Inaccuracies in fiction

There's a series of detective type novels set in North Wales. I quite enjoyed them until one of the storylines had someone getting a plane from the airport in Corwen (near where I am from)

Now there is a small airstrip there, if the sheep move out of the way, that gliders use, but it was hardly the sort of bustling airport a criminal could use to escape by

I know it was artistic licence but it's not that much further and you are in Liverpool where they have a real airport so it seemed unnecessarily unrealistic

I remember one from EastEnders - does that count?! Cindy (it was a long time ago!) was leaving on a train. Forget where she was going but it definitely wasn't to Croydon, but they'd filmed it on the bit just after Clapham Junction on the way to East Croydon which I travelled on every day so I recognised it!

I’m really struggling to get into a book at the minute because of inaccuracies. The two characters introduced are UK nationals but theirs names just don’t align with their supposed ages. It’s originally set in London and mentions a flat instead of an apartment and it mentions Labour and Green Party but then mentions a college degree majoring in education. One of the characters is an eternal student and just endlessly enrolling but not completing studies so it’s not that they went to the US for a degree.

Another one - a very successful US writer of a UK set series - had her characters going for a walk before breakfast in Scotland. In January.

Numerous novels where burnt out heroines from London are left Cornish seaside cottages by aged aunts/grandparents/godmothers. Said heroine then pops ups to London for the day (one went twice in a single day) to get her new Cornwall based business off the ground.

That is a minimum 10 hour round trip assuming the track at Dawlish hasn't been washed away. Again.

Can you tell it drives me crazy

Was the second one The Book of Goose? If so I noticed and got annoyed by exactly the same thing!

Yes, I find these things annoying. In one of the Richard Osman books a character goes to Northern Cyprus and spends euros. Nope - it's Turkish lira there.
I am an editor (mostly academic but I've done some fiction). Part of the job is watching for this kind of thing, checking, although authors are trusted to know what they're talking about, wrongly sometimes On my fiction editing course we were taught to watch out for, e.g. there's a body on the lawn, shot in the back. No-one recognises him. But you have to turn him over first!
I remember one book where someone is wearing a glamorous backless gown and then turns up the collar. And I've lost count of the number of people who are sitting down and then sit down (or stand up when they're already standing).

a character had a twinge during pregnancy and was hospitalised to avoid a miscarriage. The writer has clearly never called an EPU who rarely see you till you’ve bled for a week! (Ectopic scans aside)

Not a book, but an ante natal relaxation session.

The woman on the tape (yes it was that long ago) said "imagine you are in a garden with daffodils and roses in bloom".

Well, I stopped relaxing and wanted to shout out that they aren't in flower at the same time.

I stopped reading a book which misspelled Barack Obama on page one.

Also a book set during the war when one Jewish sister said to the other 'remember when people hating Jews wasn't even a thing?' 🙄🙄 Because that's how people spoke in the 1940s.

Yes they did. The show Sex Education does the same thing as well. Makes a U.K. secondary and sixth form into a U.S. high school where the characters just decide to move to a new school for junior/senior years.

A good publishing house will use copy editors, line editors and proof-readers on every book. Each of those mistakes should have been spotted.

They even translated Harry Potter into American for the US editions- Mom instead of Mum- things like that. So pointless, stupid, and annoying.

I haven’t read it but that would make me angry!! 😂

I don’t think that’s true, actually, though I know a lot of UK viewers of the tv adaptation struggled with it because it would be more unlikely in the UK. Absolutely, it wouldn’t have been implausible for her to board, but neither is it at all implausible for her to attend the local school. I mean, I think there are reasons within the story to explain it, too, but I don’t think it really needs explaining.

@Riverlee — no, a deeply obscure one!

And I did start Connie Willis’s Blackout, and, even leaving aside the errors and anachronisms, it just didn’t really work as a novel, I thought.

Back in the 90's I picked up a library book where someone had used the margins to note all the errors including that TCP hadn't been invented until years after the date the book was set in. No Google back then so they obviously knew their stuff

Jilly Cooper - Riders, in which Jake's dog (can't remember the name) weeps when he sees his master return from hospital. Nope, dogs can't cry.

Jilly Cooper - Rivals, in which a car turns right from Knightsbridge into Brompton Road. Nope, not possible at that junction (unless you're royalty!).

Petty, moi?

Yes!!!!!! In one book, someone moved here from India and started work as a train driver. Despite not even being a train driver previously. Just wouldn’t have happened. Then, later he was suddenly a bus driver, with no explanation. It’s unlikely you’d go from driving trains to driving buses. More likely. I think, is that the author was told to change the occupation and didn’t change it throughout.

In another book, a character left medical school
and went straight to work as a GP.

There are more, just need to have a think.

This seems to be everywhere - especially in audio versions. I’ve heard Peter Wimsey complaining about a ‘garbage dump’, an Agatha Christie policeman carrying a ‘flashlight’ and a character born & bred in Cumbria turning on a ‘faucet’. Really irritating.

I read a regency romance by an American author where the minor local character was described as from the west country. And then broke out in broad scouse.
Which is in the west of the country I guess.

This "translation" used to happen quite frequently, to the point that I would order books by some of my favorite British writers from the UK to avoid that. (I'm American). It happens less often now, thankfully.

in Normal People, Connel and Marianne would never ever have been at the same same school. She would have been at a convent, boarding if necessary.