Once upon a time, The American Book Review came up with a list of American classics. From this list, they pulled the opening sentence from each. In the days of Criminal Brief, I made a game of it, trying to identify the novel… or author… solely from the first line. Rather than skip back and forth with the answer sheet, simply pop the menu to grade yourself or refresh your memory.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I scored (ahem) in low double digits. I blame that on the paucity of mystery titles. Where’s Dashiell Hammett? Raymond Chandler? Mickey Spillane? John MacDonald? Michael Bracken? O'Neil De Noux? John Floyd? Steve Liskow? LarryMaddox? Barb Goffman herself? Yeah, so there.
It’s 13 o’clock. Let’s begin…
| 100 Best First Lines of Novels Selected by American Book Review |
| Call me Ishmael. |
| It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. |
| A screaming comes across the sky. |
| Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. |
| Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. |
| Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. |
| riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. |
| It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. |
| It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. |
| I am an invisible man. |
| The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. |
| You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. |
| Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. |
| You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. |
| The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. |
| If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. |
| Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. |
| This is the saddest story I have ever heard. |
| I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. |
| Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. |
| Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. |
| It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. |
| One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. |
| It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. |
| Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. |
| 124 was spiteful. |
| Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. |
| Mother died today. |
| Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. |
| The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. |
| I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. |
| Where now? Who now? When now? |
| Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” |
| In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. |
| It was like so, but wasn’t. |
| —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. |
| Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. |
| All this happened, more or less. |
| They shoot the white girl first. |
| For a long time, I went to bed early. |
| The moment one learns English, complications set in. |
| Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. |
| I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; |
| Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. |
| I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. |
| Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation. |
| There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. |
| He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. |
| It was the day my grandmother exploded. |
| I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. |
| Elmer Gantry was drunk. |
| We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. |
| It was a pleasure to burn. |
| A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. |
| Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. |
| I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho’ not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call’d me. |
| In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. |
| Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. |
| It was love at first sight. |
| What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? |
| I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. |
| Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. |
| The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. |
| In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. |
| You better not never tell nobody but God. |
| “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.” |
| It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. |
| Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. |
| If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. |
| Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. |
| Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. |
| When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. |
| Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. |
| She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. |
| In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. |
| “Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. |
| He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. |
| The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. |
| On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. |
| Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. |
| Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. |
| I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. |
| “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.” |
| In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. |
| 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 of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. |
| It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. |
| I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled. |
| Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. |
| I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. |
| The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. |
| I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. |
| He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. |
| Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue. |
| In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. |
| Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. |
| Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. |
| He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. |
| High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. |
| They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. |
| The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. |
How did you fare? Our enquiring minds want to know.
Great list, Leigh. And fun to play. I got many of them, but missed some. And even missed some from things I've read. And many of them make me want to reread several of them.
ReplyDeleteI scored low as well. Crime fiction?
ReplyDeleteHer hair is curly and gold on the pillow, her skin white in the heat lightning that trembles beyond the pecan trees outside the bedroom window.
from Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke
The night Vincent was shot he saw it coming.
from Glitz by Elmore Leonard
We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.
from Darker Than Amber by John D. MacDonald
I can go on and on. SleuthSayers included.
Good posting, Leigh
So many books! So little time!
ReplyDeleteEmbarrassed to reveal the older the books, the better I did.
I knew a lot of the older books I assigned in the classroom. Overall, I did fairly well, but there were a few books I'd read that I didn't recognize.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to note how the definition of a good opening seems to change with the times. Now we look more at a hook, but many of the older works established a voice and milieu first. It seems to change most clearly in the early 20th century (Hemingway, Faulkner), but Wharton and Twain started it.
Thanks for this list, Leigh.
Nicely done, Paul, you fared better than I. I also missed a few I thought I should have known.
ReplyDeleteThere you go, O'Neil. I especially like the Burke line– it accomplishes so much in so little.
I suspect you did pretty well, Janice. At one time when Americans enjoyed a classic education, everyone understood pieces of literature so well, it could communicate meaning with a mere oblique reference. But I'm probably preaching to the choir.
Steve, I'm sad to say I hadn't considered that, but now that you've pointed it out, I see it. It will be interesting, if perhaps alarming, to see what the future holds.
I too did well on the older books, as well as those that are "magical realism". And I've written here on a couple of them, most notably "The Good Soldier" by Ford Madox Ford ("This is the saddest story I have ever heard.")
ReplyDeleteAlso, if this is American classics, what's Italo Calvino, Cervantes, and Ha Jin doing in there? Just because they had an American translator don't make them American.
And I note a sad lack not only of mysteries but of sci-fi/fantasy.
Amazing how many of them you recognize, but don't remember where they come from - I knew it was Jane Austen, but forgot which book!
ReplyDeleteHow about this:
"When I was a young boy, if I was sick or in trouble, or had been beaten in school, I used to remember that on the day I was born my father had wanted to kill me."
wow - that takes some time! I love a book that draws me in at the first line. When an author is lazy about that (or simply too newbie to understand the importance) I take it as a clue that the rest of the book will be banal.
ReplyDeleteEve, you make good points with every sentence. Like songs, occasionally we recognize the lines but not recall the titles (as David says as well). And yeah, what's with those foreign interlopers! And the lack of mysteries, boo, hiss.
ReplyDeleteDavid. Damn, you stumped the panel, or at least me. Good job, man.
Exactly, Melodie. Either through ignorance or indifference, the reader loses interest and the writer loses a reader.
I'm amazed how many I knew, where I haven't actually read the book :)
ReplyDeleteThat's a chunk of work you did in putting that together, Leigh! Well done!
Seven. Some of the other books I had read, but their first lines did not stick with me.
ReplyDeleteOnly at Sleuthslayers can you play this incredible game-Thanks Leigh!
ReplyDeleteSteven, thanks. It did take a while. Perhaps we could think of further use of the technique.
ReplyDeleteBarb, I hope you didn't mind my using your name in the title of an article. Your previous column gave me inspiration.
Hey, thanks, Larry. I appreciate it.