Dashiell Hammett, copy editor's friend

Dashiell Hammett is better known these days for his novels and the movies made from them than he is for his short stories. But he had established himself as one of the great crime writers ever at least six years before his first two novels appeared. While I delve once again into the Library of America's volume of Hammett's Crime Stories and Other Writings, here's an old post about just one more reason to admire Hammett.

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In recent posts, I've taken one book to task for misusing a word, another for its surfeit  of dialogue tags, and a third for using a word not coined until the 1960s though its story takes place in 1953.

More recently, I picked up a book that uses a word in a sense it did not acquire until years after the date when the book is set, and last night, a misused homophone/heterograph  momentarily marred my enjoyment of one of the most moving, exciting crime novels I have read in years.

Since you're likelier to hear tales of ludicrous copy editing changes than thanks for errors caught before publication, we proofreaders and copy editors must blow our own horns or rely on critics to say what we would say if we thought anyone would listen.

Discovering the Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade, another invaluable book about Dashiell Hammett from the good folks at Vince Emery Productions, offers some delightful examples from Hammett's days as a mystery-fiction reviewer for the Saturday Review of Literature and the New York Evening Post.

Here's Hammett on The Benson Murder Case by S.S. Van Dine:

"This Philo Vance is in the Sherlock Holmes tradition and his conversational manner is that of a high-school girl who has been studying the foreign words and phrases in the back of her dictionary. He is a bore when he discusses art and philosophy, but when he switches to criminal psychology he is delightful. There is a theory that any one who talks enough on any subject must, if only by chance, finally say something not altogether incorrect. Vance disproves this theory: he managed always, and usually ridiculously, to be wrong."

Can you imagine caring enough about what you read that you would write something like that?

Here's Hammett on Sydney Horler's 1926 novel False-Face. Besides lampooning Horler's ludicrous plot and his contempt for seemingly every nationality but his own, he makes fun of Horler's sloppy sentences:

"Scotland Yard promises to `safeguard the safety' (page 29, if you think I spoof) of an American inventive genius who has business with the British government."

Now, what is a reader to do, especially if that reader happens to be a copy editor in his professional life and, moreover, a copy editor who has heard authors complain that publishers expect authors to pay for editing that publishers would have paid for twenty years ago? Shrug off mistakes with the bland acceptance that nothing is perfect? Bang one's head against the wall and shout that the world is going to hell?

I don't know the proper course, but I sure wish reviewers and critics would follow Hammett and highlight defects in the form as well as the substance of books they write about, because there really is no difference between form and substance when it comes to writing.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Who needs copy editors?: I get the distinctive feeling...

The photograph below and its accompanying caption appeared this evening in the Christian Science Monitor's newsletter. Is the, er, distinction between distinct and distinctive breaking down, or has the Christian Science Monitor decided that literate copy editing is too legacy for online news?

Masters green jacket and other distinct(sic) uniforms: Take our colorful sports fashion quiz

(Read more Who needs copy editors?)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Hugo Hamilton's Headbanger

I called Hugo Hamilton's 1997 Dublin novel Headbanger "a bit literary in its opening pages," by which I meant it was at times a bit too conscious of its own cleverness, trying too hard to make a plot point.

But those moments are few, and the novel does what crime novels rarely do: It confronts the reality that most crime writers and readers are not killers or victims. Headbanger's Pat Coyne, a Dublin cop, wages small fights and dreams of glory for an imaginary audience, but does what he has to do when the situation demands, "driven by a new mood of optimism and complete fearlessness."

Throughout, Hamilton maintains a nice balance between gravity and comedy, or, to put it another way, he sees the humor in Coyne's fight without, however, belittling it. After hoods kidnap and threaten Hamilton's wife, we get:

"Coyne hesitated. They just abducted her and took her to the Phoenix Park. Subjected her to inhuman and degrading treatment.

"Like what? Molly demanded ...

"They made her perform Riverdance. She needs protection, Frank."

 It might not surprise readers to learn that Headbanger pays explicit tribute to Flann O'Brien and that, like O'Brien, Coyne had a father who waged a brave, futile fight to educate him solely in Irish. I suspect that, having visited Ireland just twice and Dublin once, and being no expert in the country's literature, I may have missed much in this book. But what I got is touching and funny, and you should get it, too.

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Who Needs Copy Editors? Sentence of the Day:

    "Krzyzewski is already urging ACC officials to start contemplating what they need to do to avoid other leagues from poaching ACC schools."

— Aaron Beard, Associated Press Basketball Writer

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Who needs copy editørs?

