale, but the key is to ensure that it happens sufficiently early in the story, or a particular story arc, that both the characters and readers have time to think about its potential significance. To use the second example, after the discovery of a murder, the police trawl the area for CCTV and find footage of a young man in a hoodie. They immediately set about trying to identify him.
Part Two is the resolution. In order for the Red Herring to be effective, this needs to be separated from its setting by time (for the characters) and pages (for the readers). In other words, the characters need to waste time and shoe-leather pursuing this suspect, and the reader needs to have it in the back of their mind, if not the forefront, for a chunk of the narrative. Therefore, when the man in the hoodie turns out to be entirely innocent, the characters feel disappointment, and the reader shares in this.

​In a typical whodunnit, the writer will usually try and set up more than one viable suspect (who may or may not be known). Red Herrings can be a crucial part of this process.


What do you think of Red Herrings? Are there other examples of types of Red Herring that you can think of? As always, feel free to comment here or on social media.

Until next, time, Paul.

If you are a writer with a tip to share, or fancy writing a fictional interview between you and one of your characters, please feel free to email me.