Beginnings

A couple of years ago, I wrote about endings, and how important they were for really making the book stick in your mind. I presented a few of my favourites.

But beginnings are equally, if not more, important. After all, if you don’t like the beginning, you won’t want to read to the end. As I’ve grown older, though, I’ve become increasingly impatient with them. I can take down and then replace a book on the shelf after just a few sentences. (It used to be a few pages; now it’s just sentences.)

What I’m looking for is not impact – one of those three-word ‘whack-you-in-the-face’ sentences * – but a sentence that makes me want to discover what comes next. A sentence that doesn’t try to grab me but that lures me in. That makes me want to find out more.

What follows are three of my favourites.

 

 

My earliest memories are a confusion of hilly fields and dark, damp stables, and rats that scampered along the beams above my head. But I remember well enough the day of the horse sale. The terror of it stayed with me all my life.

 

 

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox’s left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other.

 

 

 

In 1928 my foot was hurting all the time, so they took it off and gave me an aluminium one that only hurt about three-quarters of the time. It would be all right for a bit, and then any one of about fifty things would start it off and it would give me hell.

 

 

* I've recently discovered an American crime writer, Don Winslow, whose books are pretty much nothing BUT whack-you-in-the-face sentences. And I find them impossible to put down. Ho hum!