European police procedurals

Last night I read a very good Dutch crime novel called DeKok and Murder by Melody; the author is A. C. Baantjer, who is incredibly widely read in the Netherlands but virtually unknown here. I was full of remorse at how little fiction I read in translation, I must start setting an arbitrary quota and making sure I lay hands on good stuff not originally written in English: one novel a month, say, would not be an excessively high goal. (Last week I read the first few chapters of Karin Fossum's He Who Fears the Wolf, but somehow it was too muted and tasteful to hold my interest and I skipped the whole middle and just read the end to see what happened.)

Anyway, the Baantjer book is excellent, I will certainly read more of these. My only reservations concerned the translation, which is by H. G. Smittenaar. Obviously I don't know Dutch, but I questioned his choice to use so many of those awful verbs of speaking that should really just be "said," "asked" and a handful of simpler permutations. Too much grimacing and grinning and growling and murmuring and exclaiming and shrugging and muttering and nodding and so forth. One low-life character absurdly talks like a gangster in a 30s film ("Word on da street is dem guys was knocked off because they wasn't using"). Perhaps most horrifying of all, the translator shows no awareness of the difference between "lose" and "loose"--Barbara Wallraff wrote about this problem in this month's Atlantic, though the relevant part of the column is accessible only to subscribers.

I'm sort of poking fun at myself here, I realize I am obsessive about this stuff (and BTW see Laura Demanski's recent post about the Chicago Manual of Style, plus the amazingly lovely website she links to) and maybe some of this will be corrected between the advance reading copy and the printed book but surely it is not too much to expect professionally published books to be more or less error-free? I am relatively forgiving when it's a small press like this one, but it really gets my goat when I read a book from a major imprint and find typos throughout. Seriously, get a grip! Or at least a decent copy-editor! It is incredibly distracting otherwise--I don't search them out deliberately, but it just happens that I was born with that thing where if there's one misspelling on the page my eye will be drawn to it even if I only catch a moment's glimpse of the whole page, it is convenient for work but rather a curse in terms of light reading....