Why do British authors keep making this very obvious mistake?

[YaWeeFurryBastard]

Yet again I’m reading an otherwise good book which refers to a character being unable to put up the money to make bail. This is set in England, bail in England does not require a surety payment except in very limited circumstances. Why do authors or editors not check this to make sure it’s factually accurate?!

See also characters being bailed after they’ve been charged with murder, something which is particularly unheard of in England. Magistrates don’t have the power to grant bail for murder charges.

Surely at some point pre publishing, someone with a basic knowledge of the English legal system reads the book, or do they just not care?

I’m probably very over invested but it’s bloody annoying and almost undermines an otherwise believable story.

I haven’t read that but I’ll add it to my tbr list.

I’m a massive fan of one of Lissa Evans children’s books “Wed Wabbit” it’s just so quirky and clever.

I first read Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate when I was 16 and way too young to appreciate the subtleties. The unfamiliar expressions ‘in the family way’ and ‘in pig’ jumped out at me here, but it took me a while to fully understand that Cedric was, in today’s terms, camper than a week at Butlin’s. In my defence, I was a very sheltered 16 and this was the mid-80s.

@Perfectlystill - -ize spellings such as realize and organize are actually accepted spellings in British English...

A lot of that is house style. Penguin, for example, uses “-ize” over “-ise”, and has done for at least thirty years, but the other major publishers use the “-ise” that we recognise as British spelling. No idea why, but it’s not for saving money on edits, as even if it’s published by eg. Penguin UK and Penguin US, they’ll still re-edit it for the US market.

I have always been baffled why, though, US publishers think their readers cannot bear to encounter pavements, lifts and fringes when reading a UK-set book. Isn’t that one of the mental enrichments of reading?

Yes, at school. Novels aren't written so that you have to put them down to go and look up a word in the dictionary. Unfamiliar words should be guessable in context.

What does 'in pig' mean?

@Gwenhwyfar Pregnant! I love that phrase (learnt from Mitford, I don’t know if it was wider common parlance then).

Indeed, if you read British written books from the 19th and first three quarters of the 20th century, “ize” is common.

Not quite the same as the original frustration, however, I feel the need to get off my chest what is my biggest annoyance when reading a book.

Padding

The lady pads over to the window, she pads downstairs to the kitchen. We do not pad!!

Arghhhh!

thanks for letting me get that off my chest

Do people really have the attention span of a flea?

God yes! So many people have told me they don't read books as much as they used to, while making a "scrolling on phone" gesture. I do it myself, which is irritating.

Presumably they will have already bought your book by then anyway, so who cares whether they get sidetracked whilst reading it?

Well that's one way of looking at it .... When I was editing authors who self-published on Kindle, many of them wanted to build up an audience of regular readers. They were writing series, and the general business model is to keep churning out the titles at short intervals and building up customer loyalty. Hooking them, in other words. (It reminded me of Dickens and his magazine serials - it worked for him!)

So we concentrated more on making the stories really gripping and the characters compelling than on making each book watertight perfect.

I have to confess to breaking off to Google things. I wouldn't generally for period terms/slang as I tend to get it from the context but to find out about e.g. real people - am I remembering right about that Royal figure/actress from the 1920s - or places - was this city called X at this date and Y at another date, for example.

You'd think they might actually read them though!

Well obviously. Which brings us back to whatever the original query was. Oh yes, I remember. Lagonda.

That's really interesting, thank you.

If you are an avid reader who’s quite keen on details, pedantic about grammar and spelling and hates anachronisms and factual mistakes, it can be hard to understand that many - if not most - people who read for pleasure, particularly in certain genres, really do care more about a pacy narrative or an engrossing story than they do about the odd Americanism or the finer details of the process of the law, or whatever.

I’m not saying it’s right that writers (and publishers) get things wrong. Just that an awful lot of people who are ‘big readers’ really don’t care as much as you might imagine, so the level of fact-checking and editing will reflect that in some genres.

Maybe the publishing industry just don’t realise the level of annoyance this provokes.

Maybe the publishing industry, beset with cost-cutting measures like so many other human endeavors, can't afford to fully address that level of annoyance.

It’s just really disappointing though that professional writers and publishers, who are supposed to be the experts at this, value precision and attention to detail less than some of their customers, and are happy to settle for the lowest common denominator.

YOU try checking every single period detail and line of dialogue for plausibility in a novel set 100 years ago, all while keeping an eye on plot, character, pacing, mood, spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, scene structure, chapter structure, story structure, internal consistency ... all within a tight timescale and budget.

Well said 👍

That’s fair, but it’s a big issue in contemporary fiction about simple daily details.

It's the female detective who has done a partial psychology degree and can now 'profile'. I love jk but she is guilty of this too.

I've done and teach a psychology degree. It doesn't give you any abilities to profile anyone apart from maybe how tired your lecturer is.

Americanisms in books set in Britain are easy to spot, or should be.
It might help to get an older person to read it through in those cases, because they would be able to remember the minutiae of how things used to be from their own experience or memories of what their parents and grandparents had told them.
Or get someone who's read a vast amount of books written in the particular era to check for period detail. That surely can't be hard in a publishing house.
I was born 20 years after the war but know that British people didn't say 'Hi' in wartime or eat mayonnaise, the former from reading many books set at that time and the latter from memories of my own diet and just things my parents and grandparents had said over the years.
Those errors probably wouldn't stand out to a young person working in an editing team, but they absolutely grate on a reader who knows they're wrong.

But that's the authors job surely? Any one could write about their own time, location and culture without research. If an author can't do historical fiction then don't do it. Most jobs require precision, it's a fairly basic requirement of competence.

OTOH I frequently get American reviews for my (very very British) books, saying that they didn't understand the slang/some words and either stopped reading or had to go and look stuff up. One even complained about the 'long words' saying that she had a University education but didn't understand some of the language. I just thought 'blimey, I didn't realise that the American education system was SO bad...' None of the words were anything that I didn't think someone with a reasonable level of education wouldn't know., I don't use fancy language.

On the whole UK/American thing. I have a Scottish and Irish family and have found that most of what people on MN or in England complain about being Americanisms are actually Scottish or Irish.