I was going to start off by offering that opening lines in mysteries are like opening lines in bars – too many are stale and uninteresting and others are ridiculous. But god, that’s dumb. I have no idea whatsoever what bar opening lines are and never have known. I never hung out in bars with the intent of meeting up with anyone; my major bar activity was in cheap Albany hangouts with 15 other first year CRJ students on Friday and Saturday nights when for $2, you could buy a pitcher for the group and that would be all you’d have to do. And our friend John was usually singing. I don’t like bars as social venues (except at conventions where they are safe, if you will; by which I mean “they are populated by people like me many of whom I know” and I never was so lonely that I wanted to go find someone to sleep with/hang out with in a bar. As I’ve never lived in Britain, I don’t comprehend pub ambiance and as someone who never drank much, I don’t get social drinking. So what the hell do I know about opening lines in bars?

There’s yet another discussion on DorothyL about well, not opening lines as much as pet peeves in the first few pages of a mystery. It’s brought out those of us who hate the Dreaded Prologue (many complaining more that it’s annoyingly set in italics, which is hard on the eyes after 3 pages or so). I tried to avoid the DP specifically but my true peeve in recent times is the murder scene set up in the first few pages. Especially as I tend to put it “and then everything went black”. B-O-R-I-N-G oy god is it ever. I also disagreeing with my buddy the wonderful Eileen Dreyer expressed real dislike of those “har-de-har” (as I meanly think of them) kick-ass attention grabbers like the oft-quoted line from Earl Emerson’s FAT TUESDAY. I have huge respect for Earl; he’s a class act and a good writer but I really do NOT get turned onto a book when it began with the verbal equivalent of someone blowing into a paper bag and popping it in my ear. For the record, the intro in the book which many folks love is “"I found myself in an empty foyer with a dead body, a lawyer and a barebreasted woman. The snake in the paper bag only complicated things."

I think it’s over the top. I think it starts off at too high a level and has to work too hard to maintain there. I called it on DL “manipulative” by which I mean I have to somehow be conned into reading the book.

God, of course I do, don’t I? I mean doesn’t every author work so damn hard on that opener to con the reader into continuing? OF COURSE it’s manipulation. I guess the problem is that I don’t like KNOWING, or FEELING that I’m being manipulated. It’s a sort of tacit agreement we readers have with writers, that I’m going to open your book and try it. And you’re going to try to lure me.

But if I HAD ever hung out in a bar, I would no more have been interested in a guy who used “don’t I know you?” or some line I heard before (she knew someone was there, and she turned. “Oh, it’s you….”) than I would have with some outrageous remark that was the equivalent of “the body, the lawyer, the barebreasted woman and the snake.”

I’m currently surrounded by books I’ve read recently that are due for review. These ARE books that drew me in and that I finished. Do any of them stand out for their opening line? Not particularly. Were any “givens” – that is, are there books here I was probably going to read no matter how they started? Yes, indeed. That probably means that at some point, maybe with book one, the author wrote a grabber so now I just assume/open and start, yeah. In many other cases, it’s a first book or a book by someone whose work I haven’t read in a long time. Let’s see if we can figure it out.

FARTHING by Jo Walton which is a fantastic alternate history and mystery novel from 2006, begins
“It started when David came in from the lawn absolutely furious.”
I like that line. It’s enough. It’s enough to make me curious. Who’s David, why’s he furious? It sets up a tiny bit of setting – came in from the lawn means he’s not tromping up the steps to the precinct house, or slamming the door in the kitchen. Not a lot but a bit. The next line set up far more for me. It reads “We were down at Farthing for one of Mummy’s ghastly political squeezes.”

Walton, btw, is not an author whose work I’ve read but she was, up to FARTHING, a writer of sf and fantasy. This book skillfully sets a tone, tells me the culture/class and relative period I’m reading about. I don’t recall if I read the flap copy before opening it; probably enough to know as it tells me it’s 1949 and it involves “upper-crust English”. But it worked as a lure without arm-waving.

THE CHINATOWN DEATH CLOUD PERIL by Paul Malmont. Okay, okay, the title and cover art was a lure enough. But I didn’t know the situation.

