The BBC gets it wrong on hard-boiled fiction

(At right, poster for a movie based on Ernest Hemingway's effort in a genre previously pioneered by Carroll John Daly and perfected by Dashiell Hammett.)

In a recent BBC program about Raymond Chandler, John Sutherland asserts that Ernest Hemingway invented the hard-boiled story with "The Killers." He makes this assertion even though Dashiell Hammett had already published more than twenty Continental Op stories when "The Killers" appeared in 1927 (Not 1928, as Sutherland says. He gets the year wrong, too.)

Hammett had already written and published "The Girl With the Silver Eyes," "The House in Turk Street," "The Golden Horseshoe," "The Whosis Kid," "The Gutting of Couffignal" and "The Big Knockover" by the time Ernest Hemingway "invented" the hard-boiled story, in other words.

Why do you think the BBC got it wrong? Is John Sutherland so insecure or such a snob that he has to invent a noble lineage for hard-boiled writing to justify his own affinity for it? Or is the man who shoots Princess Zafrina in the leg at the end of "The Gutting of Couffignal" really soft-boiled in some essential way that Hemingway's characters were not?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Publisher attacks readers who complain about sloppy editing

You may well have heard of the Australian cookbook that called for "salt and freshly ground black people" — instead of black pepper — to be added to one recipe.

Penguin Group Australia had to recall 7,000 copies of the Pasta Bible because of the error, according to news reports, and publishing head Bob Sessions was not pleased. His target was not what one might expect, though.

"We're mortified that this has become an issue of any kind and why anyone would be offended, we don't know," he said, according to The Age newspaper of Melbourne. "We've said to bookstores that if anyone is small-minded enough to complain about this ... silly mistake, we will happily replace [the book] for them."

Has recession eaten into editing budgets?

Mr. Sessions is half-right. Trouble is, he may also be hiding something. The error was a silly mistake, and I suspect that it was unintentional and indicates no racism on anyone's part. But before I absolve him, I want to know how much time and money Penguin Australia devotes to editing now, and how much it devoted five, ten and twenty years ago.

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(Mr. Sessions received kid-glove treatment from several media outlets that edited out or paraphrased his insult that complainers are small-minded. Read one such example on the BBC News Web site.)

The BBC is even more protective of Mr. Sessions than I realized. As of this writing, the photo caption on the site to which I link immediately above reads: Penguin said it was "mortified" over the "silly" mistake in its pasta cook-book. In fact, as Mr. Sessions' statement makes clear, Penguin is mortified not by the mistake, but rather that the mistake has become an issue.

That's a subtle though importance difference, and I trust the BBC will correct its honest but silly mistake.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010