To get annoyed by a badly written novel with serious factual mistakes

[PhaedraIsMyName]

Author thinks the witness to a crime can decide who the Crown calls as expert witness.

Expert witness is a therapist who was treating the witness to the crime. Expert witness is married to a lawyer. Expert witness has been discussing the background with lawyer husband. The person accused of the crime is the crime scene witness'father. Author thinks the lawyer husband can represent the accused and this is not a conflict.

Lawyer husband is actually employed in a government legal department and author thinks lawyer husband can, whilst still employed, act as a defence lawyer.

It's tosh. Did nobody bother to edit or proof read it?

Is it just me who bothers about stuff like this?

The House at Riverton = dreadful book. Can't remember any glaring inaccuracies offhand but can remember the abominable writing.

YY, I'm with you, scone. Sweeping changes are so much easier to cope with but the details niggle.

I hate it when the handwriting in films etc. is 'generic spidery Ye Olde script' rather than looking like whatever it was in the period. Or when someone dips a quill in ink then writes three lines straight off, as if they were using a biro.

They need this book.

Deborah Harkness has her heroine admiring her date's strength as he cracks chestnuts with his bare hands.

There were other howlers but have managed to blot most of the book from my memory and damned if I'm going to pick it up again.

I got really annoyed with one of the modern sherlock where they travelled on my commuter line. The train had a buffet car. That train never has a cart let alone a buffet car! You would never get through to it anyway due to the number of people.

Judge John deed is another - most crown court judges would eat him for breakfast AND he would have been dis barred years ago for his level of interference.

I am a pedant though. Details being wrong annoy me. It's easy enough to check them out. In fantasy novels getting historical details right I think help to suspend reality as you aren't distracted by them.

Did anyone watch 'Monty Python Almost Live'? According to the friend I watched with I am Prof Brian Cox.

Op. - have googled your book, and it's published by Macmillan! A mainstream publisher...

However, mainstream fiction publishers are among the worst payers in the business generally (I have no experience working for Macmillan, this is a general comment), and publishers generally are under all sorts of pressure to cut costs wherever possible, so perhaps this book was edited by someone with no knowledge of the legal system? Or suggested changes to the author and the author didn't want them made? That happens....

But it's down to the author to do research before they submit a book for publication, so it's on her head!

I'd write to the publisher, though, op, if I were you.

This is very pedantic, but in Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan, set in the early 70s, the main character buys a new outfit in M&S and tries it on in the changing room. But in the 70s, M&S stores didn't have changing rooms. (Can't remember when they introduced them - anyone?)

In Sebastian Faulks's Bird Song, there were two anachronisms that struck me in the bit set in the 70s. One was that one of the characters has an answer machine (I could be wrong, but I don't remember anyone with answer machines until well into the 80s); the other is that one of the characters uses a pee-on-a-stick style pregnancy test. But again, these weren't introduced until well into the 80s - in the early pregnancy tests of the 1970s, you had to wee into a container and then leave the dipstick or whatever it's called in for five minutes.

I also got really annoyed with a non-fiction book by PJ O'Rourke that referred to that well-known football team "Liverpool United". I didn't have time for it after that.

I like to trick the kids I teach by asking them if Chaucer liked French Fries. I get some fantastic answers, and occasionally one of them actually works out the correct response.

YANBU.

It annoys me so much and turns a decently written book in to torture.

I've just finished reading some historical fiction and almost from the first page I could tell that the author was a) American and b) had done zero research in to the language of the period.

"Best mate", "shell casing", "moron" and "cretin" just ruined the whole feel of it.

I know that Americans don't have the same opinion towards cretin and moron that we do, but it grated every time it was used. Apart from that moron wasn't used until the early 1900's (the novel was set in the Georgian era) and cretin wasn't used as an insult until fairly recently. So it was not only slightly offensive, but wrong too.

There is also sometimes a bit of tea drinking in books set in medieval England.

I have watched precisely ten seconds of Downton Abbey ever, as I switched it on, heard an upperclass woman at the turn of the twentieth century say "I'm pregnant" and switched it off again. What rot!

I found Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett infuriating for all these reasons. It is absolutely dire!! He has made a fortune from it though. I read the whole thing, it was so crap it was good, iyswim.

I don't think the things I'm annoyed about even need particular legal knowledge,especially the civil servant lawyer turning his hand as a criminal defence lawyer.

I'm really enjoying other examples.

And Violet, Lady Grantham used "parent" as a verb. Noooooooo!

Good job I stopped watching then; I'd have thrown the TV out of the window at 'parent'.

I can't remember what it was (because I didn't buy it) but the book I was flipping through the other day, set in Early Modern England, had women talking about 'child raising'.

But parent as a verb is worse.

In US legal dramas, they often show witnesses in the audience of the courtroom before they have testified, listening to other witnesses testify. That would never happen!

Pilgit That wasn't the one where the client had travelled up that morning? And they zoom in on the "ticket clippings" which were actually round bits of papee filched from an office hole punch, really obviously not from a ticket bought on a train.

British and American writers sometimes get Southern US speech very wrong, especially having a character use "y'all" as a singular pronoun.

There is no excusing it really as a writer can do research without even leaving the house.

There is an Aberdeen crime writer and I just can't read his books despite my mum loving and recommending them. I lived in Aberdeen for five years and have no idea how you could get King Street and Queen Street they have just been swapped names wise....I don't know if this has been corrected in his later books but I gave up.

Ohhh ... thinking of US Southern speech reminded me of the godawful sequel to Gone with the Wind. I am not qualified to comment on the US bits, but part of it is set in Ireland it my god, it is dire.

Apparently Scarlett, a nicely brought-up woman, travels to Ireland and falls in love with, er, brightly coloured Irish peasant stockings. So she buys loads and wears them, and wanders around barefoot too, like what the peasants do. But everyone totally loves her cos she's rich and eccentric.

• mixed up should be in there somewhere. what's most disturbing in mine is he is from Aberdeen