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Inaccuracies in fiction

545 replies

HoppyHat · 01/04/2024 21:08

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?

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SevenSeasOfRhye · 11/04/2024 20:41

JaninaDuszejko · 11/04/2024 20:33

@SevenSeasOfRhye if you want niche Lorraine Kelly has recently released a new book set in Orkney called The Island Swimmer. The blurb says 'When Evie's father falls desperately ill, she finally returns to the family home on Orkney and the wild landscape she left as a teenager, swearing never to return.' Which sounds fine to the casual reader. However, nobody who lived in Orkney would call their daughter Evie because it's a parish. It would be like living in Edinburgh and calling your son Craig Miller or (to reference a recent thread) living in Cambridge and calling your daughter Magdelene. And Lorraine Kelly should know better because she visits Orkney regularly.

😁I've never visted Orkney (would like to) so wouldn't have spotted that!

SoapCollector · 11/04/2024 21:19

@SevenSeasOfRhye I was just thinking the same.@JaninaDuszejko Orkney looks really beautiful 😀

ImJustMadAboutSaffron · 12/04/2024 15:05

SevenSeasOfRhye · 11/04/2024 20:41

😁I've never visted Orkney (would like to) so wouldn't have spotted that!

Playing devil's advocate my colleague has a daughter Evie, but she is really Evangeline and decided to call herself that when very young. Maybe we could give Lorraine the benefit of the doubt!

ThomasinaLivesHere · 14/04/2024 07:46

There’s a Hemingway novel where the characters get muddled up. One woman is English and another Scottish. The English woman refers to herself as Scottish. It seems such a stupid error that should have been picked up.

TabbyM · 15/04/2024 16:02

Just came across the robin's egg = blue in Upon a Frosted Star by M A Kuzniar which is quite annoying as the book is set in the UK and the author appears to be British.

Riverlee · 15/04/2024 18:54

This thread made me think about inaccuracies in the book I was reading. It mentions bluebells and I was trying to think whether it fitted with the narrations the story , or whether bluebells were being used as part of the description of the typical British countryside (wartime story, person about to go to France to serve).

ChinnyChin2 · 16/04/2024 23:55

I know this isn't exactly the point of the thread - but I must offload!

Have just started reading Ann Cleves "White Knight", the books "Shetland" is based on.

Great description in it of Jimmy Perez, tall, olive skinned, dark hair and eyes. And his ancestry explains the unusual surname he has.

Who plays him in "Shetland"?? Douglas Henshall. So pale he is nearly transparent, ginger hair and light eyes. Why??

BIWI · 17/04/2024 08:39

I know @ChinnyChin2! That really put me off watching the series initially. I just couldn't work out why they would cast someone the diametric opposite of the character so vividly described in the book. (I have only recently just binged the whole series, and thoroughly enjoyed it, but it still irks me!)

Just don't get me started on Reacher and Tom Cruise ...

ChinnyChin2 · 17/04/2024 11:32

Oh, I am with you on Reacher too 🙄

WelcomeMarch · 17/04/2024 14:07

TabbyM · 15/04/2024 16:02

Just came across the robin's egg = blue in Upon a Frosted Star by M A Kuzniar which is quite annoying as the book is set in the UK and the author appears to be British.

And there are native birds with blue eggs. Blackbird, dunnock (very blue), song thrush, starling, even magpie at a pinch -- I guess 'magpie's egg sky' would have spoiled the flow of the sentence, though!

My grouse is that the first novel of a Certain Well Known Crime Series hinges on the elimination of the only witness... to a document that would surely have needed two witnesses to have any legal weight.

Pocketfullofdogtreats · 21/07/2024 16:53

Don't read The Return by Victoria Hislop! She has a character who is a young woman during the Spanish Civil War (early 1930s) who has a DD born in the 1970s! And a man in the part set in the 1930s and then someone this century in London who have totally different names but turn out to be the same person! I can understand a nickname, but this was surname as well, with no explanation. The thing is that readers can be teased a bit but how were they supposed to guess that one, especially as he would now be about 100!

Abouttimeforanamechange · 21/07/2024 19:33

My grouse is that the first novel of a Certain Well Known Crime Series hinges on the elimination of the only witness... to a document that would surely have needed two witnesses to have any legal weight.

See my gripe in the other current thread about inaccuracies. It's a plot point often enough in classic crime/mystery fic - anyone who has read much in the genre will have come across it and know that two witnesses are needed.

JudgeJudging · 22/07/2024 13:59

Surely if you read courtroom/crime thrillers/police procedurals written by novelists who aren't involved in the criminal justice system, you simply disengage the part of your brain that bothers about inaccuracies, though? Or you just don't read them.

I have a friend who is a forensic unit of the police, a friend who is a forensic archaeologist, and friends who do criminal law, and none of them ever read or watch that kind of thing, as the inaccuracies are far too bothersome to make it enjoyable (or to make it enjoyable for anyone watching TV with them while they scream about shoecovers or exhumation procedures. Grin

The problem with novelists in general (not genre fiction specifically) is that unless you stick to writing strictly of things you have yourself experienced (in ways that might be as restrictive as only writing characters who are your own generation, sex and nationality, doing things in settings you are very familiar with), you are up against the things you don't know you don't know, so you can't research them. Hence, as a very obvious example, all the vast amounts of Harry Potter fan fic in which Hogwarts has study halls, hall passes, nerds and jocks, and in which Hermione wears a jumper and pantyhose.

