Murder in Mesopotamia

TeddyBg

So, I've just read it for the second time, and maybe I liked it a little bit more that the first time, but still one of my less favorite. But that is not what's all about.

In the beginning it's said that "the events in the book took place four years ago". The book is published in 1936, so about 1932. But in the last chapter Miss Leatheran said: M. Poirot went back to Syria and about a week later he went home on the Orient Express and got himself mixed up in another murder. But "The Murder on the Orient Express" is published in 1934.

So, is it some kind of mistake, or I'm missing something?

Tommy_A_Jones

It is probably ls a mistake, I think The Publisher's of Agatha Christie's work did her and her Fan's a huge disservice, They Have Proof Readers who's job it is to notice mistakes and It seems to me that they were appalling at their Job, I didn't know about this one as I have only read it once due to Hating it but Raymon's Girlfriend/Wife has a name change and Spence also,SPOILERS!!! There is something wrong about the Weapon in Death In The Clouds and The Drug that kills the Patient in One Two Buckle My Shoe would really work much quicker surely someone should have been awake when Proof-reading, I have heard on a programme that mentioned the Drug Mistake that Ultimately it is he writer;s duty but if that is so why employ Proof-readers?

GKCfan

***SPOILERS***

There was a lengthy piece on Wikpedia a while back on the Murder in Mesopotamia page arguing to explain the date discrepancies, but that appears to have been deleted.  I'm not 100% sure, but some editions of the books may change the years to match the Orient Express dates.

Christie found out later that a lot of traditional blowpipes (like the one featuring in Death in the Clouds) are too long to fit on a plane (and references this in Mrs. McGinty's Dead), but actually this is not the mistake that it might be.  There are some tourist souvenir blowpipes that fit the specifications, but they're not very functional.  This could have been a clue, in any case.

Christie did do a lot of research regarding poisons.  She asked her dentist about dental drugs that could kill during one appointment, and really freaked out her dentist.

Tommy_A_Jones

But Is there any explanation for the name discrepencies?

GKCfan

No explanation is canonical.  Fans have had to come up with their own explanations for the name discrepancies...

Tommy_A_Jones

But these might have been mistakes which Agatha Christie didn't intend to inflict on her readers

GKCfan

Oh, yes.  Officially, they're continuity mistakes on the part of the author.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made a LOT of them in the Sherlock Holmes stories, like when Mary Watson calls Dr. Watson "James" when his real first name is "John."   But fans like to play "The Game," which denies that they are errors, and they try to come up with logical explanations.  Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a famous essay pointing out that Watson's middle name was Hamish, and many wives call their husbands by their middle name for whatever reason (perhaps the name "John" had a bad connotation for Mary Morstan), and "James" is the English version of the Scottish "Hamish."  Another author posited that this was a slip of the tongue on Mary's part, and she accidentally said the name of her secret lover– Professor James Moriarty!  I think that Christie accidentally switched the names of characters like Joyce/Joan Lempiere West and Major (later Colonel) John/Hugh Despard.  Editors ought to have caught this, but they didn't.

Tommy_A_Jones

I think James is a derivation of John as well as being a name in its own right but I might be wrong about this as I know a James and one of his Middle names is John

taliavishay-arbel

Discrepancies between books are a curse of book series, and I think Agatha Christie had relatively few. Some other examples: Patricia wentworth's Miss Silver has a helping-woman who changes her name from Emma Meadows to Hannah Meadows - and back to Emma! In the last f Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" and it's sequels, Jo gets married at age 26, and in the last chapter of "Good wives she is 31, and John Brooke is alive; However, in "Little Men" he dies after 10 years of marriage, when Meg is 31 and Jo is 30. It's even worse in the "Katy did" books - in the first book Katy and Clover are 2 years apart, in the second they are 1 year apart, and in the third they are 3 years apart! And the list goes on...

Tommy_A_Jones

Firstly, I am wrong about James being a derivation of John secondly Perhaps Now Computers are nwidely uaed Writers will keep a list of their Characters on Files so mistakes like, Spence, Joan/Joyce and Emma/Hannah Meadows etc will not happen in the future.

TuppenceBeresford

My 'explanation' for the Joyce/Joan situation was that Raymond realised how irritating Joyce was and found someone better!

Tommy and Tuppence's ages are also all over the place.

It seems so simple to remember your characters' names and ages but there are so many mistakes in published books, I think it must be really difficult. It's probably even more difficult when the books are written over seventy years and there must have been so many different proof-readers.

Tommy_A_Jones

I wouldn't have  thought it was that hard, Have one File for each Character, Marple Characters and Details go in one, Poirot in a 2nd T&T in a 3rd, Battle Characters in a 4th, Race Characters in a 5th and Others in a 6th and maybe a nother folder fpr Quotations, another for Nursery Rhymes but these can go in appliable Files.

taliavishay-arbel

It isn't so simple. In the AC books, characters cross between series, as I've mentioned before - thus, Miss Oliver usually appears with Hercule Poirot, but she also appears in a Parker Paine story, and in a stand-alone story (The Pale Horse) she appears with Mrs Dane Calthorp, who in turn appears with Miss Marple in "The Moving Finger." Colonial Race Appears both with HP and with T&T. And the list goes on. If we look at all the books, I believe all the detectives are linked one way or another. Nowadays, when all the books are computor printed, it is of course much easier to keep track of characters and dates. Getting back to the original question of the relationship between Murder in Mesopotamia and The Orient Express, there is another problem - According to MiM, when Poirot is first mentioned, he is on the way from Syria to Bagdad, At the end of the story he goes back to Syria for a week, and then goes home on the Orient Express. However, according to Murder in the Orient Express, HP comes directly from England to Syria, spends a week untangling a problem, and returns on the Orient Express - leaving no time for a visit to Mesopotamia! This kind of "Insertion" - when a later book is written about an earlier period in the series and doesn't quite fit - has happened to other writers as well, notably L.M. Montgomery in the "Anne" series (there are discrepancies between "Anne of windy Willows" and "Anne's house of dreams")

Tommy_A_Jones

Which Book has T&T and Colonel Race?

