Inaccuracies in fiction

I don’t have a copy to hand, but from memory, it’s ’corporation dump’. ‘Garbage’ was inserted in later US editions.

Just generally as well, I hate it when time goes too quickly in novels.

Janine switched on the kettle. 'So how's it all going with your mum?' she asked.
'Not bad' I said.
She gave me a look. 'You know you're going to have to tell her?' she said, carrying the cups over to the coffee table.

No! You have to have a whole conversation while the kettle boils, and probably about 15 sentences of chat just taking out the teabags and putting the milk back in the fridge etc. Similarly in books people exchange a couple of pages of dialogue and then it's the end of the evening. Actually it takes loads and loads of talking to fill up a whole evening. Real conversation is repetitive and filled with guff. I'm not asking for all of that to be put in, but you need to give me a sense that time is passing and other things are happening.

I remember one short story, by a Scottish author but set in my part of West Sussex, where he got the trainline wrong. I was happy to suspend disbelief for the demon-horses the character was visiting by there was no way he was getting there by the route described.

Ok, that must be my mistake then, @LadyPeterWimsey & @WelcomeMarch - I thought it sounded very strange for Wimsey to refer to ‘garbage’ instead of rubbish, but apparently not!

@PuttingDownRoots I would mix up the towns in other ways -its the juxtaposition of everything else being spot on with a few howlers that is so jarring

It's 'garbage dump' in my 1972 edition. What was it originally?

If you put some kind of disclaimer at the start, I'd be OK with it. It might be less jarring if you made it an offshoot of the nearest genuine university, which you do see sometimes, i.e. 'Blah College, University of Bigcity in Mediumtown'.

quote fail, that's to @PuttingDownRoots

No, that wouldn't bother me. Good luck with the book.

@CarolinaInTheMorning and @EmpressaurusOfTheScathingTinsel

I don't have access to my copies of Gaudy Night, but I am pretty sure Peter does refer to the 'Corporation dump' and 'Corporation garbage dump' when he and Harriet go punting - and mine are definitely UK editions.

Whitstable Pearl -they have a police station, nearby hospital and no poo on the water. So much of it is shot here that these inaccuracies seem worse

Question for pedants... I'm writing a book (never likely to be published). I want to set it on Town A and Town B, as I'm familiar with them. But it needs a university in Town B to work... would adding a fictional university bother you?

I was given a couple of books for a birthday quite recently, newly published books by up and coming writers. One was set in the 60s. It had a character sitting in an office, looking out through the window at all the office workers huddled outside smoking. No. People smoked at their desks at work in the 60s. I know. I was there. Why didn't the author check with an older relative? Why wasn't this inaccuracy picked up on? In another chapter, a character gets a job offer and pumps her fist exclaiming 'yess!!'. No one did that in uk in the 60s. The whole book was culturally 'off'.

I had to stop reading the book after this. I couldn't decide if it was just ignorance and lazy research or whether the writer wanted a younger audience to feel connected and involved.

I don't think
Many publishers use proof readers, if they do they should be fired.

Wrote a scathing review about a recent book set in Cornwall, written by an American, there was a car trunk, sidewalk, they drank soda... I could go on but you get the gist.

Painful!

A novel set in England in the 1970s where much of the language was out of period - 'let's just chill' etc. The period detailing seemed to consist solely of making all the decor orange.

I read a novel where the main character wore “Dr Martin” boots.

No, no he didn’t. Possibly Dr Marten’s though.

As another poster has mentioned Cindy from Eastenders I have noticed two more continuity inaccuracies about that character (must get out more!)

Cindy's birthday was 10th May - I only noticed in particular because its very close to my birthday. After she "died" there were two years running where Ian was moping around on 10th May "because it was Cindy's birthday" and everyone had to tiptoe around him. Then on a subsequent year he remarried to Laura on ... 10th May!

Cindy's mum was originally called Lucy (and Cindy named her daughter after her) but in later years she is called Bev.

One of the opposite: I read a book set in Manchester which had a chase sequence in it, perfectly plotted - and it ended up in my living room!! Totally weird to read though 😂

I know what you mean. I recently read Weyward, which I thought was fab and really enjoyed. However at a couple of points a modern-day character goes to get her pregnancy ultrasound scans at her local GP with her normal family doctor. It really irritated me -- even if the author hasn't been pregnant you'd think one of the editors might have realised that that doesn't happen!

In Gone Girl Amy becomes pregnant after claiming her husband's semen sample from the fertility clinic. They only had it from the testing stages and had never had any treatment cycles, so it seemed incredibly unlikely it would have been (a) retained and (b) preserved in a condition suitable for fertilisation.

I've mentioned this to a few people and no one seems to think it's a problem. But from my own experience of the fertility clinic testing samples aren't retained at all once the necessary results are gathered. Does anyone know if this is different in the US?

The Crimson Petal and The White, a character in 1875/6 has potato waffles with his pigeon pie.

Wouldn’t that have been normal chestnuts? Horse chestnuts are inedible as far as I know ( poisonous).

A few years ago I read a novel set in a town I'd lived in for decades. The lead character moved into a 'lovely little flat' round the corner from the station. The author even described the route from the station to this delightful little flat. Except there are no flats there, just offices, the police station and a huge Waitrose car park.

It's a nightmare, though. I'm trying to write a historical story and it's taking (literally) years because I have to keep finding out about trivial details 😬 If the story weren't so embedded in my head, I'd have abandoned it - when my imagination built the thing, it didn't stop to wonder what fruit & veg were available in the UK at that time, how shoes were made, whether this or that road existed, and on and on and on ...

I made an early decision not to attempt contemporary speech, thank god, but wish I'd anticipated the days of research on EVERY LITTLE DETAIL of everybody's lives! I've acquired a new respect for historical authors and a great deal more tolerance for daft errors!

I recently felt smug discovering an inaccuracy by ‘Robert Galbraith’ (JK Rowling). In one of her Cormoran Strike detective novels, Strike, who is an Arsenal fan, settles down to watch the 3pm match on television.

But he couldn’t have, because Premier League, Football League or FA Cup matches between 2:45pm - 5:15pm are not shown on TV in compliance with Article 48 of the UEFA statutes.

I remember feeling absolutely enraged when I read it because I love the series so much!

On the cover of the (v. grim but brilliantly written) Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn, the word ‘startlingly’ is misspelled ‘startlingy’, startlingly.