What Is a Red Herring in Fiction? How to Write Misleading Clues

What is a red herring?

In detective and mystery fiction, a red herring is a clue that leads the reader (and often the detective) toward the wrong suspect, the wrong motive or the wrong time. Logic has a fallacy of the same name: steering an argument toward an irrelevant point. This article deals only with the fiction technique.

The core of the technique fits in one sentence: a red herring is not a lie. The detail in the scene is true; what is false is the conclusion the reader draws from it. That distinction separates the technique from cheating.

Where does the term come from?

In the 14 February 1807 issue of his Political Register, the English journalist William Cobbett criticised the London press over false reports of Napoleon's defeat. Along the way he told a story from his boyhood: he said he had once thrown hounds off the trail of a hare with the smell of a smoked herring. According to the etymologist Michael Quinion's 2008 account, the Oxford English Dictionary and the researcher Robert Scott Ross trace the figurative sense to this piece. Quinion notes that Cobbett's story was probably fictional, and that the popular "hound training" explanation rests on weak ground.

In other words, the best-known origin story of the term has itself led readers to the wrong place.

Barthes: the snare, equivocation and delay

In S/Z, published in 1970, Roland Barthes breaks Balzac's story "Sarrasine" into five codes. One of them is the hermeneutic code, which concerns the questions a text raises and their answers. Within it, Barthes names the moves that delay the answer: the snare (a deliberate evasion of the truth), equivocation (a mixture of snare and truth), jamming, the suspended answer and the partial answer.

In this classification a red herring is a snare or an equivocation. Within Barthes's framework these moves do not remove the answer; they postpone it, so the reader reaches the answer at the end rather than along the way. One note: Barthes's codes are a reading tool, not a method for measuring what readers feel.

At a glance: the red herring and its neighbours

Alfred Hitchcock explains the term MacGuffin in his long interview with François Truffaut. Dramatic irony is the reverse of the red herring: one puts the reader ahead of the character, the other walks the reader down the wrong path together with the character. For more, see the article on dramatic irony.

Does it contradict Chekhov's gun?

In a letter of 1 November 1889 to the young writer Aleksandr Lazarev (Gruzinsky), Chekhov expresses the idea that a gun placed on stage should be fired at some point. The principle is known as Chekhov's gun, and at first sight it seems to clash with the red herring: isn't a red herring a gun that never fires?

It is not. A well-built red herring fires too, just not in the direction the reader expects. The suspect's muddy shoe is explained in the end; it explains something, only not the murder. The real problem is a red herring left unexplained. Then the reader takes it not as misdirection but as a loose end the writer forgot. In short: a red herring turns the barrel of Chekhov's gun in another direction; it does not take the gun off the wall.

Fair play: misleading without hiding the clue

Two lists of rules were written in the golden age of detective fiction. In the first of the twenty rules he published in 1928, S. S. Van Dine says the reader must have an equal opportunity with the detective to solve the mystery. In the eighth of his ten rules, dated 1929, Ronald Knox writes that the detective must not reach a conclusion through a clue the reader has not been shown.

The red herring works inside these rules. The clue is not hidden; the light is pointed at the wrong place. The difference is small but decisive: in a fair-play violation the reader never had the information needed for the solution; with a red herring the information is there, but the reader's attention is on another detail. How a true clue is placed through physical detail was covered in the article on fair-play clues in detective fiction; this article asks the same question from the other side: how is a false lead placed?

From the Objective Projection perspective: who is doing the misleading?

Micro Focus: the close-up adds weight

Micro Focus, one of the four working rules of Objective Projection, is the narrative's pull of attention onto a small, concrete detail. When the narrative stops on an object, the reader gives that object weight. A red herring is often exactly this: a shoe held in close-up, a burnt match, a curtain being drawn. The technique gives the close-up to the misleading detail and places the true clue inside an ordinary list of objects.

Emotion Embargo: the judgement sentence comes back

When the narrator writes "Kerem was nervous" or "he looked guilty," the narrator does the steering; the reader inherits a ready-made judgement. When the solution arrives, that sentence comes back to the narrator: either the narrator was wrong or the narrator lied to the reader. A physical detail stays open to two explanations and remains true after the solution. This article's suggestion follows from that: build the red herring not with a judgement but with an object open to two readings.

The limit: whose mistake is it?

This is not a ban. In first-person narration, or narration tied to a single character's view, the sentence "I was sure Kerem was lying" is that character's mistake and a legitimate red herring. The reader knows the one who is wrong is the character. So the test is not the type of sentence but whose mistake it is. The topic was also covered in the articles on the unreliable narrator and point of view. That readers may feel cheated when the judgement of a narrator built as reliable turns out to mislead is an assumption; it has not been tested.

Objective Projection's parameters guide the writing but do not enter the text as numbers; the Output Layer principle applies to the example below as well: the scene has no degrees, metres or seconds, only visible objects.

Example: the same scene twice

The scene below was written for this article; it is not taken from any work. The pharmacist Halil Bey is found dead in his shop at closing time. His nephew Kerem enters the scene.

Telling version:

When Halil Bey's body was found, his nephew Kerem was extremely tense. His guilt was obvious in everything he did; he was fearfully trying to hide the mud on his shoes.

