Howdunit. Группа авторов
was killed by three chest knife blows in a station car park, Megan Harpur had been on her way home to tell her husband that she was leaving him for another man.
Bill James, Roses, Roses
And here are two of my favourites of the longer variety, each humorous in its own way. The first is, of course, a well-known classic, the second by Brian Thompson, a writer whose forays into crime writing deserve to be better known and appreciated than I think they are.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Mrs Evans was teaching me the tango. As it happened, I already knew the rudiments of this exciting dance, but never as interpreted by Mrs Evans, naked save for her high heels and some Mexican silver earrings – a present, she claimed, from Acapulco. The high heels were there to add grace and I suppose authenticity, but even with them on, the lady’s head barely reached my chin. We swooped about the room, exceedingly drunk, to the most famous tango of them all, the Blue one. It was past two in the morning and the rain that had been forecast had arrived as grounded cloud, moping blindly about the streets, tearful and incoherent. But we were okay – we were up on the third floor, looking down on the damned cloud and having a whale of a time. Mrs Evans was warm to the touch and her make-up was beginning to melt. For some reason a piece of Sellotape was stuck to her quivering bottom, and as we danced I tried to solve this small but endearing mystery. It came to me at last; it was her sister’s birthday and earlier in the evening she had parcelled up a head scarf, some knickers and a Joanna Trollope paperback.
Brian Thompson. Ladder of Angels
Over the years, some of the finest openings have appeared in novels written by members of the Detection Club. The Club’s founder, Anthony Berkeley, changed his pen name to Francis Iles for his first novel of psychological suspense, Malice Aforethought, which began brilliantly:
It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter. Murder is a serious business. The slightest slip may be disastrous. Dr Bickleigh had no intention of risking disaster.
The ironic tone is maintained throughout, and reflected in the outcome of the story. The next Francis Iles novel, Before the Fact, had an equally memorable beginning:
Some women give birth to murderers, some go to bed with them, and some marry them. Lina Aysgarth had lived with her husband for nearly eight years before she realized that she was married to a murderer.
Almost half a century later, Ruth Rendell published A Judgement in Stone which begins:
Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.
Peter Robinson describes this as the perfect narrative hook. An opening that hooks the reader’s attention is invaluable, but by itself, it’s not enough to guarantee a good book, let alone a novel to compare with those classics by Iles and Rendell. It may even, as Peter explains, be a mistake to worry too much about the opening if that leads to neglect of keeping the reader hooked throughout the whole narrative.
‘Something Should Happen Now’: Narrative Hooks
I always get nervous when I’m asked to write about the craft of fiction. As I teach creative writing courses often, I have read a lot of books on the subject. You know the sort of thing: 5 Shortcuts to Perfect Plotting, 3 Techniques for Creating Award-winning Characters, 10 Simple Steps to Writing the Greatest Crime Novel Ever Written, and so on. But when I write, I don’t think about these books; I just follow my gut instinct. As a jazz pianist needs to practise scales before moving on to wild improvisations, so a writer needs to become familiar with and internalize the basics of his craft in order to set off on a flight of fancy. For what is a novel, after all, but a flight of fancy? You may have studied plotting, structure, dialogue, description, action and character as separate strands of the writing process, and done all the requisite exercises, but when you start working on a book, they all tend to blur into one another, and when the writing is going well most writers rarely stop to make sure they have adhered to the three-, five- or seven-act structure, got their plot points in the right places or put in enough narrative hooks. When it comes right down to it, I can’t really know what will hook ‘the reader’, but I do know what hooks me. And I’m a reader, too, so maybe I’m my own best audience?
What is a narrative hook? Perhaps the best way to think of it is as anything that keeps a reader turning the pages. The writer’s least favourite question is ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ Usually when people ask that, they mean the outlandish overall concept for the book, such as a serial killer who skins his victims, but when you get right down to it, a book isn’t made of one idea. Every sentence is an idea. And in the same way, every page, or at least every scene or every chapter, needs narrative hooks. Perhaps the first lesson, then, is that you should always think of narrative hooks in the plural.
Beginnings are notoriously difficult; there’s no way around that. The main problem is that many writers, especially beginners, tend to put too much exposition up front. Someone is murdered in a particularly gruesome fashion in the first sentence, then the writer spends two pages giving us the victim’s life story. There’s very little narrative hook in that. Some more cunning writers try to get around this problem by using a startling prologue as their hook, often written in the present tense and italicized. This prologue, though full of atmosphere, mystery and menace, appears at first to have no relation whatsoever to the story that follows, and the reader is hooked on wanting to know what the hell it is there for. Eventually, all is revealed. The problem with this is that it has become a cliché. I should know; I’ve done it once or twice. In his ten rules for writing, Elmore Leonard advises us to avoid prologues. I wouldn’t take this as an absolute rule, but perhaps it is better to avoid routinely including prologues.
Too much attention is also given to hooking your reader with the opening sentence. Yes, it is all well and good if you can come up with a real humdinger, but in most cases, you won’t. By all means aspire to perfection, but remember, you can always come back to it later. What you really need to do is get the story moving. Becoming obsessed with the opening sentence is often a sure-fire way of procrastinating. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up like Camus’s Joseph Grand in La Peste, who was such a perfectionist that he couldn’t get beyond writing and rewriting the first sentence of his book.
Not all opening sentences hook the reader as strongly as Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone, in which she not only names the murderer but supplies the motive. The entire opening scene of this book merits study for any writer, as Rendell continues to describe the crime and its outcome in a way that seems to be ‘giving away’ everything we expect to find out bit by bit in the course of the reading the whole novel. Instead of encouraging us to stop reading, however, this technique proves to be perfect narrative hook, perhaps because it leads us to become more interested in how it all unfolds rather than simply what happens and to whom. As we read, we find ourselves watching a car crash in slow motion.
The lesson here is to think beyond the first sentence to the whole opening scene, for that is where you must set your first hooks. Most readers are generous enough to allow a writer a couple of chapters before deciding whether to give