doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Guns in books

It annoys me when writers of fiction get simple facts about guns wrong ,petty but thats me .Currently reading a book with several references to guns amongst which is a Remington O/U
So question is did Remington have a O/U on the market in the 1940's ?

https://www.remingtonsociety.org/remington-model-32-shotgun/

1940

Movies are far worse for accuracy.

Also many TV shows.

We had a fun thread about guns in movies not long ago; I'll try to find it.

Big Jake's Greener



Crescent American Gun Co.



John Wayne in "McLINTOCK!" pheasant hunting (presumably in Colorado prior to pheasant introduction, and with a nice white line recoil pad)
The scene starts at 1:16 and good view of gun is at 1:18
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9wNbD7wJrQ

Not the thread, but another fun one
http://www.doublegunshop.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=190638&page=all

I recently read the Bruno crime series by Martin Walker. The protagonist is a French chief of police in a fictional town in the SW of France. He hunts becasse' with his old Manufrance and in one of the later books inherits a Purdey. At one point the author refers to one of Bruno's shotguns as "double action". Good reads, however. Michael Gruber, a liberal gun nut, is fastidious in his descriptions of guns in the Jimmy Paz triology. One of them is a "Red 9" Mauser C96. Gil

Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full" revolves around the financial problems of a guy with a plantation in south GA called 'turp'ntine'. He supplies his quail hunters with .410 model 21 shotguns and the appropriate "buckshot" to shoot the birds with. Made me so mad I marked up the errors in the book.

Also introduced the secret banker's term called 'saddleblanket'...Geo

Not an error, but I wish we knew the maker of the Old Man's Boy's new 16g
https://books.google.com/books?id=J2rlrdSc1cYC&pg=PA141&lpg

This states is was a Sauer; a Sauer in southern quail woods??
https://biggamelogic.com/ruarks-guns/

I recall a TV episode of Gunsmoke where Festus had ridden out a good distance alone. This episode was clearly dated as being in the 1870s. In one scene Festus pulled his rifle from the saddle scabbard & it was clearly either an 1892 or 1894 Winchester, not the 1873 it should have been for the date shown.

Ha! I expect Wolfe may have done that solely for your benefit, George:-)

Just kidding, of course, but I am sorry for his passing and always enjoyed his total tongue in cheek irreverence for society's many facets w/fictional characters fair easy to relate to and in the case of his writing, I do believe that some of the technical flubs are intentional. Dunno that for sure; he was quite the NYC dandy.. w/southern origins & a wit I enjoyed as much as reading H.L. Mencken's assorted essay's and observations. Its good to take time out to laugh. I mostly do it when looking in the mirror at that feller who don't always agree w/me, but reading some works can cause me to do that also.

Sadly, there will be no further books of his forthcoming.

FWIW, found a big time gun flub in one of Cormac McCarthy's later works. It was in the opening portions of the one w/the guy that used a pneumatic livestock killer & it was in ref to a Mauser type rifle. His works, to that point, had been well proofed where arms are concerned. I consider that one a total failure of the technical proof reading prior to publication and the author drawing from an imprecise knowledge of the subject.

Unless it's a John Milius movie (Red Dawn, the Wind and the Lion, etc). Milius is a gun nut and is very good when it comes to historically accurate firearms. Although I have had to point out to Marines on frequent occasion that while President Theodore Roosevelt did send the White Fleet in response to the kidnapping of American citizen Pedicaris, the Marines did NOT storm the palace in Tangier. And Pedicaris was a 60-something dual citizenship Greek-American who'd bought his way out of the draft during the Civil war . . . and didn't look a thing like Candice Bergen.

Recently we watched a TV series called Godless. It went on for quite a few episodes as a Western taking place in the 1880s. The opening of the program showed a nice over under breech loader with ejectors, which probably could not have come from at least 30-40 years later. They also hunted ringneck pheasants, which as I recall were not in the U.S. at that time.

Recently we watched a TV series called Godless. It went on for quite a few episodes as a Western taking place in the 1880s. The opening of the program showed a nice over under breech loader with ejectors, which probably could not have come from until at least 30-40 years later. They also hunted ringneck pheasants, which as I recall were not in the U.S. at that time.

I'd like to recommend an author named Paulette Jiles, yes, a woman and two of her books, The Color of Lightening and News of the World, both set in 1870's Texas. They're remarkable books aside from the gun topic which isn't front stage but still integral to the stories. Lots of gory frontier action and historically impeccable.

