Thursday 11 January 2007

Opening lines

I am going to knock over 500 words tonight even if I have to stay up until 3 a.m. My problem is that I'm trying to polish the opening scene and that way lies madness.

Tantalizing first paragraphs are tricky enough. But a killer first line is as elusive as Lasseter's Reef. Here are a handful from some of my favourite crime authors. (I call it research but you might know it by its other name—procrastination.)

    Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, had been explaining how the complicated happening below the Salt Woman Shrine illustrated his Navajo belief in universal connections.
Tony Hillerman, Skeleton Man

    Hosteen Joseph Joe remembered it like this.
Tony Hillerman, The Ghostway

    On a grey, whipped Wednesday in early winter, men in long coats came out and shot Renoir where he stood, noble, unbalanced, a foreleg hanging.
Peter Temple, Dead Point

    In the late autumn, down windy streets raining yellow oak and elm leaves, I went to George Armit's funeral.
Peter Temple, Black Tide

    'Then why are you here?'
Ian Rankin, Resurrection Men

    It all happened because John Rebus was in his favourite massage parlour reading the Bible.
Ian Rankin, The Black Book*

    My law office was located on the old courthouse square of Missoula, Montana, not far from the two or three blocks of low-end bars and hotels that front the railyards, where occasionally Johnny American Horse ended up on a Sunday morning, sleeping in a doorway, shivering in the cold.
James Lee Burke, In the Moon of Red Ponies

    Years ago, in state documents, Vachel Carmouche was always referred to as the electrician, never as the executioner.
James Lee Burke, Purple Cane Road
______

*I've skipped the prologue.