I am reading some historical romance drek …and the woman in it is using chloroform to stop from changing into a werewolf [don’t ask … the book was a freebie and I was stuck in a waiting room for 3 hours]
She was complaining internally about how her supply of chloroform was almost gone and how difficult it was in the wild west of the 1890s to get more.
No, you couldn’t just walk to the nearest pharmacy and get the pharmacist to just hand over laudanum, cocaine, ether, chloroform … hell, I had a cough syrup that was OTC in the 60s with chloroform in it …
A little research could have been done by calling the nearest university with a department of pharmacology and they could have told them what would have been commonly available sigh
I got a book of halloween romance novellas for bathroom reading. I stopped reading one story early on when the author said that a character taught at ivy league Dartmouth College - in Vermont. :smack: I figured if she couldn’t be bothered to google which f’ing state the college was in, it probably wasn’t going to be a worthwhile read even on the can.
This doesn’t make any sense. Are you trying to say that chloroform WOULDN’T have been readily available then (so she shouldn’t have been relying upon it), or that it WOULD have (so she shouldn’t have any trouble getting it)?
*It sounds like the character’s problem wasn’t that chloroform wasn’t available anywhere, but that it wasn’t available where she was. If she was in a remote area (“the Wild West”) it seems plausible enough that she couldn’t just pop into the general store and buy a big ol’ bottle of chloroform whenever she liked.
One book I read many years ago that was so filled with such inaccuracies it’s hard to believe it was even published.
One example: As the main character was driving north out of Palo Alto, Ca heading north to San Francisco, stops en route in Santa Cruz.
For those who are not familiar with the SF Bay Area, you get to Santa Cruz by going south out of Palo Alto, then west and over a two lane freeway through the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Later, the same character makes a 300 yard shot with a Colt Python (2 inch barrel) to shoot a driver through the windshield. The scene takes place in downtown San Francisco on a Friday afternoon with the streets clear of traffic and parked cars.
Just about any book by an author that uses San Francisco for local color, without clearly having lived there.
One recent book I read involved a young military woman out for a jog in Golden Gate Park and getting atatcked, so they went to interview her military husband at their house in St. Francis Wood.
I imagine the author looked at a map, saw that it was only 4 miles from GGP to St. Francis Wood, looked like a straight line down 19th ave, then stopped her research.
Everyone who lives there knows how hilarious this is. First of all, St. Francis Wood is one of the oldest and wealthiest neighborhoods in San Francisco, and demographically it isn’t what I would call “young.” Second, if we assume that there exists any young couple that lives there, they would never jog to Golden Gate Park down 19th avenue, as it is the most clogged artery in the Outer Sunset. I won’t even WALK down that street. Thirdly, why would they jog all the way down there for a workout when they could more easily jog around Lake Merced, which is about two blocks from there, and then maybe down Sunset Highway?
Finally, for you military folks out there: how far would you be allowed to live from your base? They supposedly were stationed at The Presidio, which is 8 miles away as the crow flies, and would take roughly 30 minutes to wind your way there in rush hour.
Oh, and there hadn’t been a base there since 1995, which was about eight years before this book was written. Nice work!
I liked Stephanie Barron’s novels about Jane Austen, detective. Even though the formula began to seem a bit threadbare. (Although I still think they’d make some fine BBC production; after all, there as a war going on–against Nappy. Jane had brothers in the Navy. Written & cast well, with fine historical background, I’d watch them.)
In the last one I read, Barron included a chapter from her new book–not in the series. The hero was of the Irish gentry & was contemplating a return home from London to serve in the Irish Parliament. In the middle of the 19th century.
The Act of Union in 1800 was a fairly important event in Irish history. So I tossed the book aside & crossed Barron off my list…
Alistair MacLean, of The Guns of Navarone fame tried to write a western thriller. Breakheart Pass. As Wiki charitably puts it, “Maclean was less successful capturing an authentic tone of the frontier American West, and the 1975 movie version starring Charles Bronson proved to be more popular with the public than the novel.”
