[Pulpmeister]

I dislike glaring errors, such as silencers fitted to revolvers. They don't work on revolvers at all. Most of the noise comes from the gap between the cylinder and barrel.

(I'm no gun nut. I just happen to know.)

One of my favourite glaring errors was in a Modesty Blaise novel, in which Weng, Modesty's factotum, opens the rear door of her Rolls-Royce Camargue to let a passenger out. He'd have needed an angle-grinder; Camargues are two door coupes.

The "had I but known" school, already mentioned, is another bugbear.

So too is padding with technical stuff. I don't belong to the techno-geek school, so unless it's seriously relevant for plot purposes, I don't have any interest in the weight, paint colour, series number, designer's name, factory it was built in, quantity of explosives and what chemical formula, foreman of the production line, which hillside the grapes grew on, engine capacity, for every damn thing in the book.

Which reminds me of another glaring technical error in an otherwise entertaining high-finance novel of the modern City of London: The Dealer, by I think Paul Kilduff.

First a three-litre Rolls-Royce (not since 1929, and it was 3.1 anyway!) and then a V6 Bentley (never).

I go along with dodgy foreign language text, too, How hard is it to get it right? Not difficult. Some years ago, on another forum, I asked, rather jokingly, how do you say "What do you mean I can't have the room I booked?" or something, in Italian. I got an answer from an Italian within five minutes. The odd thing was, when I got to Rome, that very problem did arise, and I'd forgotten what I had been told!

Needless variations of "said". A very serious offender was the late E Phillips Oppenheim, who had to have a dialogue tag on virtually every bit of speech, whether it needed it or not, and with almost monomaniacal determination, avoided the word "said", replacing it with things like "begged" when no one was begging, "confided" when nothing was being confided, etc. I made a list once from just 10 pages of one of his novels, and got these:

declared, assured, acknowledged, begged, insisted, exclaimed, pointed out, observed, pleaded, remarked, admitted, reflected, whispered, directed, scoffed, murmured, inquired, muttered, enjoined, complained,; laughed, cried, offered and sighed.