I don't like crime-novel cover copy that brags that the author is a lawyer for the same reason that I don't like covers that identify the author as So-and-so, Ph.D. Such braggart branding plays on the intellectual insecurity of readers. It's a not so subtle effort to bully shoppers into thinking that the author must be smarter than they are, so they will either improve themselves by buying the book or else get a dirty little insider's glimpse at a world they would never know without the author's help.

Me, I don't give a crap what authors are or what degrees they have; I want to know what they can do.

I was thinking about this while reading the following this evening on the back cover of a trade paperback edition of Easy Money by Jens Lapidus when something else caught my attention:

"From one of Sweden's most successful defense lawyer(sic) comes an unflinching look at Stockholm's underworld."

Someone's not paying to have cover copy proofread carefully.

And note the o with a slash in the cover's rendering of the book's title. Jens Lapidus is Swedish, and he wrote the book in Swedish. Ø is a letter in Danish, Norwegian, and Faroese — but not Swedish.

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In recognition of professional reality, I have taken a number of the posts I'd previously classified as "Things that drive me nuts" and reindexed them under the heading "Who needs copy editors?" Read them and weep. Just don't expect to be paid for your tears.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Does getting it right matter? Not at the New York Times

A story in the New York Times in July said Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant football coach at Pennsylvania State University, "was convicted last month of being a serial pedophile."

That, of course, is arguably wrong, pedophilia being a psychiatric condition or psychological tendency, not an act. You wouldn't call someone found guilty of stealing from a store a convicted kleptomaniac, would you?

No. He or she is a convicted shoplifter. Similarly, Sandusky is not a convicted pedophile, he is a convicted child molester or abuser. (The pairing of convicted and serial is problematic, too, unless serial attacks are a crime separate and distinct from individual attacks.)

The Times' imprecise use of pedophile reminds me of a similar unacknowledged Times mistake, a post about which I reproduce below. In neither case is the Times' mistake likely to confuse readers. But in neither case is the language precisely correct, either. It's disappointing that that is good enough for the New York Times.

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(Ed. note: This error, published by the New York Times Aug. 6, 2011, remains uncorrected and unacknowledged as of Oct. 3 Oct. 16 Oct. 28 Dec. 11 Dec 18,  Jan. 23, 2012 Jan. 30, 2012 March 25, 2012 June 9 August 20. I don't know why an editor has not corrected the mistake. It's not as if the story's author is Bono, or anything.)

The New York Times recently published the following in its online edition:

NEW NFL RULE IS LIKELY  TO LIMIT KICKOFF RETURNS

By JUDY BATTISTA
c.2011 New York Times News Service

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to be an NFL kick returner, to peer toward the sky, hoping to catch a wobbling ball, while thousands of pounds of opponents thunder toward you. It is going to take more — maybe much more — this season.

In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten defined chutzpah as "gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible 'guts,' presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to." He also called it "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan."

Chutzpah means audacity, in other words, not, as the Times seems to think, bravery. Sure, nerve is a component of and near synonym for both, but this does not mean audacity and bravery are themselves synonymous.

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Or maybe they have become synonymous, which raises an interesting question: Who determines what's linguistically right and wrong? Respectable authorities, of which the Times is unquestionably one? Trouble is that, while writing and editing at the Times have become sloppier in absolute terms, in relative terms, both may be stronger than before.

That is, though the Times has in recent years given space to Bono and allowed usages once considered mistakes ("Prosecutors like Rudolph W. Giuliani busted the mob, or tried to," New York Times, Aug. 25, 2011), it is surrounded by outlets that care even less about getting things right: newspapers that have de jure or de facto eliminated their copy desks, Web sites that make the most basic editing mistakes and refuse to acknowledge and correct their errors, crime novels that misuse loathe for loath or think that the vibrating organs that enable human speech are vocal chords rather than cords.

So, who decides what's right? Standardized English spelling and, possibly, grammar, meant little before the rise of mass literacy from the middle of the eighteenth century; who says they have to mean anything now? Read loathe for loath or vocal chords for cords, and you'll still probably get what the author intended. Is literacy, beyond the minimum functional level, a luxury? Does getting it right matter?

Comments from readers, writers, editors, and, if any wish to join in, publishers welcome.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011, 2012

"The fact that," or Is it possible to be a good translator but a bad writer?

The classic handbook Elements of Style (Strunk and White) includes the injunction that "the expression the fact that should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs," and I see no reason to disagree.

I started tallying the number of the fact thats in Anne Holt's 1222, but I stopped when I got to fifty. 1222 is a fine novel, but I wish translator Marlaine Delargy had avoided that clumsy phrase, which is easily replaceable, never necessary, and wholly characteristic of slapdash, amateurish writing.

