Oops!

I recently received an email from a sharp-eyed reader I’ll identify as JC. The note informed me that I’d given one character, who appears in both “The Echo of the Whip” and “The Daddy’s Girl Decoy” two different names. In “Whip,” he’s named Eugene (Gene) Beck; in “Decoy,” he’s named Eugene (Gene) Ludwig.

Sigh. Over the course of nine Jim McGill novels, I’ve created a very large cast of characters. It appears they’ve finally gotten the better of me. The way all this came about is I first used the surname Ludwig for the character Auric Ludwig, the gun lobbyist. Then I attached it to Gene Ludwig. My wife, the first person to read all my work, pointed out this repetition to me.

I said, okay, I’ll change Gene’s family name to Beck, which is how it appears in “Whip.” But when I was assembling the cast for “Decoy” I used an earlier edition of the preceding novel for reference, and put Ludwig back in by mistake. None of a half-dozen proofreaders caught the glitch.

But JC did. For which I say, “Thank you.”

The writer-to-reader-to-writer loop is very important. It lets me know what you like and what you don’t. It also might tell me where I’ve messed up.

One of the nice things about ebooks is they are easily corrected. So Gene Beck, by virtue of seniority and a preponderance of appearances, will stay. Gene Ludwig is out. We’re uploading a corrected file of the book to Amazon. For those of you who already have a Gene Ludwig copy of “Decoy,” I can’t swear that it will become a collector’s item like a stamp that mistakenly got goofed up, but it might be an interesting piece of small talk.

One bit of unrelated concern: Some readers have complained about copies of “Decoy” and other of my books that seem to have continuity problems, missing sentences and the like. Please be advised that ebook files can sometimes become corrupted during downloading. The thing to do then is to delete the file of the book from your e-reader (but not from your account). Do another download and that will usually solve the problem. If it doesn’t, contact Amazon for advice.