I like Adriana Trigiani’s novels, really I do, but she doesn’t know her way around the Appalachians outside Virginia. I’m reading Milk Glass Moon right now, and before I even get to the first plot point, there’s a mistake on page 7!
I’ve lived in NC all my life, most of it near the area referenced, and I was not aware the mountains had picked up and moved east. A quick look at Messrs. Rand & McNally would have shown that the mountains are one and a half, two hours from Greensboro, depending on traffic.
For some reason, I seem to attract novels that make Greensboro mistakes. In Orson Scott Card’s Homebody, the main character, a man who has never been to G-boro before in his life, is able to make it all the way across town in twenty minutes. Maybe if he drove a rocket car, but he was a contractor with a beat-up old truck. Uncle Orson, you really should have known better. You live in the fricken traffic jam!
I know I can’t be the only person whose run across these. What’s your “favorite” geographical mistake?
Perhaps she meant Greenville, and just mixed up the state?
Naw, she probably didn’t bother to look at a map.
Like James Patterson in “Kiss the Girls.” The evil, mean killer decides to drive from Durham to Chapel Hill. Instead of just telling us that, Patterson figures he’ll wow us with his geography skills. He then writes about how the killer gets on I85 South in Durham and takes it to I40 East to Chapel Hill. While reading the whole paragraph I kept wondering why the killer didn’t save thirty minutes and a gallon of gas by taking 15/501 straight into Chapel Hill? Better yet, why didn’t Patterson look at a fargin’ map?
Ok, I know this isn’t a novel but a song but it has always struck me. Chuck Berry’s song Memphis TN. He must never have visited the south part of Memphis or Memphis for that matter. There are no ridges in Memphis and barely any hills. the closest thing we have is the bluffs downtown on the river. Maybe just poetic license.
“Help me information to get in touch with my marie
She’s the only one who’d phone me here from memphis, tennessee
Her home is on the southside, high upon a ridge
Just a half a mile from the mississippi bridge”
Pepper Mill has an example she loves – a “historical” romance where the geography-addled author writes about “Cornwall, near the border of Scotland…”
As I’ve remarked on this Board before, authors writing mysteries about Salt Lake City often seem to screw up, starting with Arthur Conan Doyle’s very first Sherlock Holmes novel, “A Study in Scarlet”, which puts the Salt Flats to the East of the future Salt Lake City, so the Mormon pioneers have to walk through them to get to where SLC is going to be (The Salt Desert is on the West). Robin Cook then screwed up SLC geography in his novel Tabernacle.
I’ve mentioned this several times, but in the shots of the tidal wave hitting New York in The Day After Tomorrow, Long Island (including Brooklyn and Queens) is completely absent. Also, the wave would have had to have come from inland New Jersey to hit at the angle it did (even though it was originally shown to have come from an easterly direction). Finally, the Empire State Building is portrayed as being north of the New York Public Library; it is actually eight blocks south.
Nit-pick: It’s “just beyond the ridge,” not “high upon a ridge.” At least in Johnny Rivers’s version of the song, which I thought was the original (but I’m not sure about that).
Not in a book but on the friggin’ BBC News: When the airplane crashed in Queens November 12, 2001, the anchor announced: There was a plane crash in New York City today but on the other side of the Hudson River.
Either they moved the Hudson when I wasn’t looking, or Europeons can’t tell the Hudson (separates Manhattan from New Jersey) and East (separates Manhattan from the rest of NYC) apart.
Arthur C. Clarke once had the sun on Mars come up in the west and then tried to shrug it off as poetic license. Feh!
Arthur C. Chesbro wrote a crime novel partially set in Seattle. He didn’t take the time to actually look up the names of streets here, just made them up. Almost all streets in Seattle have some kind of geographic designation (i.e. NW or SE). None of the streets he created had these designations. If he’s not willing to do the effort, why should I be willing to read his book?
The movie The Fabulous Baker Boys opens with Jeff Bridge’s walking from his apartment in Pioneer Square to his job playing piano in the Denny Regrade area of Seattle. In what’s supposed to be a continuous trudge, sometimes he’s walking uphill and sometimes downhill. However, it’s an all uphill trip in the real world. That scene got big laughs from its Seattle audience.
In Big there’s a car chase that starts in midtown Manhattan. The car being chased makes a turn and suddenly is driving through Wall Street, which is several miles from midtown. Manhattan’s a small island but not that small.
I think we can takle as a given that car chase scenes in movies have nothing to do with real geography. Try to square the chase scene in the James Bond movie Diamond are Forever with the reality of 1971 downtown Las Vegas.
Pretty much all of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He had never actually been to Romania, and all the descriptions and locations there are out. He also had Dracula’s first residence be in ‘Purfleet, London.’ Purfleet is not part of London, and while it is now very close to some of ‘Greater London,’ in Stoker’s time it was just a dock town 2o miles from London. Purfleet is actually part of Thurrock, where I grew up, and I’ve always wondered why the town didn’t make as much of its connection as Whitby has.
The same area, Thurrock, featured in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Now, this isn’t quite the same thing, because it was just film-makers using a convenient location, but Thurrock (specifically West Thurrock, were the funeral is filmed) is not a ‘grim town in the North,’ as the script and novelisations say. It’s a grim town in the South.
How about the recent film Troy, which has Sparta as a coastal city? Look at any map of Greece to see how true that is. I know that movies based on Greek mythology usually have an abysmal record for accuracy (Look at Perseus Against the Gorgon/ Son of Hercules against the Gorgon/Perseo l’Invincible, which thoroughly mucks up the legend of Perseus), but I’d expected better of Wolfgang Peterson.