Red Herrings

Simon Bognor #8

by Tim Heald

Simon Bognor takes a holiday from the Board of Trade to visit the village of Herring St George and observe the ancient custom of the Popinjay Clout -- a colorful mix of food, drink and a bit of longbow shooting. All is going well until the VAT inspector is discovered pinned to a tree by arrows.

A character in this novel is Sir Nimrod Herring, a name Heald found on a headstone in the Civil War cemetery in Richmond Virginia but which many critics thought impossibly far-fetched. This is a sort of pastiche of the traditional
Golden Age whodunnit except that the traditional English village has been updated to the second half of the
twentieth century - with disastrous results.

181 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Tim Heald (b. 1944) is a journalist and author of mysteries. Born in Dorchester, England, he studied modern history at Oxford before becoming a reporter and columnist for the Sunday Times. He began writing novels in the early 1970s, starting with Unbecoming Habits (1973), which introduced Simon Bognor, a defiantly lazy investigator for the British Board of Trade. Heald followed Bognor through nine more novels, including Murder at Moose Jaw (1981) and Business Unusual (1989) before taking a two-decade break from the series, which returned in 2011 with Death in the Opening Chapter.

Reviews

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whew! What an ending!

I like the all-Oxford-together stuff.

[Belinda Avdek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Red Herrings is the perfect title to this book. Not only in name sake for the village and some people but every twist leads to a new suspect and a red herring. Very good conclusion to this mystery.