We are interested in different things, some obsessively. So this book has come into our little library (because we order all books on the topic), Some Time in the Sun: The Hollywood Years of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley, and James Agee by one Tom Dardis. We won’t say anything here about the warning that sounds in the mind of the reader when the author uses the relaxed form of his name on what might reasonably be considered a scholarly work.

Nevertheless, a warning of sorts it should have been. Skipping the Scotty chapter for now, we dive right into the saga of our man from Mississippi. And scrape the bottom of the pool. On the second page of the chapter the author states that at the beginning of The Big Sleep General Sternwood “is dressed completely in white.” Uh, no. Granted, the book bears the copyright dates of 1976 and 1981, so personal copies of movies were not the norm (even though Dardis states that the film “is an extremely popular rerun on television and is still frequently shown in film houses”), but Sternwood is wearing the opposite of white. He is dressed in a dark (perhaps black) suit, white shirt, dark tie, checked shawl, with a dark plaid blanket over his legs.

So what does this mean? What possesses a writer to make this stuff up. Does he somehow think it helps his case — more than the facts? Is it simple sloppiness? Or is it a kind of arrogance? Arrogance, as in: “Whatever. White. Black. They’ll believe me. I’m authoritative.” Yeah, but no.

He continues. On the next page he claims that Lauren Bacall’s famous line in To Have and Have Not about how to whistle is “You just pucker up . . . and blow . . . ” Yikes! As anyone who has felt a certain little tingle when he watches the scene can tell you, the line is, “You just put your lips together and blow.”

And this is how the world falls apart.

Alas, six pages later, another howler, smaller, but still; it shows how the author thinks. Even Blotner reports that after he bolted the studio his first week on the job, only turning up a week later, Faulkner claimed he spent his time wandering in Death Valley. Death Valley? Farmer Bill among the cacti? Blotner and Parini both imply that Bill was joking. Well, yeah. Because we all say that. Our Dardis, however, seems to think he was on the level, and points out that Death Valley has been a setting in a couple of movies.

This is as far as we’ve gotten, but the warning flags are flying high. Still, obsessives will get their information wherever they can, so we do anticipate, by hook or by crook, some good stuff to come.

Bottom line? This sort of arrogantly sloppy writing is unacceptable. You find it from time to time where you shouldn’t. In his otherwise all right In Ruins: A Journey through History, Art, and Literature (Vintage — normally first rate — 2003), Christopher Woodward consistently mistitles Dickens’s little travel book Pictures from Italy Letters from Italy, and he does it every time the Great One’s lovely guide is mentioned (often), as well as in the bibliography and the index! Gosh, folks! We’re pretty sure there was Internet back then. Or your own bookshelf. Who relies on his faulty memory when accuracy is a glance away? Boy, is that annoying. Such an inaccuracy, such a gaffe calls into doubt whatever else you want us to believe and renders your book kinda useless in a bunch of ways.

Finally, Peter Ackroyd does this, also against Dickens, in a fashion. In his hastily thrown together Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion, Ackroyd calls the first (and famously suicided) illustrator of The Pickwick Papers not Robert Seymour but Edward Seymour. Ouch! And this, despite the fact that his earlier Dickens is as completely wonderful and magisterial a biography as any written (and correct, too, at least as regards Seymour’s name).

The upshot? Not as bad as blindness or totalitarianism, for a book is almost always a better thing than no book; but one does get annoyed by completely fixable lapses that, let’s agree, harm both reader and author.