Literary disappointment

[ethelthefrog]

I finished reading Shaun Hutson's Necessary Evil last night. By the end, I was barely able to stop myself from shouting at the book.

I can understand that most people wouldn't be upset by most of the following complaints based around my knowledge of the London Underground network:

• There are lights in all of the service tunnels so our heroes won't need to scan their torches about so much, and it won't be dark until they head down the disused side-tunnel.
  
• Army-issue torches that fail when you drop them? Well, maybe given the current equipment issues in the army...
  
• The cleaners clean the crap out of the tunnels every night, so that decade-old coke can wouldn't be there
  
• The centre rail is at -210V, not 50,000V, you fucking moron (a ten-second Google search is all you need). Evidence supporting this can be seen by the lack of constant arcing from the centre rail to the underside of every train or from the rail to the floor across the really rather small insulators. I mean, main line traction is only 25,000V.
  
• You do not get brick dust from the tunnel lining because it's cast iron (or concrete).
  
• A man cannot cling to the side of a train in a tunnel unless he is really really really thin.
  
• Trains do not run while there are cleaners in the tunnels. The unions would get really upset.
  
• A train cannot take a "sharp" bend in a tube tunnel at 60mph without hitting the side of the tunnel and generally wiping itself out
  
• Getting from one carriage to the next while the train is in motion is scary and nontrivial.
  
• There bloody-well is access from the train to the driver's cab as a five minute trip on an underground train will show you. Think about it for a moment. If the train must be evacuated in a tunnel, the only possible way out is at the ends. There is a cab at both ends of the train (and in the middle, too, on some lines). If you can't get into the cab from the train, there is no evacuation. Bye bye.
  
• Even if you can't open the cab door from the train (which you can), the partition is not bullet-proof. If you want to shoot the driver (you've got some big guns on you), just shoot through the bloody bulkhead.
  
• UPDATE: The only disused station that is on a disused tunnel is Aldwych. All the rest are in active tunnels.

but the icing on the cake is their solution to the bullet-proof locked door:

• Fire extinguishers do not explode in a huge ball of flame.

The clue is in the name. The fire extinguishers described are water fire extinguishers. The text correctly describes the fact that these contain a cylinder of compressed carbon dioxide used as a propellant. Fine. There are two points to consider here: 1) what kind of fuckwit uses a flammable propellant gas in a FIRE EXTINGUISHER and 2) you can get carbon dioxide fire extinguishers that contain nothing but CO2. CO2 is a fire suppressant. This is why it is used in fire extinguishers. Shooting a canister of CO2 is not going to cause a fireball. It might cause explosive decompression of the canister, but the text describes a huge fireball.

I'm afraid that the otherwise enjoyable story was completely wrecked for me by a lack of the most basic research. Ten seconds of Google gets you the supply voltages on the Underground (four rails, guys, not three). A single trip on an underground train shows you that you can get into the cab from the train. Not-being-a-moron would reveal that a fire extinguisher is not going to be filled with a "highly volatile" explosive gas. And so, I am left with a sour taste in my mouth and I will always remember the book as being one spoiled by a total lack of research instead of being the enjoyable read it so nearly was.

Rant over.