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Openings

       John Harvey

      The opening sentences of Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, published in 1929, are these: ‘I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit.’

      It’s all there: the directness, the way it buttonholes you instantly, a hand taking hold of the lapel of your jacket while the voice speaks confidently, not overloudly, into your ear. And the poetry: the poetry of the vernacular, the rhythm of real speech.

      The first sentence in his first novel. I wonder how many times he rolled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter, read it through, tossed it over his shoulder, lit another cigarette, set a fresh sheet in place and tried again? I wonder if he’d been testing it in his head at a little after four, four-thirty, those mornings it was impossible to get back to sleep? I wonder if he had it all pat from the start?

      At the time of writing that first novel, Hammett was thirty-five years old. He’d been an operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a private detective working for an vast organization with government connections. He had twice enlisted in the army, world wars one and two, and it was during the first of these periods that he was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that would seriously affect his well-being for years. When he was no longer with the Pinkertons, realizing, perhaps, that henceforth he would be physically less active, he enrolled at a Business College and set about learning the business of writing.

      Going back to the opening of Red Harvest made me think of the distinctive ways in which other crime books begin. Some, like the Hammett, are short and punchy, grabbing the attention at the same time as having a close-to-perfect satisfaction of their own. Others are longer, with a deliberately complex sentence that winds you along its length and so into both the style and the narrative. Others are paragraph-length and draw you in more carefully, and often then stay in the memory – sometimes after the book itself has been read, enjoyed and set aside.

      Opening lines matter. Here is a selection of my favourite single sentence beginnings, some of which will be familiar, others perhaps less so.

      They threw me off the hay truck about noon.

      James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice

      Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.

      George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle

      When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

      James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

      Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake.

      James Sallis, Drive

      When she was killed by three chest knife blows in a station car park, Megan Harpur had been on her way home to tell her husband that she was leaving him for another man.

      Bill James, Roses, Roses

      And here are two of my favourites of the longer variety, each humorous in its own way. The first is, of course, a well-known classic, the second by Brian Thompson, a writer whose forays into crime writing deserve to be better known and appreciated than I think they are.

      It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not СКАЧАТЬ