Kent wrote:
>A poster mentioned a hockey plotline in Steve
Hamilton's Winter of
>the Wolf Moon. Clearly Hamilton has little idea about
hockey as he
>has former baseball catcher Alex McKnight putting on
the goal pads
>for the first time and "stoning" a team of high-level
players in a
>game. This leads to a confrontation in a bar
following the game
>between McKnight and the opposition's star player
that kicks off the
>storyline. As a long-time hockey player, I can
guarantee that a team
>of "ordinary" players would score almost at will
against a goalie
>with little skating and no goaltending experience.
These guys were
>supposedly experienced players who were very upset
because they
>couldn't score on McKnight. It ruined the book for
me.
I hate to sound like Rick Mercer here, but Hamilton seems to
show a similar dodgy (and occasionally patronizing) knowledge
of not just hockey but of Canada in general. The line that
got me in BLOOD IS THE SKY was something about how Toronto
was a large city "by Canadian standards."
Like, it's one of the largest cities on the continent, easily
larger than most American cities last time I checked, but
it's only large
"by Canadian standards"?
And fellow Michigan writer Loren Estleman displays a similar
iffy knowledge of Canada in a recent western of his, where he
has the Mounties roaring into the battle in the 1800s waving
the maple leaf flag that first made its appearance in the
1960s.
And his latest Amos walker novel, RETRO, while another solid
read, is marred (at least for me) by a similarly cartoonish
vision of Canada, with a Toronto detective agency actually
calling itself the Loyal Dominion Enquiry Agency and sporting
both a maple leaf flag and a Mountie in its Yellow Pages
display ad. What, no hockey players or moose?
I dunno -- Detroit isn't that far from the Canadian border.
Maybe it's just the Michigan school system.
(Yeah, I know. Some guys get all out of shape over mistakes
about guns, I get miffed about errors about Canada. Maybe we
can "educate" a few of them "foreigners" at Bouchercon this
year...)
--
Kevin
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 02 Sep 2004 EDT