\u2026they seldom apologize. I offer you an exception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I enjoy the Lucas Davenport novels of John Sandford, and his parallel Virgil Flowers series. There\u2019s some appropriate humor; Sandford has a way with words that I appreciate; and in his latest \u201cPrey\u201d novel, he apologizes for past mistakes in an after-note.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After apologizing for referring to a .40 caliber pistol as 40mm in Golden Prey, <\/em>he offers this explanation. \u201cHow do these mistakes happen? It\u2019s not usually ignorance. They arise out of all kinds of things\u2026haste, changes in story, weariness, boredom, juggling too many nouns at once. In another Prey novel, I had a man click off the safety on his Glock 9mm pistol, stolen from a Minneapolis detective, before he entered a house. The 9mm was fine, except Glocks don\u2019t have safeties.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sandford continues, \u201cI\u2019d originally written that the man had been carrying a Beretta, which do have safeties. Then, I made the mistake of talking to a Minneapolis detective who told me there\u2019d been a change of policy, and they were no longer allowed to have personal carry pistols. They were required to use issue pistols, which were all Glocks. So, trying to be accurate, I changed \u2018Beretta\u2019 to \u2018Glock\u2019 \u2013 this was after the novel was essentially finished \u2013 and forgot that several lines above that, he\u2019d clicked off the safety\u2026The thing is, I know about guns and have been shooting since I was in elementary school. I know the difference between millimeters and calibers. I know Glocks don\u2019t have safeties.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kudos to Sandford. When I was a kid, I devoured the \u201c87th<\/sup> Precinct\u201d police procedural novels of the Evan Hunter, who wrote them under the pen name Ed McBain. The author, unfortunately, didn\u2019t know crap about guns. In one novel he had his young detective character Bert Kling release the safety on his .38 Colt Detective Special, which of course didn\u2019t have a safety. When called on it by gun-savvy readers, he didn\u2019t cop to it: instead Hunter\/McBain apparently picked up a copy of Gun Digest or something, found the one revolver in it which did have a safety (the S&W Centennial, which in its early iteration had a grip safety) and armed Kling with that in future novels. The sort of arrogance I\u2019d expect from the late Evan Hunter after he came out of the closet as a rabid gun-hater, and I stopped reading his stuff\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2026they seldom apologize. I offer you an exception. I enjoy the Lucas Davenport novels of John Sandford, and his parallel Virgil Flowers series. There\u2019s some appropriate humor; Sandford has a way with words that I appreciate; and in his latest \u201cPrey\u201d novel, he apologizes for past mistakes in an after-note. After apologizing for referring to a .40 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6771","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6771"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6773,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6771\/revisions\/6773"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}