Subvert Readers’ Expectations With Red Herrings

By BookBaby author Scott McCormick
Where foreshadowing is dropping hints about what’s to come, a red herring is the opposite: dropping false hints meant to deceive the reader. Warning: spoilers ahead!


Estimated reading time: 13 minutes


In my last post, we looked at how foreshadowing can engage your readers, create suspense, and make your payoffs stronger. But any discussion of foreshadowing inevitably brings up its evil twin: the red herring.
Although most commonly associated with detective fiction, red herrings can cause misdirection and create intrigue in any genre, as well as set up a mind-bending plot twist.
But be careful: Your success or failure in implementing a red herring relies on properly understanding your readers’ expectations and not undermining the trust they have implicitly placed in you.

Table of Contents: • What is a red herring? • The Whodunnit variety • How to employ a Whodunnit red herring • The Wrong Man • The Unreliable Narrator • They’ve been dead the whole time! • The genre itself can be a red herring • You yourself can even be the red herring • I know that you know that I know that you know… • Be subtle • Make it matter!

Warning: I’ll be spoiling the following books/films: The Da Vinci Code, A Study in Scarlet, And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express, Iron Man 3, Flowers for Algernon, The Usual Suspects, Shutter Island, Mulholland Drive, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, Unbreakable, Scream, as well as Episodes VII, VIII, and IX of the Star Wars franchise. So if you haven’t read/watched those films or books, proceed with caution.
What is a red herring?
Whereas foreshadowing is dropping hints about what’s to come, a red herring is the opposite: dropping false hints meant to deceive the reader.
The Whodunnit variety
The classic red herring is found in detective fiction in which the detective and the reader alike are misled in identifying the true killer.
Red herrings are so associated with detective fiction, you can argue they are necessary to the genre; otherwise, readers will figure out the killer straightaway. In fact, murder mysteries often have multiple red herrings, with several suspects presented with valid reasons as to how and why they could be the killer.
How to employ a Whodunnit red herring
There are two classic ways to pull off a whodunnit red herring.
False Evidence
The classic way detectives solve mysteries is by finding clues. One way to lead your detective (and your readers) astray is to have the killer plant deliberately misleading evidence. This occurs in the very first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” in which the villain writes the word “RACHE” in blood on a wall. This leads Detective Lestrade to conclude that the murderer’s name was Rachel, but Holmes deduces the murderer is German (“rache” being German for revenge). In fact, they’re both wrong, as Holmes later realizes this “evidence” is a red herring.
Suspicious behavior
The other classic method to mislead your readers is to give your innocent character a secret that has nothing to do with the murder but nevertheless causes them to behave suspiciously. Perhaps they are being blackmailed into doing something shady and therefore can’t answer simple questions like “Where were you on the night of July 7th?”
One advantage of this approach is it forces you to add depth to your secondary characters, which makes your story more complex.
The Wrong Man
A nice twist on the Whodunnit herring is when the villain appears to be known to the protagonist and the audience, only for us to discover later on that they are just a patsy.
Throughout much of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, for example, Bishop Aringarosa is hinted at as being the primary antagonist of the story until he is later revealed to be nothing more than a pawn. (To anyone who knows Italian, however, this would not have come as a shock since Aringarosa is Italian for “pink herring.”)
Another, more recent, example can be found in the film Iron Man 3, in which Tony Stark faces off against a terrorist known as “The Mandarin” who televises his threats to the world. Later on, it is revealed that The Mandarin is nothing more than an actor who is utterly clueless about the crimes he is accused of committing and that the real terrorist has been hiding in plain sight.
The Unreliable Narrator
Another form of red herring comes by way of the unreliable narrator , in which we realize we can’t trust everything the narrator tells us. Sometimes we are aware that our narrator is unreliable right from the beginning, and therefore there are (usually) no red herrings to be found. This is the case in Flowers for Algernon , in which our first-person narrator, Charlie Gordon, goes from having an IQ of 68 to 185 and then, heartbreakingly, back down again to 68.
But in other stories, the unreliability of our narrator is only revealed to us later on, leading not just to a plot twist but to the realization that the entire story itself is a red herring. Such is the case when we learn the true identity of Kaizer Söze in The Usual Suspects — meaning everything we’ve seen so far has been a lie — and when we learn the mental state of Teddy Daniels in the book and film Shutter Island — which means everything we’ve read/seen so far has been a delusion.
The dream or the lie
