Inaccuracies in fiction

[HoppyHat]

Do they bother you? I realise I am annoyed/disappointed by simple "mistakes" which surely a decent editor should notice?

A couple of examples

A very very popular novel. Set in modern day London. Character regularly gets the bus from A to B along a named road all of which exist in real life. But they don't use the correct bus number! Nothing bad happens on the bus, the driver isn't awful, nothing libellous. So why not use the correct bus number?

I've just finished a book which I really liked. The author is American. But part of the book is set in a posh English school in the 1950s. The headteacher calls the season following summer "Fall". And says (more than once) "you need to write your sister" (or similar) not write TO.

To me these things are so obvious and quite jarring. Anyone else?

I read a book once where it regularly referred to the btothers/fathers/husbands etc being away fighting in France. In 1942.
Then they all magically reappeared within a week of VE day.

That annoys me too. Although I wouldn't notice a London bus route one.

I read a WW2/Holocaust fiction a while ago which mentioned the British press writing an article about Jews being sent to Auschwitz and gassed about 2 years before they were sent there and the gas Chambers were built.

I read a detective book recently which kept referring to the abbreviation, ‘’WPC’ (woman police constable). However, that abbreviation was officially stopped in 1999, and this book was written far more recently than that. Do your research!

(Have relatives in the police force, hence knew the abbreviation was no longer in use).

Reading William Boyd: 'Any Human Heart.' Brilliant book, really enjoying it, and he gets the period ambience just right. Until the day `Logan Mountstuart is furnishing his London pied a Terre in the late 1920s with 'rugs and throws.' Nobody had a 'throw' until the 1980s.

Yes. I feel I am overly bothered by inaccuracies both in books and films.
I recently started Nomadland as it was recommended to me.
I shut it off less than 15mins in because it showed the main character cooking on a propane stove inside her van with all doors and windows closed. She would have asphyxiated herself long before the food she was cooking would have been ready.

Not just me then!!

I have done some early reading for a couple of people I know who were writing novels. I wasn't reading to find grammatical errors and edit per se but to notice inaccuracies (amongst other things). Maybe that's made me more observant or maybe that's why I was asked to early read!

Yes. I get pretty irritated. I spent most of Connie Willis’s The Domesday Book muttering about how she might have researched the Black Death thoroughly, but her knowledge of how Oxford colleges worked in relation to faculties really needed more work..

I had a wrong London bus route one once. I noticed it because the route number used was one I used to catch regularly in a totally different part of London.

WW2 in the UK is a minefield for US authors, and I wish most of them would just leave it alone. (Some UK authors aren't much better, in fairness.)

One I didn't finish recently had the heroine travelling out of London to the North from Victoria, and an officer in the RAF wth the rank of Major.

But one which really made me spit was a sample I read online some years ago. Set in London, must have been 1942 or later. Scene took place in a pub. There was an air raid, and the Yank present took it upon himself to tell the landlord and all the customers in the pub what to do, because of course they wouldn't otherwise have had a clue, would they?

I will admit that my editor pointed out that I’d had the sun set twice on the same evening in my first novel. I didn’t notice, my agent didn’t notice…

@BronzeAge A famous author in our mids?

I’ve just been complaining to DH about how aggravating it is when documents say CLASSIFIED on them in films and TV.

Nothing in real life ever says that! It says the actual classification, like SECRET or whatever.

I get pretty irritated. I spent most of Connie Willis’s The Donesday Book muttering about how she might have researched the Black Death thoroughly, but her knowledge of how Oxford colleges worked in relation to faculties really needed more work.

Didn't Connie Willis have people sheltering in the Jubilee Line in the Blitz?

Then definitely don’t read All Clear/Blackout by the same author. It’s anachronism whack a mole

This bothers me as well.

I gave up on a book (that wasn’t great anyway) because the author made rookie errors but the key one was about London rent.

At the time, I rented in the area he was writing about.

Like me, the main character was in a one bedroom flat. As far as I could see, the monthly rent figure was inflated by at least three times the market maximum. Could have got a mansion for that money!

The author was allegedly living in London, so there was absolutely no reason that he would have got this wrong.

There was also a bus driver in the novel, who was earning substantially less than a London bus driver actually made at the time.

I think he got it into his head that there was a political point to be made about high rents and salaries and he wanted that to be key to the story. But clearly he had done no research at all.

It was bizarre. If it hadn’t been about 15 years ago, I might have thought it was written by AI.

Yes!

I once read a book where one of the main characters was called Jo. She is then described as both Josephine and Joanna later on.

I also hate when authors don’t seem to remember their own plots. The later Adrian Mole books were quite bad for this. In one (Cappuccino Years)Pandoras DF gets together with Adrian’s DM. Fine. In a later book, he is described as having drowned on their honeymoon, even though both sets of parents reconciled with their original spouses.

I read a series of books set in the UK across the 20th century. Quite a big chunk is 1980s. The writer is not even American but the books are full of US words which I know were not in common use in the UK. Sneakers, elevator, sweater, call (rather than ring or phone). They spoil the sense of time and place in what is otherwise brilliantly written.

I read a novel called The Greater Waterloo in which the hero travels by train. The only problem is it was set in Napoleonic times decades before the first railway was built!

I did too and concluded they’d decided to translate British English into Americanish for American readers who wouldn’t know the terms.

And another one set in the regency era (UK) with names that just didn't go. They possibly existed but were real outliers so not all members of a household plus staff would be called them. All my family history research suggests that William, Edward, Elizabeth, Mary etc were "usual" names. Not things like Ryan or Barbara.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.