Not long ago I reacquired the print and electronic rights to three Matthew Scudder novels that had gone out of print. With the capable assistance of my friends at Telemachus Press, I’ve brought them out as eBooks, and over the past several weeks they’ve received a heartening reception on Amazon, Kindle and Smashwords. (Apple takes a little longer, but in a week or so you’ll find them there as well.)
And, in a matter of weeks, they’ll also be available as handsome trade paperbacks, similar in format to The Night and the Music. But this is not the time to ballyhoo those editions. I’ll do so relentlessly when the time comes, but now I want tell you instead about the persistent endurance of a noisome textual error.
I spent all of today proofreading the PDF file of A Stab in the Dark, the fourth Scudder novel, the book that introduces Jan Keane, the book where Scudder is first faced with the notion that his drinking just might be problematic. Arbor House published it in 1981, and it has been reprinted in a slew of paperback editions by a batch of publishers.
Today was my third reading of the book in the past couple of months. I wrote it long before I had a computer, but it wasn’t necessary to have an OCR scan of the text, as I managed to obtain a digital file. That file, however, was of the UK version, with bits of dialogue surrounded by ‘ and ‘ rather than ” and “. This can be changed by means of a global-search-and-replace, but what you wind up with requires a good going-over, as there’s a lot that can go wrong. (You ain”t seen nothin” yet, folks.)
So I spent a day or two reading and correcting the word.doc file. Then, after it was formatted for Kindle, I read the whole thing through again, and found things I’d missed the first time, plus some new glitches that had arisen during the formatting process. When I was done, my changes were entered and the eBooks in their several formats were published, and now, today, I was reading a PDF of the book formatted in pages, exactly as it will appear in the printed book.
I did find a few typos I’d somehow missed. Well for wall, means for meant, a word or two left out. And then, remarkably, I found this paragraph:
I nodded. “And Lynn London’s been married and divorced,
and half the neighbors on Wyckoff Street have
moved somewhere or other. It’s as though every wind on
earth’s been busy blowing sand on top of her grave. I
know Americans lead mobile lives. I read somewhere
that every year twenty percent of the country changes its
place of residence. Even so, it’s as though every wind on
earth’s been busy blowing sand on top of her grave. It’s
like digging for Troy.”
That’s not a bad line, about the wind blowing the sand on top of the woman’s grave, but you wouldn’t think Matt would feel the need to say it more than once in a paragraph. I’d read the paragraph, and every other paragraph in the book, twice in the past couple of months, and I couldn’t believe I’d somehow swallowed all that sand without noticing a thing.
Could some gremlin had added it since my last reading? I checked the eBook version, and saw that I’d somehow failed to notice it in either of my two passes over the text. Well, eBooks can be fixed after the fact, and Claudia at Telemachus could make the correction even as she got the print version in proper shape.
Hang on. We’re just getting to the good part.
See, I studied the paragraph, and it seemed clear to me that the first wind-and-sand line was the one to cut. But why not make sure? So I went and hauled out my copy of the Arbor House hardcover first edition and checked.
And there was the full paragraph, just as I quoted it above, with both sentences about the wind blowing the sand on Barbara Ettinger’s grave. That, evidently, is how I wrote it over thirty years ago. And that’s how it’s been ever since, sailing past Jared Kieling, my editor at Arbor House, and their copy editor, and their proofreader, and everybody else who’s been involved with the book over the years.
How could that happen?
For that matter, how come I finally spotted it?
Never mind. I sent off my list of seven corrections, and the PDF will be amended accordingly before it goes to the printer. Then they’ll pull a proof copy of the book and send it to me, and I’ll read it one more time, and at this point it wouldn’t surprise me a great deal to find something else that’s wrong with it.
I noticed it.
But then, I was once a professional proofreader. It is amazing how we miss seeing things that are right there.
I love your Scudder books, drinking and sober. What was it like to write A Drop of the Hard Stuff, about drinking, while sober?
For me, the biggest shock of the series was what happened to his sponsor. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it yet.
Thanks, Catherine. Well, A Drop of the Hard Stuff takes place during his early sobriety, so while it may be about drinking it’s not about Scudder drinking. But A Stab in the Dark and Eight Million Ways to Die and When the Sacred Ginmill Closes were all written after my own drinking days were over. I don’t know that there’s anything particularly tricky in that. Fiction takes place in an alternate universe, even as the writing of it takes place in an altered state. One just goes there, and then it’s all natural enough.
This is why I hire someone to edit/proofread all my books,
I’m a dunderhead when it comes to editing my own work.
