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 read a book, I think it was by Dorothy Koombson, the Best Friends Girl one.

The best friend has a baby and I'm sure it says in the book that she doesn't tell the father she is pregnant, let alone that she has had the baby.

He finds out a few years later, after the best friend has died and the lead character with the annoying name is raising the child instead.

However somehow the best friend has managed to put the father's name on the birth certificate, despite the fact that they were not married and he obviously wasn't with her in the registry office because he had no idea the baby existed.

It provoked me no end because I'm sure you can't register a baby without the father present and have his name on the birth certificate unless you are married to him at the time.

^ I can't remember the book or the author but I recently read a similar one where the plot hinged on someone registering a baby which wasn't hers as her own. Can't remember the exact details but it couldn't have worked.

"Tap" and "faucet" are both used in American English for inside water delivery. If outside, it's usually "spigot."

Liverpool United

I read a crime thriller recently about a whistleblower for a big research company - said Big Company is making a variant of smallpox, and the whistleblower quite sensibly thinks this is a terrible idea and also very illegal. The upshot is that he decides to break into the Big Company labs and grab some smallpox samples himself to use as proof Which he does, bypassing the security by wearing theatrical makeup to make himself look like one of the company directors Followed by carrying out some vials of smallpox IN HIS JACKET POCKET, where they stay for the rest of the book

Bearing in mind that a) that would be a Biosafety Level 4 lab, requiring a full biohazard suit and hood with life-support system, supervision at all times, and multiple complete changes of clothing, showers and decontamination on exit, as well as military-style levels of security (we're talking 24-hour armed guards and iris scanners, i.e. definitely not the kind of place that you could just swan into by pretending to be the Big Boss who'd forgotten his ID card). And b) taking the virus samples out of the hermetically sealed, ultraviolet-lit, decontaminated, multiply airlocked, negative-pressure laboratory would in itself be enough to risk a pandemic that would kill hundreds of millions of people, never mind wandering around half the US with them sitting IN YOUR JACKET POCKET. Which this guy got some kind of presidential award for!

(Ooh, that was incredibly cathartic... Can you tell I'm a biologist?! )

I think the poster was referring to a half-hearted attempt to anglicise the book. No-one says "faucet" here do they? I suppose a plumber might as a technical term (vaguely thinking that faucet in UK might actually be a part of a tap rather than the tap itself)

LRD I'm really curious now, what was it about the medieval palaeography that was so implausible?

It's also possible that the American author switched about in his/her usage and it wasn't changed for UK. I know I use both, probably about 50/50.

alAswad - not even a biologist and that has me wincing.

While I can accept that Americans might use both 'tap' and 'faucet', using 'tap' in the first part of a sentence and 'faucet' in the second part of the same sentence just looks weird and like sloppy editing.

I have one!

I recently read a novel set post-War in Russia/East Germany and it was dire.

First of all, it borrowed heavily from Ayn Rand in its descriptions of how the "good" characters yearn towards freedom (represented by America). One of them mourns that his girlfriend can't understand that her desire for silk stockings and pretty dresses represented the freedom that being able to fully partake in consumerism has to offer. Is that an accurate expression of how any person has ever thought ever when their partner wants something they can't have and moans on about it?

The "good" characters are obsessed with America as the incarnation of freedom and will do anything to get there. Including blatant violations of Soviet law which mysteriously everyone ignores, for some unexplained reason.

Secondly, the various incarnations of the Soviet secret police wouldn't have behaved even vaguely like how this novel presents them. I doubt strongly that any high-ranking member would have answered the phone in his office in front of a suspected dissident and discussed top-level secrets. That's so fucking stupid that there are no words.

If the rivalry between the Vopos and the Russians had extended as far as this novel makes out they had, to the extent that they were fighting over this one guy, senior officials would have stepped in. It's inconceivable that a turf war over a fairly minor person would have been allowed to go that far. The officials concerned would not have had that level of autonomy - they would have had to report constantly as to how they were managing person X and why.

There was also a fairly clear answer to the central problem of the novel, which was - assassination. Neither agency was particularly shy about that, so why they avoided that in the book was a mystery. I kept thinking to myself "Look, have something a bit unfortunate happen to him, you're sorted, no problem". It made no sense why they wouldn't, especially as it could have been really easily disguised.

Finally I had some issues about the German used in the book. I suspect that although I do not know military German, the command you would give if you wanted someone to fire and stop firing in a warzone would be a bit different from what was written in the novel.

sigh And breathe....

I agree it would be unlikely for the two different words to be used in the same sentence.

Ooh I'm kind of glad my specialist subjects are so boring that no-one writes about them so I can enjoy many books in blissful ignorance ... though continuity, and spelling errors really get me.

I love Denise Mina novels as a kind of indulgence, but Phaedra I was thinking that it was perhaps one I hadn't read yet that you were describing in the OP - all the protagonists in each story are overly connected in that kind of way.

