A fine example of this cropped up just now as I was reading “The Defector,” an excellent spy novel by Daniel Silva. Silva is describing the people who work in the Mossad’s Special Ops department: “Its operatives were executioners and kidnappers; buggers and blackmailers; men of intellect and ingenuity…”

Now it could be that Silva paired the word to which –– as I’m sure you’ve guessed –– I refer with “blackmailers” for a reason. Perhaps the dark arts of the Mossad, whose main office is a modest drive from where I live (though unmarked on maps, of course), include buggering people and then blackmailing them. They’re known to have used female agents as a “honey trap,” after all. Why not add to their repertoire the “chocolate come-on”? Or the “bronze bait”?

More likely, I’d concede, is that bugging someone qualifies one, in spy parlance, as a bugger. And I’d certainly agree that maybe this jumped off the page only because of the little bit of Benny Hill that lives on in me…

But it highlighted to me how a writer can be ambushed by words in many different ways.

Needless to add, for those who know Silva’s work, it didn’t put me off “The Defector,” which is a superb example of classy writing and thrilling pace.

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The opening of “Saint Fiacre” (I’m going to look at the opening, rather than the opening paragraph, because the paragraphs are short, staccato) is laden with the strangeness of waking up in an unaccustomed place, and most of all the dismal return to a place whence one has fled. Here it is:

A timid scratching at the door; the sound of an object being put on the floor; a furtive voice:

“It’s half past five. The first bell for Mass has just been rung…”

“Are you taking communion?”

All this is a re-creation of the small village atmosphere Maigret believed he had left behind him when he went to Paris as a young man to become a police officer. It’s a very meaningful atmosphere for me. For a couple of decades now, I’ve lived around the world as a journalist and writer. It’s been 22 years since I quit the backwater where I grew up. If I’d been a happy kid, I’d probably never have left. So whenever I go back for a visit, I become quiet, silenced by a bitter nostalgia and regret. Maybe that’s why I love this somber, atmospheric early episode featuring “le Commissaire” going back to his childhood village.

Maigret appeared in so many movies and television adaptations–for Saint-Fiacre alone there are a 1959 French-language movie with Jean Gabin and two British TV versions–that it’s easy to think of him with the familiarity we often ascribe to endlessly reproduced old-timers like Miss Marple. But Simenon had a lot more in common with his great U.S. crime-writing contemporaries. In Saint-Fiacre, he makes the lugubrious Raymond Chandler look like a breezy teenager skipping down a sunny small-town street in her bobby socks. Imagine that.

Simenon’s first editor wrote to him: “Your books aren’t real police novels. They aren’t scientific. They don’t play by the rules. There’s no love story in them. There’re no sympathetic characters. You won’t have a thousand readers.” Well, 550 million copies printed shows what that guy knew about potential sales. But he was right about the way the Belgian writer’s books worked. No real good guys and nothing–certainly not love–untainted by the grasping desire to escape a society of dying traditions and internal immigration.

The Saint-Fiacre Affair begins, then, with Maigret waking up in the inn of the village of Saint-Fiacre. At first he doesn’t recognize where he is. As it dawns upon him, he’s flooded with a heavy sense of darkness. He has returned to the village where he grew up to investigate a crime which is about to happen. (His office in the Paris police headquarters received a note saying that “A crime will be committed at the Saint-Fiacre Church during the first mass of the days of the dead.”)

As he strolls through the village, people glance at him curiously. They seem to recognize him, but can’t place the face of the son of the former steward at the local château, a face that left their community 35 years previously to pursue a career in the capital. All other traces of Maigret’s family are gone from the village and he wanders it sensing somehow that its very stones are unwelcoming.

When characters eventually recognize him or when he owns up to being from Saint-Fiacre, they seem to wonder what the hell could’ve brought him back. It’s clear they don’t trust him. There’s no hale slap on the back or curiosity about what he’s been doing all these years. Simenon captures the isolation and suspicion of the French peasant for the big city perfectly. What these people are signaling to Maigret–and what he instinctively realizes–is that he may have been born in Saint-Fiacre, but the moment he left he ceased to belong to it. They owe him nothing. He’s on his own.

