The Linguistic Representation of Red Herrings in Agatha Christie’s Detective Fiction

This article examines the linguistic mechanisms through which Agatha Christie encodes red herrings in her detective novels. The study highlights how syntactic delay, lexical ambiguity, ironic narration, unreliable discourse, and semiotic detail function as deliberate techniques of misdirection, guiding readers toward false hypotheses until the final solution of the crime is revealed. A comparative-stylistic analysis was conducted on selected texts, including Murder on the Orient Express, The ABC Murders, and And Then There Were None, with attention to their Uzbek translations. The findings demonstrate that Christie’s red herrings are not accidental narrative details but systematically embedded linguistic and stylistic devices. They serve both as plot mechanisms and as instruments of reader manipulation. The analysis further shows that Uzbek translations generally succeed in preserving the pragmatic function of misdirection, particularly when translators maintain ambiguity, stylistic nuance, and suspense. Drawing on Nida’s principle of dynamic equivalence, Eco’s semiotic framework, and discourse-oriented approaches to translation, the article contributes to narratology, stylistics, and translation studies by showing how detective fiction depends on the careful linguistic construction and preservation of deception.

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