This kind of red herring can be exhilarating: The Usual Suspects was hugely successful and is widely considered to have one of the great plot twists of all time. But it can also be frustrating. For example, Roger Ebert hated the film, saying, “To the degree that I do understand, I don’t care.” And he has a point. After all, once we realize that everything we’ve seen is a lie — essentially a film-noir take on the old “it was all just a dream” trope — what are we left with? If none of the story actually happened, then why did we waste our time?
(In writing this, I’m reminded of another film that seems to pull the rug out from under us with an unreliable-narrator reveal: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive , in which the entire film seems to have been a dream. But I would argue that Lynch gets away with it because A) his films are so dreamlike anyway, having this be an actual dream doesn’t really change anything because, B) the joy of watching Lynch films comes in relishing the experience rather than watching the plot, and C) it’s not entirely clear that the story was in fact “just a dream” after all; as that has always seemed like too simple of an explanation. I think Twin Perfect has a rather more interesting take on the whole thing. But I digress.)
They’ve been dead the whole time!
A twist on the unreliable narrator trope is when we learn that our protagonists have been dead or imaginary. These twists are generally more interesting than the “everything we just told you was a lie because our narrator is actually evil, insane, or asleep” precisely because not everything is a lie, only certain aspects of the story. And if you have set up your characters well, readers/audiences can still feel compassion for a character who’s dead (e.g., Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense ) or find the imaginary character compelling (e.g., Tyler Durden in Fight Club ).
The genre itself can be a red herring
Sometimes authors/filmmakers can exploit audience expectations just through the very nature of the genre they are working in. For example, in a horror novel, you can have spooky things happening and readers (and characters) can assume those things are of supernatural nature, but your big reveal can be that in fact it has a very ordinary explanation. In other words, the reader hasn’t actually been reading a ghost story at all.
The Orphanage pulls this trick off really well in a way that I won’t spoil because it’s a great film. Even though this kind of red herring may seem like a betrayal, it’s not really: Even though the scares wind up not being of supernatural origin, the film still delivers scares, which is why people went to see it in the first place, so it wasn’t a betrayal. The thing you won’t want to do is promise a horror novel (or a romance, etc.) and not deliver the scares (or the heat, etc.) inherent in that genre.
You yourself can even be the red herring
Audiences bring certain expectations when they buy a book written by Stephen King, Nora Roberts, James Patterson, Lee Child, or Agatha Christie. These authors could use this expectation against their readers if they chose to do so.
Consider M. Night Shaymalan’s Unbreakable . Coming off the heels of the massive hit that was The Sixth Sense , audiences were expecting yet another horror masterpiece from this new master of the genre. The movie was even marketed as a horror film (and starred Bruce Willis from The Sixth Sense ). But in the end, even though it seemed to have some horror-film trappings, Unbreakable wound up being something quite different: a superhero origin story (or what Wikipedia dubs a “psychological superhero thriller”). So with this film, the director himself (and the marketing around it) wound up being the red herring.
If you are known for writing a certain kind of book, consider using that to fool your readers into reading something that’s similar but also different. Just be careful. If audiences are expecting one thing and getting something too different, they’ll feel betrayed. ( Unbreakable had its detractors at the time for this very reason.)
I know that you know that I know that you know…
One thing I find interesting with regard to foreshadowing and red herrings is how these techniques rely on the conversational aspect of storytelling. This may seem like a weird statement. After all, storytelling seems for all the world to be a monologue delivered from the storyteller to the audience. But even before an author can start writing their tale, they have to understand their audience. This means they have to know what their readers want in a book but also what their readers know.
For example, if you’re writing a detective story, you have to assume that your book is not the first detective novel your readers have read. In fact, to write a truly successful mystery, you have to assume your readers have read as many or more mysteries as you have. They already know all the twists and turns and red herrings. Your job is to outsmart them. Come up with something new and original.
This has been true pretty much since the very dawn of mystery as a genre. We saw that red herrings appear in the very first Sherlock Holmes story. And no sooner did red herrings become a trope of the genre than authors were already subverting them.
Let’s consider two examples from Agatha Christie.
In her 1939 novel And Then There Were None, one of the characters says:
