Quintin Jardine's blog

I don’t normally do this but I’m feeling frisky, so I’ll publish your comment, word for word.

‘ I am a new reader of your books and just love them! However, in Alarm Call the name of the Las Vegas International Airport was repeatedly spelled incorrectly. It should of course be McCarran and not McCarron. Maybe that was corrected in later publications. The former U.S.Senator Pat McCarran would not have been impressed! I am very impressed with your stories.‘

Thank you for that advice; nobody had brought it to my attention until now. You are, of course, quite correct, and I should tear lumps off the normally impeccable copy editor who failed to pick that up. Except . . . I won’t.

As it happens I am rather proud to have mis-spelled the name of the late Senator McCarran, revealed by my research to be one of the least impressive legislators ever to sit in Congress, given his intercession that halted an FBI investigation into Mafia involvement in the emerging Las Vegas, his admiration for Franco and other despots, and his paving the way for McCarthyism.