Typos and editorial errors

I've come to accept that books published in the last decade or two, both in print format and as ebooks, will have typos in them. It's not entirely surprising with ebooks, since the transition from print to digital seems fraught with typo-traps, and there doesn't appear to be the same amount of time given to the publishing of ebooks that's usually given to print versions. You expect more of print titles, I think, but even these nowadays seem to have more typos in them that I've seen in books published in earlier decades. Even books published in the distant past, such as the 19th century, rarely have typos.

I've just finished reading Elly Griffiths' second Ruth Galloway murder mystery, The Janus Stone, on Kindle. It's a good read, the characters are well-drawn, and the mystery has enough red-herrings in it to keep from guessing what's up until well near the end. However, there were a number of typos in it - mostly words missing from sentences - as well as formatting issues, where there were paragraphs that proved to be unnecessary to the material in hand.

Many years ago I read a fascinating book on the man who edited most of F Scott Fitzgerald's books. This was Maxwell Perkins, a man also credited with getting Hemingway published as well as bringing Thomas Wolfe's books into a readable form. The book about him was, I think, Max Perkins: editor of genius by A Scott Berg.

Perkins didn't just take the manuscript and publish it, he assisted the authors to clarify details, tighten structure, make good decisions about changing things for the betterment of the book, and much more. He was more like a patron than an editor.

I mention Perkins because he's always seemed to me to be the epitome of a good editor: a man who could see faults in the overall book that eluded the writer himself, but also a man who would nit-pick and refuse to let anything faulty go by. He and Fitzgerald had some serious arguments about the latter's work.

By contrast, the editor of The Janus Stone - Jane Wood - should have picked up one major error, which I presume is also in the print form.

One of the characters, a Catholic priest called Hennessey, says, "What about the Holy Ghost? The most important one of the trilogy as far as I'm concerned." This statement is repeated a second time later in the book, when Ruth Galloway remembers him saying it.

I thought at first it was a clue that Hennessey wasn't who he said he was. No Catholic priest - indeed no minister of any Christian denomination - would ever call the Trinity the 'trilogy.' Quite apart from the fact that a trilogy relates to a series of three things, usually of books, but occasionally of other art forms.

Hennessey,however, is definitely a priest, and therefore is hardly likely to use the wrong word in this instance.

I know from my own experience of publishing ebooks just how hard it is to pick up every error - missing words are far more common than misspellings. But errors relating to well-known information should be picked up long before the book goes out into the world.

Galloway, as a character, is very prone to dismissing anything to do with religion. But surely Griffiths, although she has some wry things to say about Christianity in the course of this book, isn't so opposed to religion that she would put something so completely wrong in the mouth of one of her Christian characters.

Bring back Max Perkins and his ilk, I say!

Three Rendell movies

Here be spoilers...

We've watched three episodes from the ongoing series, Ruth Rendell Mysteries, over the last few days. They're not all from the same year, but have been bundled together as a package. The titles are Master of the Moor, Vanity Dies Hard, and A Case of Coincidence. 

Master of the Moor dates from 1994, and stars a youngish Colin Firth. It was made a year before his appearance in Pride and Prejudice. This was the least satisfactory of the stories. It seemed to be dragged out considerably over the three episodes. Firth plays Stephen Walby, a man whose main love is the moor. After meeting a woman artist working on it one day he's shocked to find her dead body the next. The detective working on the case immediately senses that Walby is the killer, and aims to charge him. Then another woman goes missing and Walby is able to lead the police to her body without difficulty. Meanwhile Walby's lonely wife, Lyn, played by Emma Croft, starts an affair with the young Londoner filling in at the local pet shop his for his sick uncle. He discovers that she's still a virgin, in spite of having been married for four years. Walby, whose mother left him suddenly when he was a boy, has been psychologically affected, and has an odd relationship with women. His father was also badly affected by his wife's departure, and, while he continues to work at his old job, is on medication and seeing a psychiatrist.
It's all a bit heavy going, not helped by the policeman seeming to be as odd as everyone else. A new character is introduced late in the proceedings (new in a sense; we've seen him before without knowing who he was - and he's odd too!) and is briefly suspected by Walby himself, and then Lyn is killed. The whole thing turns upside down and Walby and his Dad prove to be the murderers between them. Not one of Rendall's best - unless it's the adaptation that's at fault. The cast do their very best with it, but since they're all hiding things from each other it becomes a bit overwrought.
We were a bit inclined not to watch the second film, but it turned out to be much better, and keeps you guessing right till the end.
It concerns a wealthy woman who marries a younger man, who's not of the same station (as the woman's unpleasant uncle keeps reminding everyone). The main thrust of the story is that eventually the woman begins to suspect she's being poisoned and finally comes to the conclusion that it must be her husband, because he wants to get his hands on her money. But intertwined with this is a complex story about the woman's friend who apparently goes missing. Halfway through we think it's the husband who's killed her off. The suspicions keep shifting until at the end we realise that we should have known who the murderer was all along (we're kept guessing in part because we're not even sure that there has been a murder!) This was a much more satisfactory piece, with lots of red herrings, some clever casting (it has hints of Hitchcock's Suspicion, especially in the way it casts a handsome young man as the husband, but one who could easily be an outright liar), and a continually involving story.