S_Sigerson

I'm not sure he was in a book with the Beresfords. I know he was in the thriller The Man in the Brown Suit and three Poirot novels: Cards on the Table, Death on the Nile and Sparkling Cyanide. He might have been in a short story with them. I don't have a great recollection of Christie's short stories.

taliavishay-arbel

Sorry, my mistake. The character who is with both HP and T&T, as well as MM, is not Colonial Race, but rather Mr. Robinson, who appears in "Bertram's Hotel" (MM), "Cat among the Pigeons" (HP) and "Postern of Fate" (T&T).

S_Sigerson

Your memory for Christie's work is still pretty impressive.

taliavishay-arbel

Thanks but no, I had to go back and check.

Delicious_Death

Proof readers are employed to check the galley proofs for errors in text or artwork before printing, and return the proof to the typesetter and/or artist for correction.  It's not their job to research an author's entire previous output.  

A copy/manuscript editor can liaise with the author regarding factual errors, bad grammar etc., but can only pick up factual errors and discrepancies within the book he/she is working on.  For example, if a character has brown eyes in chapter one and green eyes in chapter seven, it's the copy/manuscript editor's job to fix that, but he/she can't possibly know everything that was ever written in all the author's previous books.  

The onus is on the author to keep track of what he/she has written about his/her own characters in previous books.

Tommy_A_Jones

Mr Pikeway is also in those I think talishvishay, What might have made you think Race was in a Beresford is he appears Married in the Up-dated version of Sparkling Cyanide, Oliver Ford Davies who plsys a Race type Character and Pauline Colins play Husband and Wife in a way that resembles The Beresfords.

taliavishay-arbel

I haven't seen the movies, I probably did confuse Race with Pikeaway. As to whose job it is to keep track - the fact is, that even classic authors make mistakes between books (I've written a couple of examples in forums here) so that I think the reader has to be lenient - It's fun to find out these mistakes, but I wouldn't be too critical and demanding about them. 

Delicious_Death

@taliavishay-arbel

I must say that these small discrepancies don't bother me in the slightest, to me they have no bearing on the book I'm reading at the time.  I wrote my previous comment because it seemed to me that some people have completely misunderstood the proof reader's job.

On the other hand, I do have an old Fontana issue of A Murder is Announced in which an over-zealous proof reader "corrected" all Dora Bunner's references to Letty and turned them back into Lotty.  I did find that unforgivable, because those are essential clues.  I can't understand how Fontana allowed that issue to be distributed. 

taliavishay-arbel

That, to use an old idiom, is a total scream! I wonder if any readers wrote to complain about it. It is wierd, because at the end of the book there is an explicit explanation of the name mix-up, so that even if the proofer thought she was making the right corrections as she went along, once she reached that point she should have realized her error.

Tommy_A_Jones

It shouldn't happen now we have Computers, Authors can create Files with which they can write Lists of Character's Places etc.to avoid making mistakes.

Delicious_Death

@Tommy_A_Jones

If only Agatha Christie had used Miss Lemon's comprehensive triple cross-check filing system, none of this would ever have happened!    

Tommy_A_Jones

So True Delicious_Death, Dumb Witness would be filed along with Murder On The Links, and so on

Anubis

No, Miss Lemon, a fictional creation, would never allow such a thing. Speaking as a former "junior cat herder" at a publishing house, I can assure you that in the real world, manuscript editing, proofing, and copy editing are not as easy as you might think, even with computers. Sometimes the publisher is aware of an error and won't deem it worth correcting. For amusement, I quote an instance from T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in which a proofreader says to Lawrence: 

"Meleager, the immoral poet". I have put "immortal" poet, but the author may mean immoral after all." 

To which Lawrence replies, "Immorality I know. Immortality I cannot judge. As you please. Meleager will not sue us for libel. 

I recall hearing of the first edition of a geology text in which the phrase, "the plain was strewn with erratic blocks" was mistakenly printed as, "the plain was strewn with erotic blacks".  This was corrected in later editions.

Tommy_A_Jones

If a proof reader doesn't correct something for amusement reasons, Isn't that At best Obtuse and at worse sick, I would have thought for one's own self respect if someone has seen a mistake they should correct it or why do the job.

Anubis

Um, I think you may have misunderstood — I included these examples simply the amusement of you and the other correspondents to the web site. All of the professional proofreaders (one word, by the way) who I have known, and I have known many, were exceptionally conscientious in trying to correct any errors they might find. My point was that despite the most stringent efforts mistakes will happen in the real world.

Anubis

For example, in my most recent post, "simply the" should be "simply for the".

Tommy_A_Jones

Thank you for correcting me about proofreaders, I shall not make that mistake again, but your post did suggest that mistakes were kept in for reasons of obtuseness, I would however like to add that you would quite rightly hold proofreaders in high regard as they were a member of those band of men and women but there are bad apples in every walk of like and every profession, by he way there are red lines under the word proofreader on my computer could it be that you are wrong and it is 2 words? Surely not, what am I thinking.