Being from an “older” generation some of the books I read and the author’s thereof may seem strange or even unknown to more “modern” readers. No matter – I still read what I like and like what I read!
It is often the first few words of a book that draw one into continuing. Without going into an exhaustive list I will just give a few examples from books I have read.
One of the best to my mind is, “Wanted, a detective – to arrest the flight of time!” This is the opening sentence from the (1935) autobiography of Dr Halliday Sutherland, “The Arches of the Years”. My mother, dear old thing that she was, sensed my love of literature and well written books, and suggested this book to me and mentioned that first sentence. I was intrigued!
Charles Dickens also obviously had the knack of punchy first sentences. Take the opening of his well-loved “A Christmas Carol” – “Marley was dead, to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that.”
And then of course the opening (very long) sentence from Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” - “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short the period was so far like the present period, that some of the noisiest authorities insisted on it being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
I can’t help adding that while this book was written in 1859, that sentence could apply equally well today (USA, UK, Australia – any other suggestions?)!!
Another author not much read today is Nevil Shute. Some of his books are very dated but they are all very good and well-written tales. This opening sentence from his famous “A Town like Alice” - “James MacFadden died in March 1905 when he was forty-seven years old; he was riding in the Driffield Point-to-Point.”
Then what I think is my favourite Nevil Shute story, “An old captivity”, starts “This case came before me quite by chance in the spring of last year.” And so it goes on.
Jeffery Farnol is another “old fashioned” author – it is actually quite difficult to
get hold of his books nowadays. He was almost an exact contemporary of the historical novelist Georgette Heyer and wrote rattling good yarns of daring do in the 17thand 18thcenturies – always a sword fight or duel of some sort, and of course a beautiful feisty maiden to be won! As an example the first line of “Martin Conisby’s Vengence” – “The Frenchman beside me had been dead since dawn,” sets the tone. Martin Conisby had been captured by Barbary pirates and was a galley slave sharing an oar with the Frenchman.
Erskine Childers, the British author who was a supporter of a “free Ireland” and who smuggled guns into Ireland, in his yacht, for what became the IRA, wrote his most famous book “The Riddle of the Sands”. He was executed by the British for his troubles in 1922.
The Riddle of the Sands, written in1903, was amazingly prescient in that, to my mind, it foretold the possible invasion of England by the Germans using barges towed by tugboats from the "sands" - the low lying islands of the Frisian coast and Holland. Just what Hitler had in mind in 1940!
The 1903 very English view of the world is evident in the first sentence, but it is a rattling good story – “I have read of men who, when forced by their calling to live for long periods in utter solitude – save for a few black faces – have made it a rule to dress regularly for dinner in order to maintain their self-respect and prevent a relapse in barbarism.”
Then of course there is Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous “Treasure Island”. The first sentence – “Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearing of the island, and that only because there is treasure still not lifted, I take up my pen in the year 17 --- and go back to the time my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodgings under our roof.”
Who would not be drawn into reading further?
I could go on, but as I said at the opening of this post – these are just a few examples that I have found intriguing.
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