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?

I've just finished J Sheridan Le Fanu's Wylder's Hand and in the postscript he is credited with writing the first English vampire story in Carmila. Polidori's Vampyre is over 50 years older and Varney the Vampire probably has a good 20 or 30 years on it as well.

Ruined the book, actually [needs grip].

But on the whole, the Rebus books are pretty accurate, including descriptions of Edinburgh. The reason Ian Rankin had to retire him is that he aged him with each book and then he reached mandatory retirement age. I am so glad he's back!

Scone I agree they are great otherwise and he does walk the right way just managing 5 miles in 15 minutes threw me...suppose now he can get a tram

I find that sort of stuff grating too. Len Deighton's book, Mexico Set, was situated in Mexico City and the author obviously hadn't a clue about the place. Haven't been able to read any other book of his as a result, but the one that is full of glaring factual inaccuracy is Dan Brown's book, the Da Vinci Code. The maddest one of them all was to say that holy communion was introduced because of Aztec human sacrifice!!!!

at the trams. (Former Edinburgher here, I am proud to say, if only for a year)

Books with spelling mistakes annoy me. Seriously I'm about four pages into a book and it's got two spelling mistakes already.

Talking of characters aging, I find this jarring with the Inspector Wexford novels. The early ones are very dated and obviously take place in the 1960s/early 70s when Wexford up has a young family - but the new ones take place now when he is still working as an inspector and although they have all aged, it's out of sync with the changes around him. I find it really off-putting (but Ruth Rendall often drops odd societal clangers, which is strange as in some respects she is such an observant writer.)

But isn't Wexford retired in the current books, but sort of helps Burden figure out whodunit?

Years ago I read a really bad chick-lit type book which featured a man writing a book. When describing this book to the love interest, he explains it as a crime novel where the murderer is chased by police round the Aberdeen ring road. Aberdeen doesn't have a ring road. They have talked about it for at least 30 years but are only doing prep work on it now. It really sticks on my head as it's so lazy to get those details wrong!

I was staying in a holiday cottage that had some books and I picked up a Freya North book for light entertainment specifically because part of it was set near my home town. It was some implausible tripe about some young lassie having been left a letter in her Granny's will instructing her to visit all four UK countries. Between the speech being all wrong, the descriptions being wrong etc, my blood pressure was sky high at the unfairness of life, that this author who is clearly quite successful is also so lazy that she couldn't even be arsed visiting a different part of the UK to research her book.

It was a crap story too

Flim, technically it is possible. Setanta Ireland shows 3pm premiership kick offs and there are ways to obtain the channel in the UK (not necessarily legal ways, but ways ask the same).
So theoretically yes, you could watch a 3pm kick off on a portable tv (with aid of a little extra kit)

RobinHumphries - they'd have been hard-pressed to meet behind Ye Olde Trip, even if had've been made at the time, seeing as it was once a cave and is surrounded by solid rock.

Read a book based in Ireland recently and a character has to ring the police. So she dials 911. Pissed me right off. Author was Irish too.

Apparently this happens a lot because the software they use to set out the book in to Kindle format is American and it autocorrects "mistakes". Lazy proof reading too.

I read one book where a key plot device hung on blood type - basically, wife fakes pregnancy, steals a baby and gets away with it.

BUT - wife and husband have blood type O positive, child has blood type O negative.

The author bangs on and on about how this is impossible, would give the game away. Even has the wife bleed to death after not getting medical treatment in case her O positive blood rings alarm bells!

She's got her blood types the wrong way round. Parents with O positive blood can have a baby with either O positive or O negative blood. But parents who've both got O negative blood can't have a baby with O positive blood.

So annoying. And would have taken the author, oooh, about 5 mins to check?

Also have been getting mildly annoyed about a book on potty training I've been looking at today.

I'm guessing it's originally American and been partially redone for a UK market because they keep flipping between using 'tap' and 'faucet' when talking about hand washing. Including once within one sentence.

I think it was Anita Shreve's 'The Pilot's Wife' where a character needed their passport to go over the Irish border. After I had flung the book across the room, I leant it to my mother so she could be pissed off with it too.

What an awful book The Pilot's Wife is. As memory serves, the whole premise of it is flawed. I won't say why in case anybody should want to read it.

can someone explain the chaucer joke to me please?

Re passports Donna Tartt has a character in The Goldfinch failing to buy a train ticket at Amsterdam Central station to go to, I think Paris (certainly somewhere not in the Netherlands but still in the EU) because he doesn't have his passport on him. You don't need to produce a passport to buy an international train ticket.