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 started reading the sample of Weyward but was stopped in my tracks by the swarm of bees hanging from a branch. It was referred to as a hive. Ffs.

I’ve set mine in a totally fictional world and I still keep having to do random bits of fact checking and research!

It's corporation dump in the preface by Sayers, and garbage dump in Harriet's comment, in my edition. (I haven't actually memorized the whole book -- it's on my bedside table.) I want an original edition now in case anything else was altered.

The typo on the first page of that book bugs me in every edition I've seen: 'blue-like flames', when it should be 'blue -- like flames'.

In defence of copyeditors and proofreaders, though, the mistakes you spot are the ones that got away. Nobody can see all the errors that did get caught.

I found a book called The Khan barely readable and it had been given “ crime book of the month “‘award by The Sunday Times. Firstly there were various aspects of the plot that were unbelievable additionally some of the policing / criminal justice aspects were so wrong. So, so wrong.

My offering is a crime novel set in France where the event was witnessed by a milkman. 😂

I love a good regency romance, and I was horrified recently when the author had completely misunderstood the concept of a dowry! She had a feckless father planning to marry his daughters off for the money he would get as their 'bride-price'
I just can't believe that anyone who sets out to write a regency romance hadn't read enough of them to know they've got it backwards?
Similarly, I was also annoyed by the regency heroine who perched in the sand dunes of Brighton gazing wistfully out to sea when she thought she'd been abandoned... not much sand round here! 😖

Yes!

Describing exiting tube stations by lift or whatever when I know there isn’t one. Can’t the author do some basic research. Or the geography of London by someone you can tell has never been here.

Also the way they often describe Dutch people as speaking of behaving doesn’t ring true at all (that bloody Oppenheimer film where Cillian allegedly speaks Dutch as well).

@WelcomeMarch I think it's original to Sayers and not altered, myself.

That’s true. I knew people who went to Australia in sixties to work. They went on a shop. Took weeks I believe.

A book called Sophie by Judith Saxton. Sophie starts to diet and loses three stone in a month, but also reflects on the weeks within that month when the scales refused to budge at all. That was quite an impressive diet.

I recently saw a play which was set where I grew up with a character of the age I would have been. At the interval I was raving about how accurate it was, the speech patterns, the tricks interests everything was spot on, so I assumed the author would have to be my age and from there. Another patron said no, they thought the same googled it and they were younger and America. We chatted for ages about how amazing that was. Then after the second half we came out and exchanged a look - it was full of slang from the nearest big city, events jumped decades either way and, while still good, wasn’t as magical. We reckon someone local worked really hard on Act 1 but they ran out of time after that.

I also don’t understand translating into Americanisms etc surely half the point of reading is getting into the world of the characters, pretty sure mum over mom doesn’t make it u readable.

I once read a modernised edition of a book I read as a child. The £sd had been converted to decimal, but the prices etc remained the same. So ten shillings, which would have been quite a lot of money for a teenager in 1950, when the book was published, became 50p in the 1990s.

One of my favourite novels uses 'teenager' despite it being set pre-WW2.

Another by the same writer (English) describes the sky as robin's egg blue. European robins lay off-white eggs with freckles.

And same author again has a character killed in a car accident but there wasn't a post mortem on the pissed driver.

Enid Blyton by any chance? This annoys me - any child with a brain in their head can work out these books were written at a different time and using shillings etc just adds to the feel of the book. Having random decimal amounts that make no sense makes them weird to read.

Yes and no - DS and I are reading a secret seven book at the minute, which has an “unaffordable” vet bill of £70 (it’s a working adult who can’t afford it, and the children are all horrified at the vast sum).

I’ve changed it to £7000, because even aged 6 DS knows that £70 isn’t credible.

I gave up on a well regarded UK set historical crime series by a US author who had no idea about titles, or about how the criminal justice system works. Or just decided to ignore the bits that didn't fit their plot. And no, a woman couldn't have been a magistrate at the time the book was set, but that was a fairly minor point compared to all the rest of the nonsense.

The author also had someone holding a particular rank in the British Army who was far too young to have that rank. I think that must have been pointed out, because there was an attempt to explain it away in a later book, but the character just wasn't believable.

(My copy of Gaudy Night, a 1978 edition, has Harriet saying 'corporation dump' and 'corporation garbage dump'.)

It seems rather churlish to complain about facts in a fantasy book but Platform 9 3/4 annoys me because as everyone who has been to Kings Cross knows platforms 9 & 10 are separated by tracks not by a brick barrier.

Didn't J K Rowling say, afterwards though, that she had Euston in her mind when she wrote the books - but mistakenly (at the time) thought it was Kings Cross?

Enid Blyton by any chance?

Not this one, it was A Dream of Sadler's Wells by Lorna Hill. But I've seen it done other books too.

Would it be unlikely in the UK? Only 7% go to private schools and most children go to their local school, don't they? They live in a small town...

Yes, it's completely ridiculous. Children grasp that money was different in the past without undue difficulty. (Why EB thought Black American soldiers talked about themselves in the third person and said things like 'Poor n----er, he afraid of the bad men, Little Missy!' is much harder to account for.)

It comes up in Antonia Forest's brilliant Marlow series, because although only about 18 months passes in the universe of the books, they were written between 1948 and 1982, and they are set when they were written, so you have extremely weird aspects you just have to accept, such as Ginty being claustrophobic because she was trapped in a cellar during the Blitz, but at the same time her younger sister is making herself up as a punk and people are watching Up Pompeii!! and complaining about Vatican II changes being implemented.

Another Galbraith one - we eventually learn that Robin’s father is a professor of sheep medicine at Durham vet school. But Durham doesn’t have a vet school!! So upsetting - I too was enraged cos I love them - as it would have been so easy to check, and it completely threw me out of her universe for a couple of chapters.

Dystopian fiction set in a world of global catastrophe and characters are still having coffees, cigarettes, and bananas as if trade hadn't ceased. And there is still petrol for driving.

"Also - a medieval murder mystery (sensing a theme here) where the heroine referred to metres instead of feet or yards."

I would appreciate this so that I could understand the distance.
It's not like the dialogue is going to be 100% how people spoke in the middle ages anyway, is it?