“You’ve forgotten the nursery rhyme. Don’t you see there’s a clue there?” She recited in a menacing voice: “Four little [soldier] boys going out to sea; A red herring swallowed one and then there were three.” She went on: “A red herring — that’s the vital clue. Armstrong’s not dead…”
What that character didn’t know was that this seemingly obvious red herring wound up being a meta-red herring. Armstrong really was dead.
More mystery examples
In Murder on the Orient Express, Christie exploits the mystery convention of having only one murderer. While there are a couple of actual red herrings in the book, the big twist is that most of the red herrings are not in fact real: everyone was guilty of the crime.
Maybe the epitome of stories-as-conversations came in the form of the hit film Scream. This slasher flick was itself a meta-commentary on the entire slasher film genre. It completely relied on the fact that audiences has already scene all the greats — Halloween, Friday the 13th, etc. — and therefore knew all the twists. And yet it still managed to pull off not one but two of cinema’s all-time great plot-twists.
The first was when they killed off the most famous star of the film (Drew Barrymore) in the very opening scene, thereby throwing down the gauntlet, making audiences realize they hadn’t seen nothing yet. The other big reveal was that there was not one but two killers. Although Scream was a well-made movie, today’s audiences won’t have the same relationship with it because the filmmaker-audience conversation has changed. People have seen other movies. They might not get all the references. Hell, they may have even seen one of its five sequels.
Be subtle
Except in detective fiction, where red herrings are very obvious (or at least, the reader is keenly aware that every piece of information can be a red herring), the most effective red herrings are the most subtle. The author/director is exploiting an unspoken expectation that readers have based on the tropes of the genre. By exploiting these expectations, you can catch readers off guard in a way that will feel fresh and fun. So think about the genre you’re writing in, truly examine it from the ground up, and see if there’s not something there that no one else has exploited yet.
Make it matter!
Whether you are foreshadowing or dropping a red herring into your story, there’s one thing that’s vitally important to the success of your story and that is this: Make it matter. Don’t call attention to something and then not have it pay off in some way.
In the foreshadowing article, we discussed The Empire Strikes Back as a way to successfully deploy foreshadowing. Now, let’s take a look at how not to employ foreshadowing or red herrings by examining the sequel trilogy in the Star Wars franchise (Episodes VII, VIII, and IX).
In Episode VII, our main protagonist, Rey, picks up Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber and immediately has a vision. It’s actually worth watching just to note how much screen time J.J. Abrams devoted to this.
I mean, wow, right? That was four minutes of screen time. Clearly this woman has a connection to this lightsaber. And given the intensity of this scene — and especially given Star Wars’ previous legacy of heroes and their parents — this film led to much speculation about Rey’s heritage. What she a Skywalker? A Kenobi? Something else?
In Episode VIII, however, Kylo Ren tells her “Surprise! You’re no one at all.”
One the one hand, this could have been a cool reveal, finally ditching the whole royal-blood aspect that had bogged Star Wars down by this point; but at the same time, it felt like a letdown because it rendered that four-minute vision not a piece of foreshadowing at all, but something that was worse than a red herring. It rendered it completely meaningless. All the fun fans had had speculating about that vision’s meaning had been for nothing.
Red herring lessons
The joke was on us, I guess, but not in a way that felt fun. More like a betrayal. (Yes, I do realize how bitter I’m sounding.)
Why? Because then, in Episode IX, we got yet another twist when it was revealed: “Oh no, we were just joking last movie, Rey is actually Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter! (Oh, and also: the emperor is still alive! Or a clone. Or something.) Ha! You just got double-red-herringed!”
By that point, no one cared. All the goodwill that the original sequence had earned was lost in episode VIII. It might have been possible to pull off a double-red-herring over the course of one movie (after all, And Then There Were None did it), but not over the course of three.
Now, these movies were a mess because there were too many cooks with different opinions about how the trilogy should proceed, but there are still three good lessons for you to learn from this.

Make your red herring or foreshadowing matter.
Keep it simple. Even though storytelling is a conversation and you have to consider that your readers have already read every kind of plot twist imaginable, if you try to pull off a double-or triple-red-herring, or if you include too many, you’re going to lose your audience. As fun as red herrings are, your characters are more important. Never lose sight of that.
Have fun. This one is the most important of all.


Related Posts How to Harness the Power of Foreshadowing Are YOU Absent From Your Own Story? Building Worlds That Captivate Readers Six Things You Need To Write A Book The Role Of The Unreliable Narrator This BookBaby blog article Subvert Readers’ Expectations With Red Herrings appeared first on and was stolen from BookBaby Blog .