Great Openings I

Every once in a while you come across an opening passage so memorable that you can almost remember it word-for-word years later, long after the details of the rest of the story have faded into the dim recesses of your mind. As Somerset Maugham writes in his astringent autobiography, "Now and then journalists in search of copy ask me what is the most thrilling moment of my life. If I were not ashamed to, I might answer that it is the moment when I began to read Goethe's Faust. I have never quite lost this feeling, and even now the first pages of a book sometimes send the blood racing through my veins."

And so I'm going to indulge in something I've long thought of doing, which is to share in this blog my favorite written openings (of novels, short stories, and pretty much anything else that stands out in my mind), in the form of an occasional series. Now, I only have a handful "in the bank" at the moment, so this may be a somewhat short series. We'll see how it goes.

Today's entry comes from the father of modern American detective fiction:

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

— Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, 1929.

Despite a surprisingly short career as a novelist (only five years passed between the publication of his first and last books), Hammett wrote such classics as The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon, practically defining the genre of "hard-boiled fiction." The brisk, bracing prose hits you in the face like a wet towel; his world and the characters who inhabit it practically crackle with life.

Remarkably, the passage above is the first paragraph of his first published book.