The Shifting Sands of Time

Not long ago I reacquired the print and electronic rights to three Matthew Scudder novels that had gone out of print. With the capable assistance of my friends at Telemachus Press, I've brought them out as eBooks, and over the past several weeks they've received a heartening reception on Amazon, Kindle and Smashwords. (Apple takes a little longer, but in a week or so you'll find them there as well.)

And, in a matter of weeks, they'll also be available as handsome trade paperbacks, similar in format to The Night and the Music. But this is not the time to ballyhoo those editions. I'll do so relentlessly when the time comes, but now I want tell you instead about the persistent endurance of a noisome textual error.

I spent all of today proofreading the PDF file of A Stab in the Dark, the fourth Scudder novel, the book that introduces Jan Keane, the book where Scudder is first faced with the notion that his drinking just might be problematic. Arbor House published it in 1981, and it has been reprinted in a slew of paperback editions by a batch of publishers.

Today was my third reading of the book in the past couple of months. I wrote it long before I had a computer, but it wasn't necessary to have an OCR scan of the text, as I managed to obtain a digital file. That file, however, was of the UK version, with bits of dialogue surrounded by ' and ' rather than " and ". This can be changed by means of a global-search-and-replace, but what you wind up with requires a good going-over, as there's a lot that can go wrong. (You ain"t seen nothin" yet, folks.)

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