Red Herring Examples in Short Stories: 6 False Trails and How They Are Laid
Quick answer: Red herring examples from Conan Doyle, Poe and Saki: false suspects, misleading clues and the mechanics of pointing a reader the wrong way without cheating.
A red herring is a clue or character planted to lead the reader towards a wrong conclusion. It is the oldest tool in detective fiction and one of the most useful outside it, because any story with a question at its centre can benefit from a plausible wrong answer. The rule is fairness: the false trail must be false for reasons the story eventually shows, not because the writer lied.
Six false trails
The Adventure of the Speckled Band by Arthur Conan Doyle gives Helen Stoner's account a band of gypsies camped on the estate and a dying sister's last words about a speckled band. The reader, like Watson, sees a gypsy headscarf. The real band is a swamp adder, and the story has been pointing at the ventilator, the bell rope and the saucer of milk all along.
The Red-Headed League by Arthur Conan Doyle spends its first half on the absurd league itself: the advertisement, the copying of the encyclopaedia, the sudden dissolution. The league is entirely a decoy, both for Jabez Wilson and for the reader, designed to keep a pawnbroker out of his shop while a tunnel is dug beneath it.
Silver Blaze by Arthur Conan Doyle presents Fitzroy Simpson, a stranger with a heavy stick and a motive, arrested for the murder of the trainer. Every surface fact fits him. Holmes clears him by noticing the dog that did not bark and the sheep that went lame, details the reader passed over while watching the suspect.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe has witnesses agree that one of two voices in the locked room was gruff and French, while the other spoke a language each witness identifies differently. The bank clerk Le Bon is arrested on circumstantial grounds. Both the clerk and the foreign voice are false trails; the reader who follows them cannot reach the orang-utan.
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle by Arthur Conan Doyle lets the plumber John Horner be charged with stealing the jewel, with a prior conviction to make the charge stick. Horner is innocent throughout. The stone's real path runs through a Christmas goose, and Doyle uses Horner's arrest to make the reader stop looking.
The Open Window by Saki works as a red herring in reverse: Vera points the visitor, and the reader, at a ghost story so vivid that when three figures cross the lawn, both take them for the returning dead. The false trail is not a suspect but an explanation, and it is the only one the reader has been given.
How to use it in your own story
A red herring must be more visible than the true clue and less true. The reader should be able to see, on rereading, exactly why the false trail was false.
Common mistakes
The commonest is the unfair herring, a clue that turns out to be false only because the narrator withheld something the viewpoint character knew. A second is the herring that is never resolved, so the reader finishes wondering what the gypsies were for. A third is over-supply, where four false trails leave no room for the true one and the solution arrives from nowhere.
Where readers meet it today
Readers meet the device today in Agatha Christie's short stories, in Roald Dahl's Lamb to the Slaughter where the leg of lamb misleads the police rather than the reader, in Dorothy L. Sayers's The Inspiration of Mr Budd and in most episodes of any detective series.
What writers can take from this
- Make the decoy plausible: motive, opportunity, a suspicious detail.
- Put the true clue in the same scene, quieter.
- Give the reader a companion in error.
- Resolve every false trail, briefly.
- Two red herrings is plenty for a short story.
Try it yourself
Write a 700-word story in which a small object goes missing from a shared house. Three housemates each have a plausible reason to have taken it. The true explanation must involve none of them and must be visible in the first paragraph on a second read.
Questions
What is an example of a red herring in a short story?
The gypsies in Conan Doyle's The Adventure of the Speckled Band, whose camp on the estate and whose headscarves make the dying sister's words about a speckled band point the wrong way. The real band is a snake.
How do you identify a red herring?
Look for a suspect, clue or explanation that the story emphasises early and then shows to be false, and check whether the true clue was present but quieter. A fair red herring is explained by the ending; an unfair one is contradicted by it.
Can a red herring be used outside detective fiction?
Yes. Any story with a central question can plant a plausible wrong answer. Saki's The Open Window uses a ghost story as a red herring for a perfectly ordinary return from hunting.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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