If you’ve ever been back to a place where you weren’t happy as a kid, a place from which you wanted to escape, you’ll feel as though you’re reading your diary, not a detective novel.

At the first mass, the Countess of Saint-Fiacre dies of a heart attack. With his crime delivered as promised, Maigret uncovers a clue at the scene and tracks the killer. But it’s really his own despondent sense of alienation that’s at the heart of this novel, and it’s there right from the first paragraph.

If that sounds like a spoof, you surely know who I’m caricaturing. We decided last week that you couldn’t do much better than the opening paragraph of Hammett’s “Red Harvest” for an introduction to the narrative voice, narrator, place and tone of the entire novel. But if anyone could beat it, we’d have to look at Raymond Chandler.

The grumpy god of the gumshoe genre claimed not to have much time for the
idea of a classic in crime writing. In one of his essays, he wrote that contemporary writers who aimed for historical fiction, social vignette, or broad canvas would never surpass “Henry Esmond”, “Madame Bovary”, or “War and Peace”. Crime writers, on the other hand, would easily be able to
devise a better mystery than the ones detailed in “The Hound of the
Baskervilles” or “The Purloined Letter”. “It would be rather more difficult
not to,” he wrote.

Still, the poet with the pipe (okay, no more quirky names for Ray) proved
himself wrong. Or rather he proved that he was right not to focus so much
on the mystery element and, instead, to build a mysterious atmosphere and a sardonic sense of humor. From the opening paragraph.

This is how he starts a long 1950 short story called “Red Wind”:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry
Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair
and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every
booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving
knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even
get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Like the opening paragraph of “Red Harvest,” this gives us all the elements
we’d expect. It also tells you a lot about the narrator and his lifestyle.
The booze parties, and the sense of being gypped at the cocktail lounge.

But the opening paragraph which might be said to define an entire genre ––
and the sub-genres of attempts to copy the true representatives of the
genre, and also to parody it –– starts Chandler’s 1949 novel “The Little
Sister”:

The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: “*Philip
Marlowe…Investigations*.” It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a
reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the
year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is
locked, but next to it is another door with the same legend which is not
locked. Come on in –– there’s nobody in here but me and a big bluebottle
fly. But not if you’re from Manhattan, Kansas.

That’s now a staple of the genre and, just as much, of its parodic/iconic
avatar –– the detective innocently awaiting the moment when the lady arrives (or in this case, telephones) his shabby office. But what makes it so compelling is the voice of Marlowe, with its sense of regret at having become involved in the story and its unspoken acknowledgement of the inevitability of a repeat performance. After all, if Marlowe truly learned the lessons he claims to have taken on board, he wouldn’t be who he is. He’d be corrupted or cynical. Of course he’s neither.

It’s this subtext of honor (the knight in shining armor element of Marlowe’s character, as Chandler called it) that allowed the Epistolarian of Evil (sorry, I said I wouldn’t do that again, didn’t I) to elevate himself above the many who have copied him.

What makes a great first paragraph? And which are the greatest? We all have favorites, some of which have become clichéd –– as happens to anything, whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, or if you grew up in a family that was unhappy in its own way. See what I mean?

In general it’s hard to beat Hemingway’s opening to “The Sun Also Rises” for laying out the narrator’s character, as well as the character being described: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed with that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.”

But what about crime fiction? Over the next few weeks, I’m going to look at some of the best first lines and paragraphs in the genre. Next week, we’ll do a little Chandler (how did you guess?) and then we’ll be on to Simenon, who was a nasty enough man to write perfectly bitter downbeat prose from the very start of his books.

Let’s begin, though, with the man who in many ways beats them all: Dashiell Hammett.