It doesn’t make me a better writer, but at least I’m not embarrassed with obvious misdakes.
Oops!!
Great story, and great to have these great books back in great formats. See what I did there? ;o)
You did great, Geoffrey.
I write textbooks and even with editors and proofreaders there are still errors. I have a great line for my students to whom I am actually grateful for finding and pointing out errors. “I always leave a few errors in to see if you are actually reading the book.”
I’m grateful to hear about errors in my self-published eBooks and stories, as I’m able to correct them with relative ease. As for your response to students, I’m reminded of the carpet weavers who say they always make one mistake on purpose “because only God is perfect.”
I just wanted to let you know (if you didn’t already) that January Magazine, an e-magazine devoted to books, has listed A Drop of the Hard Stuff as one of the top 10 crime/mystery books of 2011. Congrats. This is well deserved. I also am really happy that your out of print works are now available for e-readers. I will not need them. I still have copies of the books that I bought when they first came out, and I treasure them in my collection.
Thanks, Sue. It’s the sort of news I don’t mind hearing more than once!
I love my copyeditors, but I love my proofreaders even more. What would I ever do without them?
I’m laughing WITH you, Larry, not AT you. I’m in full agreement with you on the gremlins. There is no other reasonable explanation.
Aw, you can laugh AT me, Jaye. I’m used to it…
I thought that it was an intentional repetition when I read it originally. The repetition seemed especially convincing since the second occurrence began with “even so”. In real life we have these verbal tics, and I enjoy novels that come closer to our real speech (but without the uh’s, and’s, and other fillers). Oh well. Sometimes a mistake can be mistaken for a style. Mistake or not, I love reading your books!
Thanks, Ruth. What’s most remarkable, I suppose, is that I never spotted it on all those readings.
I agree, first needs to go, maybe you were needing word count then, now of course we don’t have near the time to waste on less than useful words (did I over explain that- what a waste) Enjoying Tanner on Ice (another you seemed to have found in the closet)
Thanks, Roland. Actually Tanner on Ice was written in 1998, same year it was published, and 28 years after the preceding Tanner novel. So I didn’t find the book in the closet—though I did find Tanner in a frozen-food locker in Union City, New Jersey.
Dear LB, I know you think I’m loonytoons, but I’m LMAO! Better late than never, but I’m willing to bet readers either missed it altogether or thought Matthew was waxing poetic.
Hard work, huh?
Well, once it’s in print, there’s no reason for a reader to question it. I, on the other hand, should have noticed it somewhere along the way, and how both the editor and the copy editor let it pass unquestioned is hard to fathom, but these things happen.
Here’s a much more vivid example. Sometime in the 1970s, my friend Joe Gores published a novel, one of his detective agency procedurals. One character’s getting ready for bed, and in interior monologue he recalls the line “To sleep, perchance to dream,” and remembers that he’d played Macbeth in high school.
I couldn’t believe it. One of the most famous passages in English literature, and it had suddenly migrated from Hamlet to Macbeth. Joe and I had the same agent, whom I called, and who couldn’t believe the line had gotten through that way. Joe’d made a mistake—these things happen—but then Henry (the agent) had missed it, and the book’s editor had missed it, and the copy editor, and the proofreader.
Any chance you knew perfectly well you had written the same sentence twice and left it in there for literary effect?
No chance at all.
The toughest proofing jobs are those where the stories are so engrossing that I catch myself reading instead of proofing. That’s when I have to pull out the trusty metal ruler and start going through the text backward. It’s tough to see errors when one is in the thick of things, so to speak.
I had a crime comedy script, a “road” picture, in which I had spelled “brake” as “break” throughout the whole first act (an act full of car chases). Nobody noticed. It won prizes, got great coverage. I had critique and comments. People corrected “it’s” and “its” but nobody noticed what was going on with the brakes.
True, there was a lot of breaking going on as well. But still… I simply assumed that Hollywood is illiterate and nobody realized it was a mistake. I eventually found and corrected the error myself.
Hey, that’s the brakes, Camille…
That’s a great story. I have self published a couple of books, and paid to have both of them copy edited, but still found the odd error upon reading though them again. My latest I read through again and again before publishing. Guess what? A reader told me the other day he had found a spelling mistake.
Great.
My favourite copy editing mistake is from (I think) The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep, and the Tobbo shop. I still intend one day slipping a Tobbo shop into one of my stories… 🙂
Ah yes, the celebrated tobbo shops of Bangkok. I believe it was the fourth Tanner novel, The Scoreless Thai, in which they appear.