Gutbrain Records

Tuesday, 16 December 2008

I've been looking at the first lines of favorite books by favorite authors, expecting them to be great and finding that many of them aren't. It's hard to come up with a great first line. A lot of authors need two or more lines to get things moving.

This made me think of the series of Parker novels that Donald Westlake wrote using the pseudonym Richard Stark. These books about a professional thief, written from the early '60s to the early '70s, are great, fast-paced thrillers — and many of them have great opening lines.

Butcher's Moon, from 1974, should have been the grand finale (first line: "Running toward the light, Parker fired twice over his left shoulder, not caring whether he hit anything or not"), but more than twenty years later Westlake started writing Richard Stark "Parker" books again.

The new Parker novels got good reviews but I didn't think they were about the same Parker. It's sad to read in one of the new books, for instance, how Parker always carries a quarter in case he needs to make a phone call. Are you kidding? After fifty years of robbing armored cars, can't Parker heist the small change from a payphone? He can't memorize a calling card number? (Parker can get safe fake credit cards, so why not a calling card?)

This page has all of the first lines of the Parker novels. The first lines of the new ones are too busy and trying too hard. Not all of the old ones are great, but when the first line of a book is like the first line of The Mourner — "When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away" — it's hard to stop reading.