I bet you think I’m going to talk about “The Maltese Falcon,” which in the first paragraph describes Sam Spade as looking “rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.”

But I’m not.

No, we’re going to have a quick gander at the opening of “Red Harvest,” Hammett’s first novel, in which his Continental Op heads to a corrupt small town. It starts this way:

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.

Here we get the introduction to the Op and a lot of insight into him. We learn that he’s a man who has been drinking in a bar in Butte, which implies that he likes rough places and cheap alcohol. He knows the jokes thieves make and so we learn that the “men who could manage their r’s” were thieves too. We also get our introduction to Personville, which is after all to be a central character, as it were, in the book.

Most important, perhaps, given that this was Hammett’s first full-length novel: We get the voice. The voice of Hammett and the Op. The worldly, experienced voice of a man who has mixed with criminals long enough to have heard repeated references to one small town over the course of years. A man who, in the course of the book, will do criminal things for decent ends.

It also has that Hammett trademark: the kicker in the final sentence of the opening paragraph (note that the “blond Satan” does this for “The Maltese Falcon.”) If a writer’s trying to hook a reader into his book with this first paragraph –– on the basis that it’s as far as a casual browser will bother to read –– he has to view the opening paragraph the way a journalist does his lead. It must include information about the kind of book it is and where it might be going. But it must also give us a clever line that jumps our eye further into the book –– once you’ve read the second paragraph, you’ll probably figure you ought to buy it.

Unless, that is, you’re one of those bums who doesn’t buy books and reads them in bookshops without paying for them. If you’re one of those guys, then hear this: I won’t be copying out any more of “Red Harvest” on this blog. Buy it and read it.

Next week: Part 2 –– Big Ray C. Meantime, see if you can guess which Chandler book gets the nod for the best opening paragraph.

I picked “The Long Goodbye” off the shelf, because it’s my favorite. From the very first page, where Marlowe finds Terry Lennox falling drunk out of a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith in front of a club called The Dancers, I find myself hooked once again: “The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back. It didn’t bother him enough to give him the shakes.”

Chandler is, for me, the greatest of writers. Taken with Hammett, I’d say he did everything for American literature that people always assume Hemingway did: made things simple, direct, tough and stark. But unlike Hemingway (and like Hammett), he had the gruff sense of humor of a man who didn’t quite buy into the system (he wasn’t a Communist like Hammett, but he’d lived in England and been in the Canadian airforce, which made him less than conventional). That’s why he wrote crime novels, I think. It’s an outsider’s genre, the writing venue of a man or woman who sees through things and yet remains positive enough to bother putting pen to paper.

Chandler, like Marlowe, seems to have “felt as out of place as a cocktail
onion on a banana split.” Frequently, so have I, when I’ve been among the
corporate or the gilded of this world –– and I have spent many an
uncomfortable day, month or year in those scurrilous circles. That, in
fact, may be why I’m a writer. Certainly it helps me cope with the weird
status a writer holds today, threatened and undervalued, and yet cherished
(though not always enough for someone to buy your book and pay for your
kids to go to college.)

Ray understood all that. In his essays he writes about how banal commercial
British cosy mysteries “really get me down.” In his interviews, he
complained that “you starve to death for ten years before your publisher
realizes you’re any good.”

Yes, Ray’s my man.

The hero of Martin Cruz Smith’s excellent series set in the Soviet Union and, later, Russia (with stops in Cuba, Ukraine, Germany and Alaska) is the closest today’s crime fiction gets to Chandler’s idea that “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.” In many ways, Cruz Smith is the closest among current crime writers to the keen yet elliptical style of plot development perfected by Chandler. (In Chandler’s case, that was, as
he admitted, largely because he didn’t really keep track of the plot; I
suspect that’s not the issue with Cruz Smith.)

[Note: To qualify my lead paragraph, I ought to quote Chandler once again:
“There are as many bad literary novels as bad detective novels. The bad
literary novels just don’t get published.” That’s not true anymore, as
anyone who’s ever tossed a copy of Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America”
at the wall will vouch. Still detective fiction retains that reputation among certain circles, and indeed a lot of crap still washes through the sleuthing sluices.]

