By PJ Parrish

Okay, I’d like you to read this short scene from a book I grabbed off my shelf. See if you can figure out what’s wrong here.

Jesse handed him the Jack Daniels. Louis took a drink and handed it back. Jesse took a swig.

“Whiskey will kill you,” Louis mumbled.

“Better than that cough syrup you drink,” Jesse said. nodding toward the empty Christian Brothers on the floor.

Louis pulled the afghan up his chin and shivered. From outside came the call of a loon.

“I hate the sound of those f–ing birds,” Jesse murmured.

“Lonely,” Louis said.

“What?”

“They sound lonely,” Louis said.

This is from my second book Dead of Winter. Now, I spent the first 23 years of my life in Michigan. I know what winter is like. I know what loons are. I know they don’t stay in Michigan in the winter.

Speed ahead twenty-five years. I gave Dead of Winter to a friend at pickelball who wanted to read my stuff. The first thing she said when I saw her again was, “It was a good book but the loons migrate, you know.”

I know! I know! What I don’t know is why I brain-farted on this when writing that scene. And of course, my editors didn’t catch it. The good news is when we got the rights back, we re-published it and edited out the error. Too bad all life’s mistakes can’t be so easily righted.

I’m kicking up my old dust because I am angry about a TV series I am watching now — Patience. It is a British series about a brilliant autistic woman who toils in the basement records department of a York police station. She forms an alliance with the chief inspector and helps her crack murder cases. The first four episodes were stellar, tight writing, great character arcs, juicy puzzles.

Then, in episode 7, things got weird. A photographer is found dead in a tower with a stake through his heart and bite marks on his neck. His body has been completely drained of blood. Kewl. But…

As Patience tackles the case, the forensic and investigation details fall apart, The body was apparently moved to the tower after death, and it is implied that the blood draining took place in the TOWER, yet there is no blood trace. The bite marks are never explained.And Patience’s personal life overwhelms the plot to the point that it’s cloying. And annoying. The next two episodes were nearly as sloppy in the police work. I checked the writer credits. And yes, two new writers had replaced the original ones.

Is it because I am a mystery writer that I am so put off? I don’t think so. Readers and viewers are very savvy today about forensics and police procedure. They don’t like dumb errors and they won’t abide sloppiness.

But hey, we’re all human, right?

Yeah, but we shouldn’t be stupid. It’s pretty easy to research and get stuff right. My old buddy Dr. Doug Lyle writes mysteries but is best known for his how-to (and how not to)  forensics books. He writes: “[Mistakes are] part of the [writing] process. Sitting alone, bouncing clever ideas off your computer screen offers little feedback. But readers notice such breaches. They shake their heads, close the book, snuff out the light, and go to sleep. Not the ringing endorsement you wished for.”

Doug wrote an excellent article for Killer Nashville about the most common forensic mistakes beginners commit. A summary:

• The Quick Death: Death rarely arrives instantly. Sure, it can occur with heart attacks, strokes, and extremely abnormal heart rhythms, but trauma, such as gunshot wounds and blows to the head, the staples of crime fiction, rarely cause sudden death.
• The Pretty Death: I call this the “Hollywood Death.” Calm, peaceful, and not a hair out of place. Blood? Almost never.
• The Bleeding Corpse: Your detective arrives at the scene a half hour after the murder. Blood oozes from the corpse’s mouth, from the stab wound in his chest, or from the vampire fang marks on his neck. Houston, we have a problem. You see, dead folks don’t bleed.
• The Accurate Time of Death: Determining the time of death is neither easy nor very accurate. It’s always a best guess and is always stated as a range rather than an exact time. Yet, how many times have you seen the medical examiner confidently announce that the victim died at “8:30 last night”?
• The One-punch Knockout: You’ve seen this a million times. One character socks another character in the jaw. He goes down like a sack of potatoes and is apparently written out of the story since we never hear from him again. Really?
• The Instant Athlete: Your PI drinks too much, smokes two packs a day, and eats fast food. After all, stake outs are boring. His belly flaps over his belt and he gets short of breath climbing a single flight of stairs. He will not be able to chase the villain for ten blocks. Two on a good day.
• The Untraceable Poison: Of all the questions I receive from writers this is number one. Seems that all crime writers want an untraceable poison. Sorry, no such thing.
• The Instant Lab Result: The world is not like CSI. Not even close. Those CSI folks get results in a New York minute. Sometimes faster. In the real world such testing typically takes days, even weeks.

Click here to read Doug’s entire article. You can thank me (and him) later.

In the meantime, if you want to feel better, here are some mistakes from the big guns:

Patricia Cornwell’s bonehead mistake is now infamous. She wrote that Kay Scarpetta was working on a grizzly murder. It was unbearable…

Agatha Christie messed up her math in Elephants Can Remember,  writing that the central tragedy took place 12 years prior but later in the book, characters say it happened 15 to 20 years ago. The years do fly by, my dear…

In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the shipwreck survivor Crusoe is on the island watching his ship sink. He takes off his clothes and swims back out to the ship to salvage supplies, which he brings back to shore…in the pockets he no longer has.

When Sherlock Holmes’s stalwart sidekick meets the great detective in A Study in Scarlet, he tells Holmes he was shot in the shoulder in Afghanistan. In a later novel, The Sign of Four, the wound travels down to his leg.

Thomas Perry has a fun essay about his own errors. He writes:

During all of those years, I was making unassisted mistakes at the usual rate and catching them at a lower rate. I referred to a car model made by Nissan as a Toyota. I revised a chapter, changed a revolver into a semi-auto pistol but forgot to change later references to it as a revolver. I sent heroes and their enemies alike off with faulty driving directions. I can’t remember all of my mistakes, but the ways they used to elude me are familiar….

I’ve come to believe that never making mistakes is impossible, catching them all is a dream, and the only way to prevent them is to leave the paper blank. Since I’m not willing to do that, I’m looking forward to more years of hunting and correcting. I tell myself it’s a lively pursuit, with almost the suspense of a silent, nearly motionless sport.

Maybe Raymond Chandler had the right attitude about literary brain farts. In The Big Sleep, a chauffeur is murdered in his car. In the course of the twisty-turny plot, the mystery goes unsolved, in fact totally ignored. When the book was turned into a film, the producers rang Chandler to ask who was responsible.

“Damned if I know!” he said.