So AlAswad, how did you feel about that smallpox they found forgotten in America?

I'm like others up thread where I don't mind massive changes, but get irritated by minor ones. A recent example is the descriptions of the women in The Luminaries wearing leg-o-mutton sleeves about 30 years earlier than they were in fashion - I didn't understand this oversight at all given how well researched the rest of the book was. I didn't intend to be nitpicky about it, but it really jolted me from the world she'd so carefully created.

My pet peeve is historical novels when the good guys have very modern ideas about feminism and the like, and all the bad guys don't. It seems that the subtext of these books is "our way of viewing the world now is good, everyone that came before us was wrong".

I'm editing my novel at present though and trying to pick up the sorts of errors you all mention, but it's really hard - especially getting the speech right as some characters are British and some are American. I've done a bunch of research about different nouns, but struggle with turns of phrase - I saw on the weekend vs at the weekend pointed out somewhere and all it's done is make me worried about what else I've probably missed, especially as it's really important. I read a book written by a Brit recently where all the characters were American and it all felt wrong, I think because she got the subtle turns of phrase wrong

I don't mind little things being wrong in period novels as long as they get the obvious ones right. Potatoes and Zippers in 1066 would put me right off.

Likewise I am not too picky about language. An English character in 1980 would say 'look at' instead of 'check out' and season ticket holder rather than commuter. For example.

But.

Anything that shows a lack of even basic research drives me nuts. I would seriously advise against ever writing about a country you've never been to. Several times I've read books by well known American Authors where they have characters walk into normal English homes and grab the pit from the coffee machine to pour a cup. And once I gave up on a story where the American character supposedly living in London say down to watch a new episode of their favourite soap Coronation Street in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday.

This totally ruins the suspension of disbelief for me. It throws me out of the story and I just can't get back in.

Damn phone! That's pot not pit, and sat not say! Why does autocorrect want to change too perfectly normal words?!

This assumption that you don't need to research all details because obv everyone does it the same way is so arrogant. Especially when a famous author does it who can afford to hire people to check these facts.

Oxfordbags the inn was definitely already in existence - that's how it became called the trip to Jerusalem. It was a meeting place for those intending to join the crusades. But even if it was already being known as the trip it wouldn't be the old trip. And yes I already knew you couldn't go behind it - that's why I had such an issue with their statement.

kungfu -less grating errors? Shouldn't that be fewer?

I was reading a book recently where the various plot implausibilities didn't bother me at all - but the crusty old English major saying "pleased to meet you" on being introduced sent me spiralling out of the story world for ages. Odd.

And a bit off topic - totally agree with whoever commented upthread on Jodi Picault...

It irritates me so much it spoils the book.
It is so lazy! Recently there was someone who went to Newcastle in Tyne from Euston just because author thought 'Euston =North'.
I stopped reading one which was set in the present and someone was buying up cottages cheap from ignorant locals around Bursledon and Hamble - do they not know the area and house prices and the type of person who lives there?
Recently I bought one from an author selling his own book which I thought enterprising- never again! It was set in 12th century and he just dumped 21st century people there - it was funny at first, but everything was so wrong it got tedious and I gave up. They hung their clothes on clothes hangers - called people 'you blighter' are 2 that stood out.

I was reading a childrens book (for research purposes!) Which had dogs that the author was describing. She described a Tibetan Terrier as "much smaller" than a lhasa apso - Lhasas are about 12 inches, TT are 16-18 inches. Stopped reading straight away. If you're going to choose to feature a fairly unusual dog breed at least make sure you know basic facts about them!

LOL, Scone good job I'm not writing any novels :)

I meant first she had the bloke use a command for fire which made me think "Eh?" because it seemed wrong. Then after the need for firing was over, the command he used there seemed wrong as well.

She also bizarrely has a small section written in Russian although the rest of the book isn't (in Cyrillic script). I didn't think that made a lot of sense as a tactic although I got no clue about Russian, it seemed like showing off. It would make more sense to me to have "Turning to the children, he asked them where they were from" or words to that effect rather than "Turning to the children, he said [massive block of Russian text]".

scarffiend Aberdeen DOES have a ring road. Anderson Drive has always been known as the ring road. It just doesn't have a bypass yet.

alAswad

Maybe they found some in the back of a storage fridge at a uni?

www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jul/08/smallpox-vials-found-cardboard-box-maryland-laboratory

Answering machines - for who ever asked - my dad set up a business in 1975 or 1976, we moved house in 1976 and had the answering machine then.

It was huge and we had to tell a neighbour we had it and ask her to phone it to try it out.

It had 2 full sized cassettes, one for outgoing and the other for incoming messages.

Perculators for coffee were about in the 1970s we ways had a pot of coffee at home back then, so not totally implausible.