AARRGGGHHH! How Hard Is It to Get This Gun Shit Right?

I realize that there are a lot of authors out there that don't give a shit about guns. They don't know squat about them. They may have never fired a gun. I get that.

But you know, if you're writing in a genre for which the use of firearms is a common plot point and if a couple of your plot points involve guns, you ought to at least get try to get it right.

Cae in point: Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane. In this book, Lehane returns to the private investigative team of Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, which last made an appearance in 1999 in Prayers for Rain. Moonlight Mile is a follow-up to Gone, Baby, Gone, which was published in 1998.

Lehane brings the story forward in real time. All of the characters are a dozen years older and they are still dealing, to varying degrees, with the hard choices that Kenzie made in the earlier case. The writing is good, I enjoyed the story, but at the end of the book, the narrative makes two glaring errors with regard to guns.

First: In a scene where one professional killer is instructing his boss's wife on how to use a particular pistol to murder someone, he says "it pulls a bit to the left." Riight. In the "up close & personal" use of a handgun to murder a captive in a room, at a range of maybe six feet, that isn't going to matter jack point shit. Maybe you'd miss with one of those piece-of-shit derringers, but that's about it.

Second: A following scene has a character disassembling a variant of a 1911. You don't "detach the slide from the grip," which is what this character does. When you do remove the slide from the receiver, the "grip" and the frame (or the receiver) are not simply break down into individual pieces. You'd need a screwdriver (or an allen key) to remove the grip panels.

Maybe it shouldn't bug me. But it does. (And there is a glaring one that will also bother the foamers.)

But if you can overlook crap like that, Moonlight Mile is a good hard-boiled detective novel.