5 Great Opening Lines from Pulp Novels

In her terrific book The Artful Edit, Susan Bell veers from analyzing the prose of Fitzgerald and Joyce to give credit where credit is due, lauding great first lines of hard-boiled and noir novels.

The best pulp-fiction writers hone beginnings and endings to their sharpest edge.  Surprise and wit, among other things, are in their arsenal.  Here are some examples of gripping first sentences:  "I am going to kill a man" (Nicholas Blake, The Beast Must Die); "They threw me off the hay truck about noon" (James Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice); "I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte" (Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest); "Well, sir, I should have been sitting pretty, just about as pretty as a man could sit" (Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280); "Anna Halsey was about two hundred and forty pounds of middle-aged putty-faced woman in a black tailor-made suit" (Raymond Chandler, Trouble is My Business).

(I'm not sure that's my own favorite opening line by Hammett.  What's yours?) 

Bell's an experienced editor who writes clearly and concisely about the best editing strategies she's discovered and developed over her years in publishing, and The Artful Edit shares her terrific advice with writers of all genres who are serious about improving their work.  I've praised it here on the blog before, and I'm happy to be teaching it in my graduate workshop tomorrow night.