There's more weirdness in the book, too, writing that's not exactly bad, but that lacks the polish I expect and generally want. The narrator calls one character "A thief, without a shadow of doubt" — not beyond, but without. When the book's trainload of passengers settle into the hotel where they have been stranded by a derailment, we are told, "Basically, everything was more or less OK." Coffee is described as "red hot," which liquids don't get, except maybe molten steel. A character receives supplies "on a daily basis" (Why not "every day"?) A crowd panics, and "total chaos" ensues. How does "total" chaos differ from any other kind?

Elsewhere Delargy gives us scenario when the right word would have been scene. Scenario means script — something written down, in other words, and not something visual. And no, the narrator does not describe a scenario being played out before her. She uses the word as if it meant scene, which it does not. And then "The noise level was rising." Why level?  A character "has been tasked" with keeping everyone calm. And why "With every harrowing experience that occurred ..." rather than "With every harrowing experience ..."?

The narrator recalls an earlier conversation, and "I could literally hear his tense, high-pitched voice." Literally? Really?  Not unless Holt intended an infusion of the paranormal or the narrator was having auditory hallucinations. If you're still with me, you won't be surprised by "This person must also carry within them a hatred powerful enough to make them murder Cato Hammer ..."

Is it possible to be a good translator but a bad writer?

(By comparison, The Devotion of Suspect X, translated by Alexander O. Smith with Elye J. Alexander, offers only a character "vainly attempting to do some damage control," unnecessary words italicized by me; tarp and prepping rather than tarpaulin and preparing; and three gottas, which is three too many.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

When spell-check replaces editing

"Back in the house anti-personnel mines, assorted assault rifles, Canadian Sterlings, Mats, Madsens, a few Chinese 79s, sweating in the heat. ... The ordinance (sic) sweated. They sweated." (pg. 19)

and

"The receptionist punched a button on her consul (sic) ... " (pg. 110)

and

"Paulo was hardly out of Global Enterprises than (sic) his phone rang ... " (pg. 153)

and

"I drive a Duetto. You horde (sic) money. ... To invest isn't to horde (sic). .... What we've got in the Cayman's a horde (sic), in case you've forgotten." (pg. 164)

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Those are all from the UK edition of Payback (2009), by South Africa's Mike Nicol, a terrific thriller marred by shocking errors that suggest the publisher did, in fact, dispense with proofreading in favor of a quick pass with a spell-check program.

Payback is atmospheric, suspenseful, full of dark humor, with likable but dangerous protagonists and as evil (and believable) a villain as you're likely to find anywhere. It's the kind of book one can tell the author had tons of fun writing, and I'm having tons of fun reading it. As much as I enjoy the image of a secretary punching a commercial attaché's buttons, though, I suggest the publishers pay a few pounds, rand, (or dollars) to a good proofreader next time. They owe it to Nicol and to readers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A quibble about The Golden Scales

I'd guessed that The Golden Scales, by Parker Bilal (nom de plume of Jamal Mahjoub), had been translated from Arabic and that tin-eared rendering was responsible for some of the clunky prose in the book's prologue. But I can find no translator's credits, and online biographies say Mahjoub was born in London, brought up in Khartoum, educated in Wales and Sheffield, and lives in Barcelona. Given that background, I now assume that he writes in English.

Whatever the original language, sentences like the following do nothing but get in the way:

“Liz Markham reared back, completely stalled by the human mass that confronted her.”

What's the difference between stalled and completely stalled? What does completely add? What does it do except slow down what the author clearly intends as a heart-pounding opening?

“Behind her she heard someone make a remark that she couldn’t understand.”

Why the extra words? Why not “she heard a remark” or “someone made a remark”?

“Glancing back, certain that someone was behind her, she moved away from the hotel, pushing impatiently through the crowd of tourists and tea boys...”

Pushing impatiently? How else would one push through a crowd? Yet again Bilal tells rather than shows and uses too many boring words doing it. That's apt to try a reader's patience, especially in an action scene.

My first guess was apparently wrong, but I'll try another: Mahjoub, described by some sources as an acclaimed author of “literary” novels, can't write action. I hope either that I'm wrong or that he chooses methods other than action scenes to tell his story, because I'm curious about what this writer of Arabic and African background can do with the Western crime-fiction tradition, a la Yasmina Khadra or Naguib Mahfouz.

Here's part of a blurb for the novel:

“Makana, a former Sudanese police inspector forced to flee to Cairo, is now struggling to make ends meet as a private detective. In need of money, he takes a case from the notoriously corrupt mogul Saad Hanafi, owner of a Cairo soccer team, whose star player, Adil Romario, has gone missing ..."

