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?

DrCoconut that would've really irritated me!

Jilly Cooper - Riders, in which Jake's dog (can't remember the name) weeps when he sees his master return from hospital. Nope, dogs can't cry.

Jilly Cooper - Rivals, in which a car turns right from Knightsbridge into Brompton Road. Nope, not possible at that junction (unless you're royalty!).

Petty, moi?

Thanks all for these! So many 😬

Back in the 90's I picked up a library book where someone had used the margins to note all the errors including that TCP hadn't been invented until years after the date the book was set in. No Google back then so they obviously knew their stuff

I don’t think that’s true, actually, though I know a lot of UK viewers of the tv adaptation struggled with it because it would be more unlikely in the UK. Absolutely, it wouldn’t have been implausible for her to board, but neither is it at all implausible for her to attend the local school. I mean, I think there are reasons within the story to explain it, too, but I don’t think it really needs explaining.

@Riverlee — no, a deeply obscure one!

And I did start Connie Willis’s Blackout, and, even leaving aside the errors and anachronisms, it just didn’t really work as a novel, I thought.

I haven’t read it but that would make me angry!! 😂

They even translated Harry Potter into American for the US editions- Mom instead of Mum- things like that. So pointless, stupid, and annoying.

A good publishing house will use copy editors, line editors and proof-readers on every book. Each of those mistakes should have been spotted.

Yes they did. The show Sex Education does the same thing as well. Makes a U.K. secondary and sixth form into a U.S. high school where the characters just decide to move to a new school for junior/senior years.

I stopped reading a book which misspelled Barack Obama on page one.

Also a book set during the war when one Jewish sister said to the other 'remember when people hating Jews wasn't even a thing?' 🙄🙄 Because that's how people spoke in the 1940s.

Not a book, but an ante natal relaxation session.

The woman on the tape (yes it was that long ago) said "imagine you are in a garden with daffodils and roses in bloom".

Well, I stopped relaxing and wanted to shout out that they aren't in flower at the same time.

a character had a twinge during pregnancy and was hospitalised to avoid a miscarriage. The writer has clearly never called an EPU who rarely see you till you’ve bled for a week! (Ectopic scans aside)

Yes, I find these things annoying. In one of the Richard Osman books a character goes to Northern Cyprus and spends euros. Nope - it's Turkish lira there.
I am an editor (mostly academic but I've done some fiction). Part of the job is watching for this kind of thing, checking, although authors are trusted to know what they're talking about, wrongly sometimes On my fiction editing course we were taught to watch out for, e.g. there's a body on the lawn, shot in the back. No-one recognises him. But you have to turn him over first!
I remember one book where someone is wearing a glamorous backless gown and then turns up the collar. And I've lost count of the number of people who are sitting down and then sit down (or stand up when they're already standing).

Was the second one The Book of Goose? If so I noticed and got annoyed by exactly the same thing!

Numerous novels where burnt out heroines from London are left Cornish seaside cottages by aged aunts/grandparents/godmothers. Said heroine then pops ups to London for the day (one went twice in a single day) to get her new Cornwall based business off the ground.

That is a minimum 10 hour round trip assuming the track at Dawlish hasn't been washed away. Again.

Can you tell it drives me crazy

drawnfrommemory yes it was!

Another one - a very successful US writer of a UK set series - had her characters going for a walk before breakfast in Scotland. In January.

I’m really struggling to get into a book at the minute because of inaccuracies. The two characters introduced are UK nationals but theirs names just don’t align with their supposed ages. It’s originally set in London and mentions a flat instead of an apartment and it mentions Labour and Green Party but then mentions a college degree majoring in education. One of the characters is an eternal student and just endlessly enrolling but not completing studies so it’s not that they went to the US for a degree.

I remember one from EastEnders - does that count?! Cindy (it was a long time ago!) was leaving on a train. Forget where she was going but it definitely wasn't to Croydon, but they'd filmed it on the bit just after Clapham Junction on the way to East Croydon which I travelled on every day so I recognised it!

There's a series of detective type novels set in North Wales. I quite enjoyed them until one of the storylines had someone getting a plane from the airport in Corwen (near where I am from)

Now there is a small airstrip there, if the sheep move out of the way, that gliders use, but it was hardly the sort of bustling airport a criminal could use to escape by

I know it was artistic licence but it's not that much further and you are in Liverpool where they have a real airport so it seemed unnecessarily unrealistic

I read a thread on here slating an author for not researching Mumsnet properly and assuming it was something you posted on and people do the 'you ok hun?' type of response.

I'd never heard of the author - JD Kirk - I've now read (well, audiobook) all his books and am eagerly awaiting the latest release. So that mistake earned that author at least one new reader.

Oh yes OP this sort of thing can ruin a good book for me! Just read one now ( wont name it) set in West Yorks but they use phrases that nobody would use!

A particular bugbear of mine is titles. So many novels have ‘Sir Winston Smith’ forever after referred to as ‘Sir Smith’ and his wife, Lady Julia (who is a Lady simply by virtue of her marriage).

Also one in which an important plot point relates to a lease coming to an end. One of the main characters was a lawyer who had clearly never heard of the Leasehold Reform Act (and didn’t event think to check the legalities around the ending of a lease)

You all need John Sutherland and his literary puzzles

Eastenders also screwed up on a character’s name. There was a minor character called Lorna. She left and came back….now called Laura! After some months, another character made a throwaway comment about the name change, but it was obvious they’d just realised they’d messed up.