Kent,
Re your question below:
"Am I the only person who can be turned off this quickly by
mistakes of this type?"
I certainly can be if the story is predicated on technical
accuracy, as in, for example, a police procedural. If
technical accuracy is clearly not the aim of the writer, I
tend to cut a bit more slack. Hence, errors in police
procedure bother me less in, say, a Charlie Chan novel or a
Roderick Alleyn novel than in a Luis Mendoza novel.
And it's not just errors in police procedure that bother
me.
I recall an Edgar nominee a few years back, in which a
Catholic background is a major part of the setting, in which
a priest hears the confesson of a murderer and immediately
goes and tells someone about it. He also referred to the
murder as "a violation of the First Commandment."
In the first place, as any Catholic knows, the Seal of
Confession is absolutely sacrosanct. That the priest in this
novel not only violated the seal, but did so without any
apparent thought, hesitation, or consideration was totally
unbelievable.
That he would refer to the commandment against murder as the
"First Commandment" was just laughable. In Catholic
tradition, the commandment "Thou shalt not kill," comes
fifth. In Protestant and Jewish tradition it's regarded as
the sixth. The First Commandment, in all three traditions, is
"I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods
before Me."
In another book, set in my home town, San Francisco,
purporting to be the product of much copious research, the
Mayor says something in the first few pages about a "meeting
with the City Council." I stopped reading at that point.
Anyone who'd done copious research about The City would've
known that the legislative body in San Francisco isn't called
the City Council but the Board of Supervisors.
If the book is predicated on its authors having sweated the
details, than I expect the details to have been
sweated.
JIM DOHERTY
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