Kids today, I tell ya

[marykaykare]

I just tried to read A LONG QUICHE GOODBYE by Avery Aames. In the first chapter she dropped 3 brand names and had the viewpoint character use the adjectives rustic, tawny, and quaint in completely non-ironical fashion. The second chapter began with her drinking cinnamon-laced coffee on the wrap around verandah of her vintage house

Comments

[ellarien]

There's a commercial for retirement housing I keep seeing, with an elderly gent who claims that he was "in the War" and couldn't wait to get back to his wife and kids, and is now 83 and living in a nice retirement home. I can only imagine it was made several years ago and no-one's thought to update it since; if he's 83 now he'd have been 15 in 1945.

On the other hand, detectives in long-running series do sometimes seem to have an odd relationship with time. P.D. James' Adam Dalgliesh only seemed to age about twenty years, if that, between the 1960s and the first decade of this century, which made the reminiscences of an obviously pre-war childhood rather odd in the later books.

[malkingrey]

On the other hand, detectives in long-running series do sometimes seem to have an odd relationship with time.

Indeed. Rex Stout, or so I've read, deliberately kept Nero Wolfe the same age from the start of his career in the nineteen thirties up until the end of the series in the early seventies. And Emma Lathen's John Putnam Thatcher (and there's a series I'd like to see brought back in e-text!)† was described somewhere in the first couple of novels as being a "youthful sixty" and a veteran of the AEF in WWI; his age, too, stayed the same throughout the series, though references to his WWI services disappeared

[marykaykare]

Being a devoted fan of both Wolfe & Thatcher I'm familiar with that sort of timelessness. Christie did a form of it too. It didn't feel like that kind of mistake since this was the first book in the series.

And having just had a thought I went and looked to see if it had been pub bed earlier and 2010 was the ePub date. Nope, 2010 it is. By my reckoning that's 65 years after WWII. So grandma ought to be at least in her early 80s.
MKK

[marykaykare]

Oh, also, I catch lots of things in books these days that the copy editor should have. Including one mystery where the solution involved the dead guy discussing something he had done. Several hours before he actually did it. Won't be reading that author again.

So, and I'm sort of serious, how do I get started as a copy editor? I spell excellently (and know what I need to look up), am good at grammar (so much subject-verb disagreement around these days!), know how to properly use the poor apostrophe, and have a great memory for detail. As a former librarian, I have a real magpie mind with all sorts of trivial & esoteric inormation in it (and I know how to find what I don't know). I almost would view it as service to mankind!

[ext_1447417]

Hmmm. I sometimes have that problem with "contemporary present tense," particularly if the book is more than ten years old (rereading something where I have to keep inserting and subtracting will throw me right out of the story).

Sue Grafton has been aging Kinsey Millhone verrrrrry slooooooowlly and has had the interesting problem of avoiding now-ubiquitous anachronisms.

Occasionally long-running comics also have the chronology problem (there was a squib in Mad magazine once about Dondi still remembering World War II twenty years later without having aged past 9 years old), but except for Gasoline Alley, no one expects cartoons to have any kind of time sense.

Mysteries lately have been irritating; maybe I need fluffy romances better historical novels.

[marykaykare]

I hear you on the annoying mysteries. Don't know your taste in mysteries, but if I did, I might be able to recommend some non-irritating ones...
MKK