That said, however, I must say I am annoyed by errors that I
do
recognize as such. Not being in the law trade (neither
enforcement nor
breaking), my first hand knowledge is minimal, so this
doesn't happen a
lot. And now that I think about it, with the exception of a
couple of
books like Dave Simon's great Homicide, I'm really mostly
checking
fictional reality against other fictional realities. So I
wonder how
many times I have taken something factual to be a mistake
simply because
it does not jibe with the way the element is usually wrongly
handled in
the mysteries I read.
One other thing sort of on this subject, it has become an
incredible
cliche in contemporary private eye novels for a witness being
questioned
to say, "Oh, you're a private eye like on TV? Like Magnum,
Rockford,
insert name here?" "No ma'am, it's not nearly so excting." I
have
nothing against reflexiveness in art, sometimes I get a big
kick out of
it, but this has become a terribly overused way for an author
to tell
readers that they are getting the real deal. It was slightly
amusing
the first ten or twenty times, but it now seems to be
required of every
private eye in book, TV or movie.
Mark
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