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The opening sentences of Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, published in 1929, are these: ‘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.’

It’s all there: the directness, the way it buttonholes you instantly, a hand taking hold of the lapel of your jacket while the voice speaks confidently, not overloudly, into your ear. And the poetry: the poetry of the vernacular, the rhythm of real speech.

The first sentence in his first novel. I wonder how many times he rolled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter, read it through, tossed it over his shoulder, lit another cigarette, set a fresh sheet in place and tried again? I wonder if he’d been testing it in his head at a little after four, four-thirty, those mornings it was impossible to get back to sleep? I wonder if he had it all pat from the start?

At the time of writing that first novel, Hammett was thirty-five years old. He’d been an operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a private detective working for an vast organization with government connections. He had twice enlisted in the army, world wars one and two, and it was during the first of these periods that he was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that would seriously affect his well-being for years. When he was no longer with the Pinkertons, realizing, perhaps, that henceforth he would be physically less active, he enrolled at a Business College and set about learning the business of writing.

Going back to the opening of Red Harvest made me think of the distinctive ways in which other crime books begin. Some, like the Hammett, are short and punchy, grabbing the attention at the same time as having a close-to-perfect satisfaction of their own. Others are longer, with a deliberately complex sentence that winds you along its length and so into both the style and the narrative. Others are paragraph-length and draw you in more carefully, and often then stay in the memory – sometimes after the book itself has been read, enjoyed and set aside.

Opening lines matter. Here is a selection of my favourite single sentence beginnings, some of which will be familiar, others perhaps less so.

They threw me off the hay truck about noon.

James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice

Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.

George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake.

James Sallis, Drive

When she was killed by three chest knife blows in a station car park, Megan Harpur had been on her way home to tell her husband that she was leaving him for another man.

Bill James, Roses, Roses

And here are two of my favourites of the longer variety, each humorous in its own way. The first is, of course, a well-known classic, the second by Brian Thompson, a writer whose forays into crime writing deserve to be better known and appreciated than I think they are.

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Mrs Evans was teaching me the tango. As it happened, I already knew the rudiments of this exciting dance, but never as interpreted by Mrs Evans, naked save for her high heels and some Mexican silver earrings – a present, she claimed, from Acapulco. The high heels were there to add grace and I suppose authenticity, but even with them on, the lady’s head barely reached my chin. We swooped about the room, exceedingly drunk, to the most famous tango of them all, the Blue one. It was past two in the morning and the rain that had been forecast had arrived as grounded cloud, moping blindly about the streets, tearful and incoherent. But we were okay – we were up on the third floor, looking down on the damned cloud and having a whale of a time. Mrs Evans was warm to the touch and her make-up was beginning to melt. For some reason a piece of Sellotape was stuck to her quivering bottom, and as we danced I tried to solve this small but endearing mystery. It came to me at last; it was her sister’s birthday and earlier in the evening she had parcelled up a head scarf, some knickers and a Joanna Trollope paperback.

Brian Thompson. Ladder of Angels

Over the years, some of the finest openings have appeared in novels written by members of the Detection Club. The Club’s founder, Anthony Berkeley, changed his pen name to Francis Iles for his first novel of psychological suspense, Malice Aforethought, which began brilliantly:

It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter. Murder is a serious business. The slightest slip may be disastrous. Dr Bickleigh had no intention of risking disaster.

The ironic tone is maintained throughout, and reflected in the outcome of the story. The next Francis Iles novel, Before the Fact, had an equally memorable beginning:

Some women give birth to murderers, some go to bed with them, and some marry them. Lina Aysgarth had lived with her husband for nearly eight years before she realized that she was married to a murderer.

Almost half a century later, Ruth Rendell published A Judgement in Stone which begins:

Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.

Peter Robinson describes this as the perfect narrative hook. An opening that hooks the reader’s attention is invaluable, but by itself, it’s not enough to guarantee a good book, let alone a novel to compare with those classics by Iles and Rendell. It may even, as Peter explains, be a mistake to worry too much about the opening if that leads to neglect of keeping the reader hooked throughout the whole narrative.