I’ve read all the Renko novels, as well as some of Cruz Smith’s standalone
books. From the perspective of a writer, I’ve observed with enormous
pleasure the elements that make Renko work so well, and of course the
manner in which Cruz Smith puts them to effect.

A key to this is Renko’s voice. His apparently deep disillusion is something of a trick. Renko’s father was a Stalinist general and as an investigator he’s constantly measuring himself against that old bastard – and regretting the similarities he finds. This continuity between the old USSR and the new FSU grounds Renko. It’s why he’s not a drunk like some of his colleagues, and why he isn’t corrupt like the others: he’s a hard-edged idealist, like his father, who happens to have inherited the humanity of his mother.

Cruz Smith’s Russia is the perfect backdrop for Renko’s tawdry shining
armor. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cruz Smith has painted the
breakdown of society better than any nonfiction or journalism I’ve read.

It’s what I’ve tried to do with my Palestinian crime novels. A place over-covered by journalists, like Gaza or Moscow, might seem to have little new to yield for a fiction writer. But the element overlooked by journalism and nonfiction – which sees everything in terms of politics – is that politics in such places is merely the thin end of a gangster wedge which must reach to every corner of society and go to sordid lengths to maintain control. Thus any murder Renko uncovers (such as the whore/dancer of “Three Stations,” his latest) reaches directly to the upper echelons of the government, the security establishment or (in the case of “Three Stations”) the new oligarchic economy.

That’s what makes Renko so dangerous that the bad guys want to stop him.

And that’s an element detective writers ought to note: when your sleuth is
after the truth, are the villains trying to stop him merely to avoid prison
for their personal misdeeds? Or are they protecting a corrupt, monolithic
system that our hero will uncover and, in his small way, smother around the
edges?

This kind of context is what makes Renko the most compelling detective in
contemporary crime fiction.

The composer, who shot to stardom with hummable classics like Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and The Marriage of Figaro, revealed to his wife only weeks before his death that he was sure he had been poisoned. Saucy Constanze Mozart thought her husband was just overworked, but when the deadly day came in December 1791, she was shocked to think that he had been right all along.

“There’s been a cover up at the highest level,” says Constanze, who now lives six feet under the ground in Salzburg, Austria. (The News of the World hacked into the spirit world and bribed St. Peter to obtain access to secret Mozart communications.)

Doctors and historians have repeatedly pooh-poohed calls for a full investigation of the great composer’s death. This summer new reports
emerged from a Viennese academic that Mozart had died due to a deficiency of Vitamin D. (*Editor’s note: No, really. We’re not kidding.*)

The academic said that Mozart composed his tunes “late at night and no doubt slept late into the day.” This deprived the great man of Vitamin D from sunshine, which is anyway rare in Vienna during the winter, the academic asserted.

Like other supposedly rational medical theories of Mozart’s death, this one has about as much basis in reality as the average report in, well, The News of the World did. After all, Mozart’s letters show that he rose before seven for breakfast and his hairdresser arrived soon after to do his coiffure. If he wrote late into the night, that probably meant some time after 10 p.m. And if the lack of sunshine is a reason for Mozart’s death, why doesn’t the entire population of Iceland die at 35 as he did?

Award-winning writer Matt Rees reveals in his new book MOZART’S LAST ARIA the truth behind the sinister end of the greatest composer in history. “Academics suggest that anyone who thinks Mozart was murdered is a nut,” says Rees. “But the theories academics put forward to counter the murder scenario are far more speculative than any of the ideas they seek to discredit.”

Next week: News of the World exclusive investigation reveals: Mozart Academics Hit Back — Nutty Rees Writes Standing Up; ‘I Like Yoga,” Says Whacko Crime Writer. Alkie Author Blacked Out on Subway and Woke Up in Bronx at 3 a.m.