Zingers 4: More First Lines with Grab

I’m a sucker for a good first line—one that grabs me by the throat and pulls me kicking and screaming into a story. It not only sells the novel—or short story—but it sets the mood, tone, theme, and damn near everything else that makes a story a story. And how I love a good story.

In this fourth edition of Zingers there are, as usual, three opening lines, or paragraphs as the case may be, that were especially appealing when I picked these books up. I’ve been in a thriller mood of late, and two of them show my mood, but the third is straight mystery.

1.

Creepers.

That’s what they called themselves, and that would make a good story, Balenger thought, which explained why he met them in this godforsaken New Jersey motel in a ghost town of 17,000 people. Months later, he still would not be able to tolerate being in rooms with closed doors. The nostril-widening smell of must would continue to trigger the memory of screams. The beam from a flashlight wouldn’t fail to make him sweat.

This is the opening paragraph to David Morrell’s Bram Stoker winning Creepers. It perfectly sets the stage for the story that quickly develops on the pages, and if you can put it down after an opening like that, you’re a braver man than I.

2.

He woke up scared.

Worse than that: he was terrified. His heart was pounding, his breath came in gasps, and his body was taut. It was like a nightmare, except that waking brought no relief. He felt that something dreadful had happened, but he did not know what it was.

He opened his eyes. A faint light from another room dimly illuminated his surroundings, and he made out vague shapes, familiar but sinister. Somewhere nearby, water ran in a cistern.

This is how Code to Zero by Ken Follett opens; the paragraphs create a terrific image of change. The character is off-balance, unsure, and scared. The character's feelings of unease permeate the prose, and very much make me want to read on. And I’m just glad someone else wakes up that way too.

3.

When ranch owner Opal Scarlett vanished, no one mourned except her three grown sons, Arlen, Hank, and Wyatt, who expressed their loss by getting into a fight with shovels.

This is one of the best opening lines I’ve read. It has everything. Bite. Mystery. Appeal. Humor—dark as it is. And it’s just damn intriguing. This line is how C.J. Box’s In Plain Sight begins, and oh how it makes me want to read on and on.

Zingers 3: More First Lines with Grab

I love the first few lines of novels. When they are done well they set the tone, theme, and just about everything else that makes a story a story. They all also act as a hook—they need grab, or the reader will put them back on the bookstore shelf and move down the line until they find a book with an opening that appeals to them, and bam. If it has grab they’ll be at the cash register before the clerk can ask them if they need help.

As usual I have three opening lines, or paragraphs as the case may be, that were especially appealing when I picked these books up. They are from three divergent genres—the first is a mystery and traditional western rolled into one, the second is a techno-thriller, while the third is an adventure / spy novel.

There are two things you can’t escape out here in the West: dust and death. They sort of swirl together in the wind, and a fellow never knows when a fresh gust is going to blow one or the other right in his face. So while I’m yet a young man, I’ve already laid eyes on every manner of demise you could put a name to. I’ve seen folks drowned, shot, stabbed, starved, frozen, poisoned, hung, crushed, gored by steers, dragged by horses, bitten by snakes, and carried off by an assortment of illnesses with which I could fill the rest of this book and another besides.

So it’s quite a compliment I bestow when I say that the remains we came across the day after the big storm were the most frightful I’d ever seen.

This is the opening paragraph and some from Steve Hockensmith’s humorous hybrid mystery / western Holmes on the Range. The opening line sets up the entire story so well that it only takes a few seconds to realize there is something special and different about this novel. And the rest of the novel certainly doesn’t let you down.

Most of the time they didn’t f*ck around with the executions. A bullet in the back of the head or a blade drawn across the throat and the body left pretty much where it fell. But when Rashid was there it was different. Rashid liked to play.

This is one of the coolest openings I have read recently. It creates a situation of change seemingly effortlessly—we don’t know whose perspective it is coming from, but we do know that he is in a bad situation that just got much, much worse. This one is from Overkill by James Barrington.