“’You think life can’t be like the pulps?’ Walter Gibson asked the other man.”

The second short paragraph continues ‘til I read that the other man was “Ron Hubbard”. This means we have a novel about two “real” people (ok, the jury’s out on Hubbard, snicker) and I don’t know huge amounts of their history, but I know enough about Ron Hubbard and that era to wonder “what the heck?” And I liked the book tremendously.

Okay, a sure thing was the new Charlaine Harris Sookie Stackhouse. This is one of my favorite series, I will often stop what else I’m reading to spend time here and it began with what might be a loud kickass line, but it was done smoothly enough that I didn’t hear a big bang. “The Shreveport vampire bar would be opening late tonight. I was running behind , and I’d automatically gone to the front door….”

I think there is SO MUCH told here and so smoothly, that had I not read every book in the series, I would have kept going. The vampire bar?? And this person is running late going there? That worked.

I read a bunch of Bill Tapply’s Brady Coyne books until I just didn’t find him interesting any more. I got his newest, with a new character and tried it. GRAY GHOST begins (I did read the flap copy so I knew the premise involved a man with memory loss):
The alarm in Stoney Calhoun’s head jangled at two fifty-five, five minutes before the redundant wind-up clock beside his bed was scheduled to go off. Calhoun’s internal alarm hadn’t failed him yet, but he still didn’t quite trust it.”

Okay, not huge. Almost what, soft? Subtle enough. What I saw there though was that a) Calhoun uses a wind-up clock – why in this day and age when we all have electricity? and there was enough from the flap copy for me to wonder, who does that? I knew from the copy he had been in a VA hospital, so there’s military background. It was intriguing just enough to keep going to find out why he did this.

Those are several very different books. None of them shouted, though Harris vampire line could be seen as a Big Line but I’d gotten over that a while ago I guess.

Several rejects began with weather, forecasts, temperature or the wind; it’s still a legit way to start a book, I will defend it but it’s tired and while that was not enough for me to reject it, it was the beginning of the end for me. But it’s too hard for me to come up with examples of first lines I hate. For I do truly try to read beyond a horrible first line. It’s going to be a combo of things that will stop me; I don’t like the plot, the characters whine, that first paragraph made me roll my eyes or scratch my head or go into the living room and read it to Stu and go “do you understand that?” or page 2 has a torture scene on it or the lead character appears to be a dullard or or or….so I can’t say that an opening line ever stopped me from continuing. CERtainly opening chapters stopped me.

But the Emerson line – not to pick on Earl, he does not deserve it but his opener is so often cited as the best gosh-wow I love it lead-in to a mystery – doesn’t work for me as it’s over the top. On occasion, there are snappy patter openers in some mysteries that might do the same – but when I first read them, they were new and fresh and not “here we go again”.

That Emerson opener really works for some people, they really find it just WOW and intriguing. It makes me feel like, as a reader, I can’t be trusted to find something interesting unless someone’s banging a big loud NOISE. It’s sort of the way I feel about advertising; the louder they yell, the faster I note down the name of the product I will never buy. There’s a creature on television now who apparently is very successful at selling all forms of cleaning products. I don’t care if they are miracle products (and trust me, I want miracle products. I’d LOVE to just get by with baking soda but I can’t!) but I will not buy from anyone who is YELLING to get my attention.

I don’t mind funny openings or openings that grab my attention. I always cite one of my favorite openers as that of Catherine Dain in her book WALK A CROOKED MILE. I always enjoyed her Freddie O’Neal books and I new the character by this one, book three. It begins “Camels stink worse than goats.” And I admired that opening because it just got me. I wanted to know HOW Freddie could possibly know this and WHERE she was that she would mention this and huh? It was a good hook, and I thought it worked awfully well.

Let me quote, as I tend to do from time to time, Bill Tapply who said tonight as this discussion continued on DL for he said what I was thinking.

“I'm put off by any opening to a story that seems to be jumping up and down and yelling, "Hey! Look at me! I'm a wicked clever opening! Have I got your attention? Hey! I mean you!"

Yeah, what he said. I guess I want to feel as if the author knows how intelligent I am and that if she or he writes something, I’ll get it. That, I think, is the deal, the agreement between reader and writer. Or should be.