Favorite Novel Openings

By Johnny D. Boggs

Someone asked: If Peter Cooper’s “Somehow, Johnny Cash is dead” is the best lede to any newspaper article, what’s tops for a novel’s opening.

That’s easy.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.” – J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937)

Wait. I forgot Hatchet – the novel that makes every 10-year-old boy want to read. Want to learn how to write for boys? Read Gary Paulsen.

“Brian Robeson stared out the window of the small plane at the endless green northern wilderness below. It was a small plane, a Cessna 406 – a bushplane – and the engine was so loud, so roaring and consuming and loud, that it ruined any chance for conversation.” – Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet (1987)

There. That’s settled.

Except I just remembered …

“To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. …” – Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946)

Wait, I write mostly Westerns so it ought to be …

“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.” – Charles Portis’s True Grit (1968)

Portis’s ending is spot-on, too.

On the other hand, I’m a fan of mysteries. Like …

“I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte.” – Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929)

And this is coming from a reader who is a bigger fan of Raymond Chandler – and, while I’m on mysteries, William P. McGivern (The Big Heat, Rogue Cop) doesn’t get the credit he deserves.

But, shucks, you can’t go wrong with Mark Twain.

“You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. …” – Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Oh, I can't diss Dickens.

“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 …” – Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

No, it’s now settled:

“It was a pleasure to burn.” – Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Yep. Settled. Till I think some more.