Dana, Starr, and "the land of knives and forks and tea-cups"

"The territory of Alta California, a network of scattered settlements on the lower edge of an empty American West, had a number of visitors during the Spanish and Mexican period." 

— Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915

"F——— went forward into the forecastle as a common sailor, and lost the handle to his name, while young foremast Jim became Mr. Hall, and took up his quarters in the land of knives and forks and tea-cups." 

— Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years Before the Mast

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Today's selections are not just not crime, they're not even fiction. But they are taken from works of great imaginative power (Starr's preface invokes the imagination, a wonderful thing for a  historian to do), and they would not be out of place in a kind of crime novel I especially like to read—hard-boiled with a humorous edge.

Starr's first. The sentence above is not just the first in his book, but the first in his multivolume history of California. Read the sentence, and I hope you'll agree that "had a number of visitors" is a delightfully understated way to begin a history, particularly of an area so dominated by people who arrived from elsewhere.

And can you think of a more entertaining way to portray the difference between living conditions of a ship's officers and its ordinary sailors than Dana's reference to officers' quarters as "the land of knives and forks and tea-cups"? The description is not just amusing, it's supremely economical. Its eight (or nine) words tell you all you need to know about how both classes live.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Openings

We're big on conventions here at Detectives Beyond Borders, namely the ways crime writers adhere to conventions of their genre while still trying to keep things fresh. Here's Barry Maitland's spin on the just-another-day-in-the-protagonist's-life opening in All My Enemies:

"By lunchtime Kathy was reduced to the word-puzzle in the Sunday paper. Form words of three or more letters from the title of The Grubs' latest hit single, `Claim to Dream.' No proper named; target 130; include at least one 12-letter word.' "She had begun the day with good intentions. There were plenty of things that could be done before she started her new job: letters that could be written, bills that could be paid, housework that could be done.

"Mad, ran, mat, tic, model, modal, rot."

All but mat and model are promisingly evocative, and even they might turn out to hold clues to the story to come. I particularly like the combination of modal and rot.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Good first lines — and what makes them that way

Here's another good beginning:

"This is how River Cartwright slipped off the fast track and joined the slow horses."

It's from Mick Herron's Slow Horses. It's about a kind of grunt squad where British spies go when they screw up. I don't know yet if I'm going to like the book, but with an opening like that, I stand a better chance of reading long enough to find out.

Here are some openings from the other book I have immediately at hand:

"It was a wandering daughter job."

"`I'm Tom-Tom Carey,' he said, drawling the words."

"`I haven't anything very exciting to offer you this time,' Vance Richmond said as we shook hands. I want you to find a man for me—a man who is not a criminal."

Each of those three openings — and Mick Herron's as well — does what an opening sentence needs to do. It's surprising, it tells a little story in a tiny bit of space, and it leaves the reader wondering what happens next. That's important for impatient readers, such as your humble blog keeper.

I've discussed first lines several times (scroll down), occasionally asking you to pick your favorites. This time I'll ask you to get theoretical. What must the opening line of a piece of fiction do to make you keep reading?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

More great first lines

Two days ago I wrote about my haul of five books at Murder by the Book in Houston (since augmented by four more titles).

I've been flipping through my new acquisitions feeling like a kid on Christmas morning. The first three of them reminded me how important it is to grab the reader from the start, whether with the title, the opening line, or both -- and how thrilling it is to be so grabbed.

Colin Cotterill's Aging Disgracefully is subtitled "Short Stories About Atrocious Old People." Know that, and you'll love the title of the first story: "Gran Larceny."

Bill James' Off-Street Parking pulled me right in by addressing and challenging me directly: "I'd like to put you right on something. OK?"

Tower, by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman, offers two grabber opening lines, the first to a short prologue, the second to the novel proper:

"Griffin coughed blood into my face when I made to slip the chains under his shoulders."

and

"`He beats me.'"

What are your favorite openings? How did they pull you into the story? Why did you like them?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Another fine opening from Declan Hughes

Declan Hughes began the main body of his first novel, The Wrong Kind of Blood, with one of my favorite opening lines: "The night of my mother's funeral, Linda Dawson cried on my shoulder, put her tongue in my mouth and asked me to find her husband."

His third, The Price of Blood (The Dying Breed in the U.K.) does not get to the heart of things quite so quickly. One has to wait until the end of the paragraph for the comic payoff:

"Two weeks before Christmas, Father Vincent Tyrell asked Tommy Owens to fill in for George Costello, who has been the sacristan at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Bayview for thirty years until he was rushed to the hospital with inoperable stomach cancer. A lot of Father Tyrrell's parishioners were outraged, to put it mildly, since Tommy was known as a dopehead and a malingerer and a small-time drug dealer, one of the die-hard crew who still drank in Hennessy's bar, and not a retired Holy Joe shuffling about the church in desert boots and an acrylic zip-up cardigan like George Costello, God have mercy on him. And fair enough, the first time I saw Tommy on the altar in cassock and surplice, it was a bit like something out of a Buñuel film."

That's not a bad way to begin a story, I'd say. In fact, it's a little story in itself, complete with buildup and payoff. So far, I can report that the story also involves tangled family secrets, that blood in several senses figures prominently in Hughes' books, and that this book contains at least one dubious priest. Did I mention that Hughes is Irish?

The novel also explores the world of Irish horse racing in some detail. Between Hughes and Peter Temple in his Jack Irish novels, crime writers are proving that there is territory left to be explored in that old sport.

More to come.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Declan Hughes
Irish crime fiction

More about first lines

Jerome Weeks at BookDaddy expands on my recent post about Great first lines in crime fiction with some excellent crime-fiction openers and thoughtful comments about why they work. He also offers a wince-inducing opening from an acclaimed novel and a comment just as thoughtful about why it doesn't.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Great first lines in crime fiction

Dave's Fiction Warehouse holds forth on opening lines, including a good one from his upcoming story in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Dave was inspired by this list from the American Book Review, headed — no surprise — by the first words of Moby Dick.

But what about crime stories? What opening line (or paragraph) gave you that frisson of excitement that made you keep reading? My candidate for the Moby Dick of crime-story first lines, the opening that everyone knows, is this, from Raymond Chandler's "Red Wind":

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot, dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Here's the opener of the book I'm reading now, Ken Bruen's Ammunition: "Brant was on his third whisky, knocking it back like a good un."

And now, readers, you have the floor. What are your favorite crime-story opening lines?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007