Favorite first lines by decade (my decades):
‘70s: “Call me Jonah.” Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle – Brevity really is the soul of wit. And important to a teenager.
‘80s: “A screaming comes across the sky.” Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow – I can’t recall why I ever admired this sentence. Wait, I do: It was the drugs I took.
‘90s: “Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.” Martin Amis, The Information – The Clinton Administration let me feel free to prize melancholy above all else.
‘00s: “Keller flew United to Portland.” Lawrence Block, Hit Man – With so many contemporary writers – apparently not trusting their readers’ attention spans – stocking their opening sentences with pulled triggers and decapitated heads, it’s more than a relief to come across this: Five words that say, “No, really, just keep reading, I trust you, enjoy the story, I know you’ll like it. I’ll attend to the sentences.”
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by small-time writer Joe Boland
About Me
- Joe Boland
- My first published story appears in Detroit Noir (Akashic Books Nov 2007)
Labels
- Detroit Noir (19)
- Double Feature (18)
- Friday's Forgotten Book (12)
- Reading 2011 (10)
- Scenes From A Re-Education (5)
email boland underscore joseph at yahoo
4 comments:
"When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away."
-The Mourner, by Richard Stark
I love Stark.
Stark can open like that. He can do it. Most of his admirers have a problem: They like to start a story with someone pulling a trigger, but immediately panic: “Oh no, the reader needs to know how we got here.” Then we get to hear what the guy had for breakfast. Then they panic again: “Must make him sympathetic.” Then we get to hear about his childhood…and the story has gone sideways before the first chapter ends. Know what I mean?
Absolutely. I've noticed this as well. Stark does give you the background, but much later on. The reader steps into a moving story, picking up the details like one of the crew getting briefed on the way to the job.
Another thing I like about Stark is how he'll bring a Parker and another character(s) to a point of major conflict, then send the narrative off to follow each of the characters on their own divergent path. Later on, he converges everyone's storyline back together for the big payoff. Bang bang, bye-bye.
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