It was immediately apparent he had not done one lick of research regarding 1870s Nevada in general or American railroad practices in particular. I didn’t quite throw the book across the room, but I never read another word by Mr. MacLean
I was stationed at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii but lived in Kahuku, which was over a half hour drive away in good traffic (which I had going to work at 5AM but most assuredly NOT coming back in the evening, when the tourists were rubbernecking on that fucking 2-lane road…)
ETA: Coincidentally enough to your novel, I outprocessed from the Army at the Presidio, just before they closed it.
This might sound stupid, but I was annoyed by JK Rowling’s depiction of Viktor Krum’s accent. It in no way resembles an actual accent of a Bulgarian speaking English. It just grates on me to read. I bitched about this once in my LJ and then excused her because I thought it might be a difficult thing to research, but was proven wrong when Elenfair immediately got back to me with an excellent description of a Bulgarian accent that she just happened to have lying around or something. So apparently JK just didn’t bother to research, she just went with what was, in her mind, a stereotypical “Eastern European” accent. But it’s really bad.
if you could see over the counter in a pharmacy, and had the cash you could get pretty much any chemical you could ask for, and they could compound.
Just because it was being used for anaesthetic, toothpaste and huffing to cure hysteria and womens collywobbles … It was actually fairly commonly used for all sorts of issues, and very commonly available tended to mean it was widely available even in many of the smaller towns. It was a very popular patent medicine.
She was traveling in large towns at the time, the 1890s in Kansas, towns that the writer claims had several thousand people and were very settled.
Do keep in mind that Missouri and Kansas were the Wild West fairly late =)
Varies by command. mrAru and I live 25 miles north of Groton CT in Canterbury CT, and one guy in his shore division when we first moved up here was waivered to live in Waterbury, some 80 miles away [he had previously been on recruiting duty and had bought a house, and it was his final 2 years before retirement.
Normally they prefer no more than 30 minutes from your duty station.
Point taken – but Hanover is right on the river. A teacher at Dartmouth could easily live in Vermont, crossing the Connecticut River (by bridge, of course) to go to work. Particularly if the plot line involves differences between New Hampshire and Vermont law, or some other gimmick involving the difference in the two states.
Holy cats, I just remembered one of my own—and it’s so incredibly geeky that I feel ashamed to mention it.
Well, what the hell…
There was a Star Trek: The Next Generation paperback quite a few years ago. I forget the title, but the main plot was the Enterprise coming to the aid of some planet that was—I forget the malady. Their sun was exploding, or the planet was going to explode, I forget. The gist was: the world only had a few days or weeks of life left, there was nothing anybody could do to stop it [sup]probably this changed later, I don’t know—you’ll see why[/sup], and the Enterprise was the only ship that could get to them in time. Thus setting up the agonizing with the command crew, and the planet’s government—who would they try and evacuate and save? The Enterprise, after all, could only accomodate maybe a thousand extra passengers…
Okay, so the problem with that? A Galaxy class starship, according to all (canon!) technical materials, is designed to take fifteen thousand people in an emergency evacuation.*
Now, in fairness, what kind of person would be expected to know this? Well…probably people who actually read Star Trek novels. Y’know, the sole target audience. :smack:
One of the few novels—or books, period—I never finished, by choice.
*I mean, that’s still a thin slice of a planet’s population to work with, and you could still squeeze a lot of drama out of it. But it’s not as bad as what seemed an artificially small number the author chose—either out of a lack of research (or imagination), or a try for cheap pathos.
This requires actually having a pharmacy in the area, though. From your description, it sounded like the heroine’s problem was that there wasn’t a pharmacy, not that the pharmacy didn’t have chloroform.
*I personally would not assume that any given late-19th century Kansas town of a few thousand people had its own pharmacy. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. This is a question that would indeed require the author to do some research, but of a totally different (and rather more difficult) kind than you suggested in the OP. Even if the author was lazy on this point, the idea that a late 19th century woman in a frontier town might have trouble getting chloroform in a hurry doesn’t strike me as implausible at all. There might have been A pharmacy in the area but there certainly wouldn’t have been a pharmacy on every corner, and a trip of even a few miles takes time on foot.
But A Rustle In The Grass is probably the runner-up.