P.S. An author chooses Parker Bilal as a pseudonym for his first venture into crime fiction. What are the odds that he had Richard Stark or Robert B. Parker in mind?

P.P.S. Read my 2008 post on “Who will be the next Samir Spade? ... (Crime fiction in the Arab world)”

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Our decaying changing language

Why say "the number of murders is up" when "the murder rate is up" has the zingy cachet of science, rate conveying an aura of precision because of its association with statistics and physics?

Because a word's meaning has a way of haunting those who are ignorant of it.   I recently came across the following:

“When adjusting for population, City X’s homicide rate was three times higher than City Y’s.”

That’s redundant, and it indicates that the writer does not know what rate means. Rate in this context adjusts for population by definition, 8 per 100,000 or whatever. The most useful of several definitions of rate is this, from Merriam-Webster:

a : a quantity, amount, or degree of something measured per unit of something else

Use rate as if it meant simply quantity or number, and you may be taking part in the evolution of English. But for now, at least, you'll be using the word incorrectly — and driving me nuts.

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Read an October DBB post for another example of the kind of redundancy that results when writers remember a word but forget what it means.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Conditional surrender

Here's a simple test of a theory of mine about grammar and language change. How simple? Just answer this question: What does the following sentence mean? Thanks.

Under a pending law, trash dumps will be permitted in every zoning district — even residential ones — statewide.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

You slay me!, or Overheard at a high-level summit

Summit

Two journalistic usages that have always bothered me are summit (for summit meeting) and slay.

I remember hearing about summit meetings in the 1970s, and the term made sense, even if it catered to the vanity of those involved in the meetings and the self-importance of the reporters who covered them. A summit meeting was a meeting of leaders at the very tops, or summits, of their countries. Then journalists (and maybe politicians) started abbreviating the term to summit, and, about a year ago, some reporter referred to (I am not making this up) a high-level summit.

To slay means, according to my desk dictionary, "to kill violently, wantonly, or in great numbers." To use it as if it meant simply "to kill" is to rob the language of a useful word. A few weeks ago, I read a newspaper story that said a police officer killed in a car crash while on the job had been "slain on duty."

The writers in question were, of course, ignorant of the meanings of the words they used. But does it serve a useful purpose to call them dopes? One man's illiterate mistake is another's linguistic evolution. Best to go home and read a good book.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

More Alan Glynn, plus "interactive discussion"

Where was I? Oh, yes: buzzwords, privatization, the evils of corporate control.

Alan Glynn's new Bloodland sparked much of that discussion, and the concerns in that book are a neat bookend to those in Glynn's  2001 novel The Dark Fields (also published as Limitless, title of the movie based on it).

That novel follows a New York semi-slacker on a journey through Manhattan's financial stratosphere fueled by a magical drug that lets him do just about anything, includings things he can't always remember. Here are three favorite quotation from the book which, though ten years old, is possibly more pertinent today than ever:

"The military superpower was a thing of the past, a dinosaur, and the only structure that counted in the world today was the ‘hyperpower’, the digitalized, globalized English-language based entertainment culture that controlled the hearts, minds and disposable incomes of successive generations of 18- to 24-year-olds."

"She worked as the production co-ordinator of a small cable TV guide, but I’d always pictured her moving on to bigger and better things, editing a daily newspaper, directing movies, running for the Senate."

"Hank Atwood, the Chairman of MCL-Parnassus, was routinely described as one of the ‘architects of the entertainment-industrial complex.’"

Back on my personal newspaper front, a story about young civic activists had one touting "sustainable models" and another talking about a conference that sought to encourage "interactive discussion."

"Interactive discussion." That takes redundancy to the next level.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

New York Times, you're one of us now

For some time now, the clincher in any discussion of declining standards of literacy in American newspaper and book publishing has been "I'm even seeing mistakes in the New York Times." Now I can make the same declaration.

Here at my newspaper, I used to play a little game when reading or editing stories from wire services, including the Times' service. Whenever I'd come to a bit of mangled grammar or an ugly, sloppily executed sentence, I'd think, well, this can't be from the Times, and I'd scroll to the top of my computer screen to verify this. Until recently, I was always right.

Then, a few weeks ago, I edited a story by a Times writer who did not know the difference between nominate and appoint. (Think the difference is academic? Not when the story is about presidential nominations subject to Senate confirmation.)

Today there was this, from the Times' Bill Pennington:

"Last weekend he was talked about in entirely different contexts: to note that McIlroy was almost the same age as Woods was when he won his first major..."