Showing version:

The shutter was pulled halfway down. Two tea glasses stood behind the counter; sugar had settled at the bottom of one, the other had been rinsed and turned upside down. Next to Halil Bey's ledger lay an unopened box of sweetener. Kerem stopped at the threshold. Red soil had dried on the toes of his shoes. At the foot of the fig tree in the back garden the earth had been freshly dug. Kerem drew his left foot behind his right. Under the counter, in a cardboard box, sat a half-full food bowl and a collar.

What is happening in the scene?

• The red herring: the dried soil, the dug-up patch and Kerem drawing his foot back. All three are true. The narrative gives each of them a sentence of its own.
• The innocent explanation is in the scene: the food bowl and the collar. In a later chapter it turns out that Kerem buried the shop's cat under the fig tree that night. When the reader learns this, they see that the explanation was already there in the first scene.
• A gesture with two readings: Kerem drawing his foot back could be hiding, or the habit of not stepping onto a clean floor in muddy shoes. The narrative does not say which.
• The true clue: the two glasses. Halil Bey was not alone that evening, and his visitor took sugar in their tea. This detail gets no close-up; it is given in an ordinary sentence inside a list of objects.

In the telling version the narrator does the misleading: when the solution comes, "his guilt was obvious in everything he did" returns as the narrator's error. In the showing version the reader's own inference does the misleading; after the solution, every sentence in the scene is still true.

How to write a red herring

1. Write the real solution first, then the false path. The false path is built against the truth.
2. Build the false path with a true detail. Not false information, but true information that can be misread.
3. Put the innocent explanation in the scene too, in the same scene or earlier. When the reader looks back, they should be able to find it.
4. Give the close-up to the misleading detail and the list to the true one. How attention is distributed steers the reader without hiding the clue.
5. Do not let the narrator write the judgement. If a character voices the suspicion, let the mistake belong to that character.
6. Do not forget the payoff. Every red herring is explained in the end; a detail left unexplained is not misdirection, it is a gap.

To see the details of your own story and their payoffs in one list, the Micro Focus Tracker offers a "misleading detail" type and flags red herrings that have no payoff written yet. The other tools are on the Objective Projection Tools page.

What the doctrine cannot say here

• It cannot say when a reader facing a red herring feels cheated and when they feel surprised. There is no reader data on this.
• It cannot say how many red herrings are too many in a story; no such threshold is proposed.
• It cannot say that the "two explanations" suggestion works better than writing in which the narrator names the suspicion. It is a writing suggestion, not a tested finding.
• It cannot say how a misleading detail is read outside detective fiction, for example in the literary novel.
• It does not give any work or film a score, value or measurement.

Limitations

This article rests on a single original example scene and on secondary sources in narrative theory. The example scene has not been tested with readers; it is not known which readers it misleads. Barthes's classification is used as a reading framework; it is not a measuring instrument. Because sources disagree about where Knox's ten rules first appeared, only the year is given in the references. The article's relation to the method can be seen in Levent Bulut's knowledge graph, and his registered works on the Levent Bulut corpus page.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a red herring in fiction?

A red herring is a clue in detective and mystery fiction that leads the reader toward the wrong suspect, motive or time. The detail in the scene is true; what is false is the conclusion the reader draws from it.

Where does the term "red herring" come from?

According to etymological research, the figurative sense goes back to William Cobbett's piece in the Political Register of 14 February 1807. Cobbett tells a probably fictional story of throwing hounds off a trail with a smoked herring; the popular "hound training" explanation rests on weak ground.

Does a red herring contradict Chekhov's gun?

No. A well-built red herring is also explained in the end, just not in the direction the reader expects. A misleading detail left unexplained is an unfired gun, and the reader takes it as a loose end the writer forgot.

Does a red herring break the fair-play rule?

It does not, because it does not hide the clue. In a fair-play violation the reader never saw the information needed for the solution; with a red herring the information is in the scene, but the reader's attention has been drawn to another detail.

What is the difference between a red herring and a MacGuffin?

A MacGuffin is an object the characters chase that matters little in itself, and it does not need to pay off. A red herring leads the reader toward a wrong solution and pays off in the end with a different explanation.

References

• Barthes, R. (1970). S/Z. Paris: Seuil. English translation: R. Miller, New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
• Cobbett, W. (14 February 1807). Cobbett's Weekly Political Register, vol. XI.
• Chekhov, A. P. (1 November 1889). Letter to A. S. Lazarev (Gruzinsky).
• Knox, R. A. (1929). "Detective Story Decalogue" (ten rules for detective fiction).
• Quinion, M. (2008). "The Lure of the Red Herring". World Wide Words. https://worldwidewords.org/herring.html
• Truffaut, F. (1967). Hitchcock. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Van Dine, S. S. (September 1928). "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories". The American Magazine.

Citation

@misc{bulut2026redherring,
  author       = {Bulut, Levent},
  title        = {What Is a Red Herring in Fiction? How to Write Misleading Clues},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://leventbulut.com/red-herring-in-fiction-how-to-write-misleading-clues/}},
  note         = {leventbulut.com}
}