Red Herring

“A red herring is something that is intentionally used to mislead the readers or viewers from arriving on a solution too quick.”

The foundation block for murder mystery stories had been for many decades the element of Red Herring. A literary device every crime writer had to use one way or another to lead the viewer/reader till the end. People had seen several variations of it in Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot series, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series. The problem that writers now have is that of coming up with a new variation of diversions. Over these many years, Murder Mystery works are coming up to be of same pattern. I was watching this TV series ‘The Mentalist’ and after few episodes, I started sensing a pattern. With certain set of characters introduced, the least suspected always turned out to be the murderer. The character which got too much attention almost at all times never had anything to do with the murder. So, if I were to write a murder mystery/thriller/suspense story, I had to make sure I come up with an innovative way of leading the readers to play the guessing game. When I wrote my crime-mystery book, ‘Zahhak’s Wildest Dreams’, I was trying to reinvent Red Herring. That’s when I remembered Kiefer Sutherland’s 24. It was never about finding the murderer but they used a unique variation of Red Herring. Each season comprised of 24 episodes. They always used the first 12 episodes to divert the audience from seeing the bigger play they pull out in the next 12 episodes. For those of you who have watched 24 would know what I’m talking about. Of course, the length of the show owing to the real-time depiction of events would make the audience tiresome and the same trick pulled out again over and over in the following seasons made it all less suspenseful. But that’s a whole different issue. Anyway, as I was telling, the trick behind writing a murder/crime mystery is in the variation of Red Herring you come up with. It’s all an art of lying and misdirection; the more convincing the lie, the more exciting the end is. Can a mystery be without the element of Red Herring? I couldn’t imagine it that way. The other way out is what they call a ‘cat and mouse chase’. You can do it without introducing the murderer directly to the audience but that, in my opinion would still need some level of diversions and misleading. There are only few works that had managed to do that, for example, the Spanish movie ‘The Secret in Their Eyes’. You may want to see that movie or google it. It’s one of the finest Murder Mystery that goes without making use of conventional red herring element. The movie opens with a police officer trying to write a novel about a murder he dealt with a long time ago. The story then goes about the bureaucratic troubles he goes through to bring in the murderer and how he loses the fight eventually. It doesn’t go throws suspicion on random persons but still comes off as a good mystery. It is one of those very rare mystery movies. Nevertheless, Red Herring is still a great device to make a story more gripping and suspenseful.