# Clueless writers



## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

We've all read passages where the writer gets into an area he's unfamiliar with and gets the details wrong. Mystery writers are especially prone to this. Mrs. W is a big mystery reader and occasionally passes one along to me.

A recent example took place in Edinburgh, by a writer who seemed never to have been to a concert in his life. The victim fell to his death fron the second balcony after the concert was over. Conveniently, there was no one in the hall across the way who might have seen something, and no audience member bothered to notify the investigating authorities that the victim had not attended the concert alone.

Moreover, the amateur detective who solved it paged quickly through the concert program, and noted that the first half consisted by music by Mahler, Schubert, and [some Scot I'd never heard of], and the second half of a work by Stockhausen. Aside from the fact that no orchestra (even an amateur bad one) would structure a program like that, I can't think of any combination of works by Mahler, Schubert, and [Scotsman] that could possibly be fit into half a concert. (Yes, maybe some lieder, but the author isn't that smart.)


----------



## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

All composers had interest in mythology (in Scotland there is a rich tradition as well), so in theory one could compose a concert programme of vocal works/excerpts with those composer names.


----------



## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Even writers strong on research make horrible choices. Ian McEwan's _Amsterdam_ is a case in point. One of two main characters is England's greatest modern composer, one Clive Lindey. Through nearly the whole book McEwan's descriptions of the composition process as Lindey crafts his latest symphony are pitch perfect. One might have wondered if McEwan had himself been a professional musician or perhaps even a composer. (SPOILER ALERT) But the denouement falls flat. Lindey is working under a commission deadline and he has a vision for the coda of his finale that he fails to realize because of the time constraint and other distractions. If only he had just a little more time! In real life, of course, a composer would just rework the last thirty measures for the next performance and the publisher would have been waiting for corrections from the first performance before the final printing. In McEwan's novel this minor problem is blown into an irrevocable disaster. Despair follows and Clive and his lifelong best frenemy have each other involuntarily euthanized. The worst part of the reading experience is that McEwan proved himself capable of writing intelligently about music but then completely blew it in the last ten pages.


----------



## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

some of the writers can show a lack of knowledge. Not only in music, but also in medicine and science. Especially crime novels and some bad scifi books. The descriptions of medical procedures are just wrong, descriptions of diseases, traumas and deaths untrustworthy. The science in a scifi book violates basic laws of physics. The description of hypnosis in the Hypnotist is silly etc. It usually ends with me deciding not to give that particular author another chance.


----------



## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

In "A Gentleman in Moscow," Amor Towles, the author, adds a fourth movement to Dvorak's violin concerto.


----------



## drmdjones (Dec 25, 2018)

On the other hand, Herman Hesse appears knowledgeable in The Glass Bead Game.


----------



## Oldhoosierdude (May 29, 2016)

As a writer, I am afraid of that very thing, getting a basic fact incorrect. If I am in unfamiliar territory I either write something else or I research the you know what out of it and try to nail it down. One thing for sure, a reader somewhere will spot an inconsistency and let you know. Not exactly related, but I had a story at an online magazine once and a comma was missing in a sentence, somehow the magazine editor missed it also, but readers didn't. I misspelled a famous athletes name one time and an editor caught it, boy did I feel like a dummy! But to the OP's post, yeah, it appears the author was relying on the ignorance of the readers to CM. Evidently the editors were ignorant also or figured it to be an unimportant detail.


----------

