There’s a bridge book I’ve got where the author has the wrong partner playing the hand, forgetting that North bid an artificial Two Diamonds earlier so should be declarer in Seven Diamonds.
And a chess book where the commentator gives a winning line for White that overlooks a simple mate in three.
I shake my head every time.
Also, famously, Lord of the Flies has them use Piggy’s spectacles to focus the sun’s rays to start a fire. He’s short-sighted - those are diverging lenses.
One of J.T. Edson’s Westerns re-emphasises that the Ysabel Kid isn’t much of a gunfighter - it is said to take him a minute to draw and fire. ???
Christine was another Stephen King book that had me shaking my head. It takes place in the fictional town of Libertyville, PA, which is described as being near Monroeville in Allegheny County, and about 15 miles from Pittsburgh. The characters in the book are all Philadelphia Phillies fans. Really? Phillies fans in the middle of Pirates territory? They might as well be Giants fans in L.A. :rolleyes:
Some trashy crime novel I can’t even remember the name of had the male protag getting a handjob from a woman, and she stops him from ejaculating by putting her thumb over his urethra.
:dubious::smack:
Uh sure, all I could think was that the author was a woman but even then that is baffling. To be clear the text suggested she stops him from having an orgasm this way, to tease him.
I’m reading a The Enemy Within by James Craig right now. It’s a good thriller about a humble London cop uncovering corruption and scandal within the Establishment. (I suspect that he’ll find there are some people who are above the law.)
Be that as it may, I’ve reached the point where he discovers that the murders he’s investigating are all linked to an elite Cambridge University drinking club whose members are now high-status politicians, businessmen etc. Realising this is going to cause problems, he discusses with his sergeant how to proceed and they agree that first thing tomorrow morning he should brief his Superintendent. He then leaves the murder scene, walks through carefully described London twilight to his police station and immediately briefs his Superintendent. I had to flick back and forth thinking “Morning? Evening? When? What?”.
.
The book having little to do with the eventual movie certainly hasn’t stopped them from publishing the novel as a tie-in to the film in plenty of other case – *Ice Station Zebra, The Osterman Weekend, * the Bond movie Diamonds are Forever. I KNOW the reason they did it was because of a disparity between the film and the source. It just seems weird for them to do so, which is the point of this thread.
Your argument could be as easily applied to the earlier example of Total Recall – the film exhausts the subject matter of Dick’s We Can Remember it from you Wholesale in the first twenty minutes, with the rest supplied (I have argued) from Robert Sheckley’s The Status Civilization and a bit of A Princess of Mars thrown in (without any attribution, I note). They could have published one of the collections of Dick short stories, as they did when Minority Report was released, or the way they re-published a re-titled Best of Catherine L. Moore when the movie the Last Mimzy was released. But they didn’t. They chose to release a novelization of the bloated film.
There are multiple errors about climate and driving conditions in the Jack Reacher series that make me wonder about the rigor of the author’s research.
The worst of these involved an attempt to track a bad guy driving north on I-95 in Maine (using a transponder?), in which people were paralleling his travels on Route 1 north. You can go 65-70 mph on I-95. Route 1 is a sluggish tourist road with lots of towns, red lights and speed limits that are at best 35-45 mph on the open stretches, so you’d fall hopelessly behind fast if trying to track someone speeding north on the Interstate.
I have a beef with the people who write blurbs for the back of paperback crime and mystery novels. Often the plot summaries are dead wrong. Either they haven’t read the book or are making up stuff as they go along to make it sound better.
One thing always takes me out of Reacher novels. Reacher is an American, ex-military, and the story is told from his point-of-view, yet for some reason, every instance of the word “Tire” is spelled “Tyre”, in English fashion. It’s just jarring, like hitting a speed-reading bump.
I’m a fan of the Dresden Files books, but I’ve noticed that the author uses the word “jives” when he means “jibes”. You’d think someone would have caught that after 15 books.
Military and firearms errors get to me because of my previous experience with both.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve read that the protagonist 'took the safety off his Glock." Glocks don’t have safeties.
Also enlisted men in the Army calling Sergeants “sir.” Seen that quite a few times as well.
I have a military friend who is always quick to point out in books and movies when military people are on the radio using “repeat” - which means fire, instead of “say again.” So there will be a confusing scene where the character says “Hold your fire! Repeat! Hold your fire!”
I never understood why the French were so uptight about secrecy in Day of the Jackal. They already know the assassin is traveling under a false passport; that’s enough to arrest him for illegal entry into the country without revealing the plot against deGaulle. They could also just put out an APB for him after he steals his second automobile.
In The OdeSSa File, Mueller makes sure to park his Jaguar up the street from one Nazi’s house before he knocks on the door in his old man’s disguise. But the nanny who answers the door is turned on by the sight of a young man with a sports car.
In Icon, there’s a scene in Moscow where two men wait for the light to turn green before they cross ul. Tverskaya (the main N–S thoroughfare) near the Kremlin. The only way you cross ul. Tverskaya at any point is through a pedestrian tunnel, unless you want to get hit by a car or nailed for jaywalking. Its stoplights are strictly for controlling autmobile traffic.
ALTERNATIVELY…
I once found a passage about a third of the way through Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears that literally made no sense whatsoever, not even after I had read it a half-dozen times!
Whoever was advising Clancy on Russians and the Russian language didn’t know either very well, as his books are full of related things that are either incorrect or just the author’s fantasies.
[QUOTE=terentii;17969327I never understood why the French were so uptight about secrecy in Day of the Jackal. They already know the assassin is traveling under a false passport; that’s enough to arrest him for illegal entry into the country without revealing the plot against deGaulle. They could also just put out an APB for him after he steals his second automobile.[/QUOTE]
I’m thinking one of us has misunderstood the book.
First of all, it’s 1962, so consider the communications and records of the era.
So they know he’s traveling under a false passport… but they don’t know his name, and the passport is effectively genuine and not detectible as a forgery.
I’m less clear on the APB (haven’t read the book for a few years) but it’s a bit of a needle in a haystack issue, especially given time and place. I don’t remember that they know about the second car until he’s already in Paris and preparing.
Keeping their knowledge of him secret keeps him from switching identities and plans to ones they have no information about, rather than ones they have a faint hope of tracking and blocking.
It’s not the technical difficulties involved (though I’m sure the French Security Police had radio and Telex networks by 1962 that allowed bulletins to go out nationwide without delay), it’s the level of secrecy they wanted to maintain.
As for the passport, the British themselves confirmed that it was obtained under false pretenses and had surely revoked it immediately.
True, he doesn’t get caught at the border or during his first night in-country because the information is simply too late in coming (though his hotel registration card is noted early the next morning). But again, that’s not the point.
The second car was the one he accidentally ran off the road. The police found his abandoned sports car at the scene and could presumably have figured out that he made off in a stolen vehicle, though it may have taken a while to identify it (but not all that long).
In other words, he committed a whole slew of crimes prior to murdering his lover, any one of which would have justified a nationwide manhunt out in the open. They could even have launched one using a ficticious charge, which no one would have bothered to dispute.
But time was of the essence: he had it, and they didn’t. Any tactic that bought him a few hours and moved him closer to Paris was in his favor. He wasn’t bound to any identity, or travel route, and he could commit any crime to further his progress without worrying about the consequences. The more he knew about their progress, the more effectively he could evade them.