In fact, Rory McIllroy, who won golf’s U.S. Open on Sunday, is not almost the same age as Woods was when he won the 1997 Masters, he's 10 months older. Sure, you can figure out what the Times meant, but not so long ago that extra step would have been unnecessary. The Times' reporters knew what they meant and the right words to say it, and if they didn't, its copy editors were good enough or given enough time to fix the mistake. No longer.

The Times is still better written than many newspapers, though it's not as good as the Wall Street Journal or the Economist. It's probably also a better source of news than most, so you won't be clueless if you read it. As for me, though, I'll have to find a new game to play at work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Winners, losers and two more complaints about editing

I'll ease out of Daniel Woodrell country with the observation that none of the characters in the three novels that make up the "Bayou Trilogy" is a winner in anything like the conventional sense.  Call me sentimental, but I call that a refreshing perspective.

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An excavation into the book pile today turned up a mystery set in contemporary times with a prologue in the fourth century A.D. that had arrows being fired, meaning shot. Flaming arrows were used as early as the ninth century B.C., Wikipedia tells me, but I recall no indication that these arrows were of that variety. I also suspect that to fire as a synonym for to shoot or discharge a weapon did not enter English until after the invention of gunpowder and guns well after the fourth century. That would make its use in this book a distracting anachronism.

The same excavation turned up a book that referred to a man who killed a number of women over more than a decade as a "mass murderer." He was not. He was a serial killer.

Where were the editors of these books?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Have you ever seen the rein?

I'm reading a crime novel now that has someone "reign(ing) back" her behavior when the correct word would have been rein(ing). The book also spells a character's name two different ways in its opening chapters and goes on to alternate between the two spellings.

This is a book I like from a largish house that publishes an excellent crime-fiction list. When even high-quality publishers get this sloppy, I believe we are seeing proof of what has long been evident to those of us in the publishing industries: Cut back on quality control, and you cut back on quality.

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N.B. Though I received this book from the publisher, it is between hard covers, and there is no indication that it is an uncopyedited proof or advance readers' copy (ARC), and therefore not to be quoted from. Still, I'll check a copy on a store's shelf before I get any more specific.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Words, words, anachronistic words

A crime novel I am reading now that was copyrighted in 2010 but set in 1953 includes the following:

"He had personally and with great deliberation planned a mission that even the most naive GI could see was a clusterfuck waiting to unfold."

The problem (other than that I've never liked the word clusterfuck) is that its occurence in 1953 appears to be an anachronism. Wiktionary says the word was "Reportedly coined by the hippie poet Ed Sanders in the 1960s." Another source traces the first usage to 1966.

What anachronisms have you come across in your reading? How badly did they bother you?

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(Here's a post I made a few months ago on how vocabulary contributes to a novel's sense of time and place.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Mistakes beyond borders

As of this posting, the following still appears in the Toronto Star's Sept. 4 review of Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom:

"The women are strong, a little slutty and adverse to self-analysis and other intellectual pursuits ..."

Illiteracy is always painful (the word the reviewer wanted was averse), but especially so in a book review.

(If the Star has corrected its mistake, thanks.)

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The Star preserves the error as of  6:14 p.m., Jan. 23, 2012 7:46 p.m., March 28, 2013— and yes, it has been notified of the mistake. Correct English usage is apparently obviously optional at the Toronto Star.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Errors that drive you nuts

Ken Bruen heads one chapter in Ammunition with a quotation from Marc Lepine, "before he massacred fourteen female students at Montreal University."

In fact, I believe Lepine killed thirteen students; one of the victims was a university employee. And the school's name is University of Montreal, not Montreal University. (Think the switch makes no difference? Tell a Princeton University graduate that he went to the University of Princeton, or a University of North Carolina alumna that she went to North Carolina University.)

On the plus side is Ammunition's argument between Brant and Porter Nash over who wrote "The First Cut is the Deepest":

"Know who wrote that song?"

Without hesitation, Porter said:

"Rod Stewart?"... 

Brant laughed, said:

"Fucking money from a baby, money for old rope ... it was Cat Stevens."

Porter felt he already had the twenty in his wallet ... Cat Stevens ... yeah, right.

I loved this because I recently had the same discussion with someone, though in less colorful terms. Like Brant, I was right.

And now, readers, what errors, little slips in detail, drive you nuts?

P.S. Apparently I am not the only one with this question on my mind. It's a Crime! (or a mystery...) has just posted a dispatch about the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival that mentions a panel called Getting it Right, "about the need for accurate detail when setting novels in the past." It's important for novels set in the present, too!

© Peter Rozovsky