This is a scene from the "Shooting Party" overall they did get the guns right. The requirement for James Masons character was the type of quality gun that would be used by an elderly and wealthy large land owning gentleman. The gun he is holding but never shot in the film is an early Purdey Bar in Wood thumb leaver opener. It was decided that even with assurance from the Birmingham Proof House that the one hundred plus year old gun was quit safe for use. The gun in question was borrowed from me via a friend who was in the gun trade and furnished other guns to the films Armorer.

Ian Fleming was certainly no gun expert. Many here are probably aware that Geoffrey Boothroyd wrote Fleming a letter correcting some of his errors. In return, Fleming--who had a wicked sense of humor--bestowed upon Boothroyd the title of "official armourer to 007". And "Major Boothroyd" appeared in print, when M took away Bond's .25 Beretta . . . although some would quarrel with its replacement, a .32 Walther.

I had the opportunity to see another example of Fleming's sense of humor concerning his fictional secret agent. Fleming knew former CIA director Allen Dulles from WWII days. He always sent Dulles an inscribed copy of the latest Bond book. They're part of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection. The book that came out shortly after JFK fired Dulles--I believe it was either "The Spy Who Loved Me" or "On Her Majesty's Secret Service"--had a particularly interesting inscription: "To my old friend Allen Dulles, who no longer has access to this information."

Daryl,
I called BS on that also to the obvious annoyance of my wife.
"Do you have to point out every error you see involving firearms"

My wife said, " oh, you are so smart. "

Brag, brag, brag and you either have a remarkable wife or you're pulling our leg...Geo

its called suspension of disbelief gentlemen.

youre suppose to be focused on the plot, not the details.

its this.......$$$

so, directors trim in areas that are not required to make the plot move forward.

now, if all of you that are annoyed by these imperfect details were to take a trip, im sure Hollywood or whatever film studio is filming, would gladly accept your free advice and have you supply them the correct guns.

money an issue? no wages?
are you starting to see why they don't really care about the details?
its not just guns either. odds are, while youre watching for gun mistakes, a zillion other things are getting by you unaware.
cars, appliances, phones, saddles, clothing, you name it. directors would be over budget in a snap if they had to use everything perfectly correct.

the biggest error in filming is language and terms. most script writers don't study the talk of the era, and use modern buzz words and jargon. now that's a burr in my saddle, when a 1800's cowboy yells out in a bar scene...'you go girl!'

But going back to the title (books) . . . it's not that hard to do a little research and get the gun stuff right. If authors are going to be specific about what their hero is packing, then they ought to make that much effort.

The publisher's editors are supposed to cure technical flaws. A friend of mine who fishes with a known author receives final drafts and brings up such matters and was told by the author that his publisher's editors are paid to make corrections. Despite that, I've seen errors fall between the stools. Gil

On that note Bob....I've always wondered if the flowery (and profane) vernacular they used in the HBO series "Deadwood" was accurate....I have my doubts.

Why should we be either shocked or surprised when book authors make glaring errors concerning the guns they write about?

Just look at all of the misinformation and intentional falsehoods about guns that comes from our Liberal Left Fake News media organizations and from Democrat Congressmen. Equipping Festus on Gunsmoke with a Model 94 instead of an 1873 isn't near as bad as claiming that semi-autos are machine guns. One is entertainment, and the other involves deceptively attempting to take away our Constitutional Rights.

I don't remember the titles, but I have seen two movies in the last year in which someone closed a double accompanied by the sound of a slide racking.

You're talking copy editors. And the assumption is that they know the nuts and bolts of what it is they're editing. When Iowa State University Press published the first edition of my pheasant hunting book, they didn't have anyone on staff capable of catching any technical errors I made. But then I was careful not to make any. Second edition, published by the same outfit that does Shooting Sportsman, I had an editor who knew the subject well. And it wasn't as much a case of catching technical errors as it was helping me make it a better book, simply because he understood the subject matter.

Slightly different version of the same issue: Back when I was teaching high school French, one of my students was the daughter of an evangelical preacher who'd written a pamphlet that he'd had translated into French. She asked me if I'd take a look. Turned out that whoever did the translation was obviously fluent in French, but not in American English idioms--several of which had been translated literally. Gave me a good laugh, and I helped with a few corrections.