This is pretty belated, but since this thread has been bumped I’d like to point out, from the first post:
These are inconsistencies, not anachronisms (which would be something out of place temporally, like Archie writing his stories with a quill pen.).
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Same here, great characters, decent mysteries, and a light touch of humor.
IIRC, in several of those, the victim was knocked out first- then run over- sometimes to make it look like an accident.
Nor do i. The window is in the Front Room.
He does on a couple of occasions, the ones i remember were easy locks like on a suitcase. And he implies it several times.
I enjoy those books, Asey is a great character, along with Cousin Sid, etc Yes, she used that trick a lot.
Nope, it is clearly to the side so one can see Wolfe’s desk, etc.
All of RAH’s heroines “dimpled” to smile. Also, Heinlein will STOP the action and plot to have a character go off on some political diatribe, often wrong. The worst is The Moon is a harsh Mistress” which I found myself struggling to re-read recently due to this.
I enjoy Lee Child’s Jack reacher tales- but Jacks knowledge of guns is pretty pathetic. Example- a .38 special is considered way less powerful than a 9mm, but actually they are about the same- in fact bullet diameters are very close. And Cruise is a terrible Reacher- altho the films arent bad.
For many modern Popular Writer, their books are barely edited. Maybe once lightly to correct typos etc, but never to cut out lengthy sidetracks. Later Wheel of Time books showed this.
Rothfuss! The third Kingkiller book basically isnt coming out, despite the fact the Publisher has already paid him.
Cousin Syl.
That’s my favourite mystery series.
Often with a spellchecker. 
It is my second, after Nero Wolfe. But full of characters and a touch of humor.
I love all of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books and won’t hear a word said against them. However… on about my tenth re-read I start to realise that he over uses the word “carefully”. Once I noticed that, I stumble over it every time.
Hey, no hoo-hoo. He just wants you to understand TANSTAAFL. In nearly every book.
I love Pterry, too, but the thing about him that I didn’t mention in my OP is that he almost never uses the subjunctive mood (e.g., “If I were king,” instead of “If I was king.”)
Now, it makes perfect sense that at least some of his unsophisticated characters wouldn’t know to use the subjunctive, but none of them do, and he rarely uses it in the narrative, when it would be appropriate. It’s one of those thing I notice in reading and watching films and TV, and in real life, too, and I was disappointed to observe its absence in Pterry’s writing.
The other really annoying thing he did was write stories about Rincewind. I HATE that character. (But I still read those books every once in a while.)
Frank Herbert loves long pages of nothing but dialog. Often I’ll lose the trail of which line is being spoken or thought by which character in the dialog, and have to step back through lines to make sure I have the participants straight. Better breadcrumbing during the conversation would help.
Just a small thing. Roger Zelazny uses the word “chuckled” ALL THE TIME. When Corwin meets a crow in Book Five of the Amber series, he must have used that word a dozen or more times to describe the fooking thing.
The thing is- most of the rest of the characters are winners in some way. RW is just so poor loser everyman schnook, who happens to be lucky. Itis a nice contrast. But yes, not my fave either.
Rincewind is personally responsible for me not reading the discworld books until this year, he’s everything I despise in a character.
Fortunatelly my 4th or 5th attempt to break into discworld took the form of “Witches Abroad” a book completely free of any trace of Rincewind, I promptly read every other Rincewind-less book in the setting and even a couple were he appears as a secondary character. There is not enough money in the world to pay me to read an entire book with him as a main character though.
I honestly feel Asimov was, finally, out of his depth when he tried to do that. The combined sequelization was a mess of continuity errors and just plain ridiculousness.
I despise Rincewind too. He makes me cringe.
I’ve been listening to Agatha Christie in my car since I became disgusted with public radio (previously the only news I trusted besides The Skeptical Inquirer). There’s not a particular writing technique she engages in that bugs me, but what does needle me is her go-to fake country, Herzoslovakia, which she made up by stealing the first half of a region of then Yugoslavia, and the second half of then Czechoslovakia.
It’s a linguistic impossibility. “herzo” is Serbo-Croatian (a Slavic language), and more properly spelled “herce” for, basically, a duchy. It’s a family name, and when a large region had a family name, it meant that the family probably ruled the region and shared its name.
“Slovakia” means something like “Land of glory,” and it means that in pretty much all Slavic languages.
It’s weird to call a place both after its owners, and to call it “Land of Glory,” which is sort of a revolutionary name in E. Europe.
(Edit, never mind)
Rincewind isn’t that bad.
There, I said it!
In the Star Trek: I.K.S. Gorkon series by Keith R.A. DeCandido, he has the Klingons say the word “anyhow” an awful, awful lot.
Compared to whom?
I guess he’s marginally better than Flashman, since he’s not a rapist. I definitely cannot stand Harry Flashman (there, I said it!)
From my reading youth in ‘Biggles goes to war’, I remember the plucky little Maltovia vs the bad bully Lovitzna, both ‘somewhere on the eastern fringe of Europe’… 