An editor isn't going to know these unknown unknowns, either, unless you are writing a character who happens to chime with either his/her own experience or have chosen for setting an area they happen to be expert in. Even historians of a specific period will often not know the kinds of things a novelist needs to know, and besides, the world is not full of experts in field x.criminal barristers/forensics specialists sitting about desperate to do free (or even paid for) reads for novelists.

I'm currently writing something that has an architect as a key character, and while I have researched, asked architects I know lots of questions, and will be asking an architect friend to skim a full draft for any egregious errors, I'm sure he will find some that I didn't avoid.

Saschka · 22/07/2024 14:32

Treaclewell · 10/04/2024 20:49

I've remembered another American female author's blunder. She, and I've forgotten her name, had adopted Sherlock Holmes to the extent of legally defending her rights to him, I think. Anyway she has him living in East Dean, keeping bees, as per Doyle, when a murder occurs in a chalk pit, which is when I got suspicious, because the plot hinged on that pit, by Exeat Bridge, and I had to get the downloadable BGS map out to check where there were outcrops of Clay-with-Flints or Lenham Beds or other things on the top of the Chalk, not down in the Cuckmere Valley. If you're going to outdo Doyle, you should get the map right, even ordering a paper one. I got fed up with her female partner to Holmes - much too young - and gave up after that. I found the printouts in my study the other day. She had, I think, used the OS maps for local topography, so forgive her that.
I even went and field walked a bit to see if she had and picked the clay or whatever it was and transposed it. Nope.

Which East Dean? There’s one just south of Friston in East Sussex, and one near Chichester in West Sussex. Had she mixed the two up?

Treaclewell · 24/07/2024 07:29

The East Sussex one.

PhotoDad · 24/07/2024 07:46

I read Patrick O'Brian's epic seafaring saga while it was being published. He got a very minor character's name wrong and it annoyed me! About four books later, his main character said something like, "Oh! Remember that time I forgot your name? Sorry about that."

EmpressaurusOfTheScathingTinsel · 24/07/2024 08:00

One of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club books mentions Lidl delivery vans. Presumably he doesn’t shop there.

EmpressaurusOfTheScathingTinsel · 24/07/2024 08:00

PhotoDad · 24/07/2024 07:46

I read Patrick O'Brian's epic seafaring saga while it was being published. He got a very minor character's name wrong and it annoyed me! About four books later, his main character said something like, "Oh! Remember that time I forgot your name? Sorry about that."

I love this!

LesserSpottedAlligator · 24/07/2024 08:41

I love the Outlander books by Diana Gabaldon, but goodness they need a decent editor.

The last one, book 9, is terrible. My favourite mistake is one character getting to Oxford from Inverness in about 4 hours 😃

mimbleandlittlemy · 24/07/2024 11:17

LesserSpottedAlligator · 24/07/2024 08:41

I love the Outlander books by Diana Gabaldon, but goodness they need a decent editor.

The last one, book 9, is terrible. My favourite mistake is one character getting to Oxford from Inverness in about 4 hours 😃

Went through the Stones in Oxford and came out the Stones in Inverness?!!😃

ifIwerenotanandroid · 25/07/2024 17:27

Not a mistake in terms of the times in was written in, but I thought you might appreciate this. I've been listening to a dramatisation of Unnatural Death by Dorothy L Sayers (with the fabulous Ian Carmichael) & it's got casual misogyny, racism & even a bit of lesbian scolding/conversion therapy. A young woman in a lesbian relationship with (SPOILER ALERT) a murderess is told by an older lady that that sort of thing is for a man & a woman, & one day she'll meet the right man. Then the young lesbian gets murdered anyway.

I'd been wondering why I hadn't come across this story before. Now I think I know why.

SheilaFentiman · 25/07/2024 17:36

Love Ian Carmichael.

There’s some casual antisemitism in a couple of the books also.

ifIwerenotanandroid · 25/07/2024 18:16

Love Ian Carmichael.

In this one, he/LPW suddenly goes into a silly persona & voice at one point, & it's hilarious.

WelcomeMarch · 25/07/2024 18:37

A young woman in a lesbian relationship with (SPOILER ALERT) a murderess is told by an older lady that that sort of thing is for a man & a woman, & one day she'll meet the right man. Then the young lesbian gets murdered anyway.

Two lesbian relationships, surely? The murderer's aunt and previous victim is depicted as in a long-term relationship with a (rather splendid) other woman.

ifIwerenotanandroid · 25/07/2024 19:21

I'd forgotten her in the welter of names & relationships! Nobody tried to convert auntie, though. Well, not that we're told about. I was just a bit gobsmacked at Miss Climpson lecturing the young woman & the unsubtle magazine cover stuff (or was it a book? I was crocheting while listening & I may have paid less attention than I should have, at times when I was counting stitches or deciding on colours).