On 27 Sep 96, 12:37am, James Mcneill wrote to David Chessler
on the subject of "LIVING FOREVER":
 >    Mostly because I'm familiar with Browning's. I would think a detective
 >    would be, also, particularly if he carried one. At any rate, the error
 >    destroyed the illusion of the story for me.
In one of his books, (Clear and Present Danger, I think), Tom
Clancy has a US Special forces team running around South America.
He has them not wear camoflage uniforms, because the local armies
down there don't wear cammies. He has them wear what are
apparently old US "Fatigue" uniforms. He calls the color of these
uniforms "khaki."
"Khaki," from the Hindi word for dust, refers to a light tan,
sometimes called beige or suntan (or in the old Army, "pink"). He
meant the dark, somewhat brownish green called "Olive Drab," so
that the old fatigue uniforms were called ODs. Clancy is
supposedly known for his meticulous research in military affairs,
and this was in the paperback, not the first edition. So much for
the erudition of his readers, too. There's another error in the
book involving the use of Gatoraide in water purified with
Iodine, but I've checked, and apparently the military isn't
taught about the problem and its solution.
I just read a mystery by Susan Isaacs. In this one, the husband
of the narrator supposedly started an evening business selling
computers in peoples homes, with instruction, and ultimately
expanded it to a computer-based research business. Fine. Except
the chronology works out that he had to have been doing it about
1973-1975. There were no personal computers that early. Indeed,
the first Altairs came out about 1975, and the first Apples, not
till 1977. There was a desk-model IBM in the 70s, before the PC,
but it was never sold to individuals, but only to businesses by
IBM's sales force. In other words, the chronology is clearly
wrong.
I suspect that nearly every book I read has some errors of this
nature. I probably spot them in one book in five, and usually
just write a note in the margin and move on. Sometimes they are
errors of continuity, such as the author forgetting the weapon
a character is using. More often it's something that suggests I
have more detailed knowledge of something than the author. But I
often find this in technical books, in my fields of expertise, as
well, so I've learned to live with it.
--
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