There were times when Jean Mercier wondered what life was all about and this was definitely one of them. Somewhere beyond the boat in the darkness was a shoreline that he could only guess, and the lack of navigation lights wasn’t helping.

This is the opener for Jack Higgins’ A Fine Night for Dying, and like everything written by Higgins—at least his early work—the opening is smashing. Why the hell are the navigation lights not on? And why didn’t Mr. Mercier start thinking before he decided to take a midnight cruise?

Zingers 2: More First Lines With Grab

We all know the rules: the first few sentences of a novel have to reach out and grab us. If they don’t we generally pass on the novel and move down the shelves until something does grab us. Here are three more novels with openings that not only have grab, but have stayed with me since I first read them. Interestingly enough, they all are mystery novels.

1. Sweating, thirsty, hot, uncomfortable, and tired to the point of explosion.

Cynically I counted my woes.

Considerable, they were. Considerable, one way and another.

I sat in the driving seat of a custom-built aerodynamic sports car, the castoff toy of an oil sheik’s son. I had been sitting there for the best part of three days. Ahead, the sun-dried plain spread gently away to some distant brown and purple hills, and hour by hour their hunched shapes remained exactly where they were on the horizon, because the 150 m.p.h Special was not moving.

Nor was I.

Dick Francis was a favorite writer of mine in the mid-1990s—heck, he still is, and this opening from his novel Smokescreen is why. His writing is interesting, his voice is very working class, and his mysteries are top-notch. Not to mention they are exciting as hell.

2. Around eleven that night, the hostess broke out the Johnny Mathis and the Frank Sinatra, and everybody quit talking about their kids and their jobs and their mortgages and their politics, and got down to some serious slow dancing out on the darkened patio in the warm prairie night of summer 1961.

This is the first paragraph of Ed Gorman’s novel Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool featuring part-time P.I., part-time lawyer, and full-time small town fix-it man Sam McCain. The Sam McCain novels are a melancholy journey into a past that no longer exists, and the opening line from Everybody's Somebody's Fool fits the mood, temperament, and relaxed sorrow that is woven into each novel of the series.

The Sam McCain novels are my favorite P.I. series still being produced—the most recent, Fool’s Rush In, is scheduled for release later this year. I hope! It was originally scheduled to be released in March, but according to Amazon.com is now scheduled for the end of August.

3. I’m sitting on the porch of a bungalow on the Yucatan Peninsula with lit cigarettes sticking out both my ears.

This first line from Charlie Huston’s super-cool novel Six Bad Things begs the question: What? It also makes me want to read further, if for no other reason than to figure out why the guy has lit cigarettes stuck in his ears. And the great thing is, the novel only gets better.

Zingers: First Lines with Grab

First lines. We have all picked an unknown novel off the shelves of a favorite bookstore, thumbed to the beginning and read the first line only to be dragged into the story with a compelling, frightening, or witty opening. Here are a few—three to be exact—opening lines that reached out and grabbed me. They act as the hook, and the author spends the rest of the novel reeling you in.

“Richler didn’t want to interview Reno, the coward, reprobate, and whiner, but newspaper correspondents don’t always have a choice.”

Richard Wheeler is known for compelling first lines, and his novel, An Obituary for Major Reno, opens with a zinger—it not only makes me want to read further, but it gets me curious just who Reno is, and why he is such an unlikable sonuvabitch.

“The corpse might as well have been in a minefield, surrounded by razor wire, and guarded by trigger-happy snipers. There was no way Adrian Monk would go near it.”

How can you stop reading Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu, with an opener like this? I dare you, try. And just why won’t Monk go near it? Gets you curious, doesn’t it.

“When the port wing began to flap I knew I was in trouble, not that I hadn’t been for some time.”

Jack Higgins—his older work at any rate—is one of my favorite writers. And this first line from The Last Place God Made is an example why. His work is dramatic, fun, and takes you places you have never before been. And damn if his opening lines don’t make you curious of what is happening, and why.

If any of you have read first lines you think are particularly defining, or sensational, or just damn good send them to me: My Email.