Michael Fitzgerald, in a
completely different role.

The third film, A Case of Coincidence, is shorter than the other two, and concerns the murder of five women in a marshland area. Four of the women, it turns out, have been murdered by the same man (this is discovered in a rather odd way, and isn't very believable), but whether the fifth was killed by the same man or not, isn't so easy to work out...for the police, that is. We're pretty certain early on that she wasn't. Her husband, a top surgeon, lives something of a separate life from his wife, and after her death keeps fainting or sweating heavily or being given medication and put to bed (by a fellow-surgeon, a female, who's plainly madly in love with him) and not really getting back to work. His over-protective mother turns up and treats the woman surgeon like a kind of high-class maid, but the surgeon herself is equally over-protective. Fatally, as it happens.The half-wit murderer of the other four is accused of the fifth murder as well, and is hung. But the husband, as we guessed, murdered his wife, and seemingly because someone else has been tried and hung for the crime, can't be convicted. This seemed a bit odd.
However, the cast is superb, and does a terrific job with a rather unbelievable story (it's an adaptation of a short story by Rendall, and it seems almost as though the adaptor had got himself in a bit of a tangle). Michael Fitzgerald (see picture), as the 'half-wit' man convicted of the crimes, is marvellously moving.

Nobody Birds

The following piece was one of many I wrote for the weekly column, Column Eight. The pieces appeared in the Dunedin Star Midweeker in the early 1990s. I've edited it very slightly; there were also a couple of typos in the printed version. A now-deceased friend, Gaynor Smith, had cut it out of the paper and kept it with a host of other material. Her sister found it while going through Gaynor's multitude of papers.

Nobody Birds ˗ Column Eight ˗ November 8 1995

On one of several mornings lately when I haven’t been able to sleep through until a civilised hour, I got up and went for a walk. The day was overcast, the sun barely pinking the clouds. The cool air kept my hands in my pockets.

After wending my way round streets familiar to me through all my born days, I came across a blackbird sitting on a garage roof, singing his heart out.

I’d been aware of the birds all around me waking the day with their singing. I couldn’t help being aware of it, just as at night, if I happen to be in the Octagon or the Queens Gardens as the sun’s going down, I can’t help but notice thousands of sparrows setting themselves for the night by shouting and chattering all at once.

It’s as if they’re trying to hold back sleep ˗ or night ˗ like tired and boisterous children unwilling to go to bed, wearing their parents out with their caterwauling.

It’s easy to think that it’s only out in the open, in the country, that you really hear birds singing.

I remember lying in bed one morning in a place on Banks Peninsula, listening to a bellbird (so I called it, though it may not have been). Time after time he dropped his perfectly-formed notes into the still air, with the regularity of a tap dripping into a bath.

That morning is a glorious moment fixed in my memory.

But this blackbird, this particular morning, was a bird of a different feather ˗ of course. Not for him the hypnotically-repeated, fragrant full-formed notes.

No, he sat there and opened his throat, like a jazz singer in full flight, and the only consistent thing about his song was the regular pause between phrases when he took, I guess, a necessary breath.

He soared up and down the scales, he trilled, he twittered, he laughed, he sang a moment of beauty and topped it off with a scratch across a blackboard. He gave little screams interspersed with fragments from his favourite operas. He choked notes in mid-stream, and coughed. He threw music off the top of his head and caught it again, gave it a shake and a rattle and a roll, and turned it into a thing of beauty forever. He was an avian coloratura.

Across the road, oscillating on an electric wire, was another blackbird. He was doing some trapeze work with his song, swinging it back and forth in a much more regular pattern. Down the road another bird kept hitting his top note and sliding down the scale on a toboggan.

The French composer, Olivier Messiaen, spent a life-time recording bird songs and turning them, unaltered, into compositions for the piano and orchestra. (Personally, I think they lose something in the transition, though the attempt is admirable.)

But I think Messiaen would have found it impossible to cap

ture the wonder of this plain old blackbird’s song. I could only stand in awe as this minuscule scrap of creation gave forth praise to his Creator.

We’ve had a cockatiel in our house for many years. He’s lost whatever little bit of English he could speak, and he’s decided that chattering and squawking is sufficient to make his needs known. (Though he likes to join in when human singers come for a practice.)

Once in a blue moon, however, our cockatiel allows us to hear what he can really do with his voice. He opens his throat and puts Ella Fitzgerald to shame. Then with a casual cough he settles down and becomes just a nobody-cockatiel again.

Thinking entrepreneurially, I could see our cockatiel and that morning blackbird making a great duo. Borrowing a little, maybe, they could call themselves Bee Bee and Cee Cee Tee Winans, or the Daytime Nightingales, or even, Birds Blow the Whistle.