(The reader may have further wondered where Ed London got the muscles to manhandle a rug with a corpse rolled in it; oriental rugs are pretty heavy, even without bodies in them. This whole question never occurred to me until years later.)
Ever since Death pulled that doublecross, I’ve used this opening gambit more often than not. All seven Tanner books employed this device. In some of them I wrote a single chapter before doubling back to explain the book’s premise, while in others I let the story line run on for two or three chapters before flashing back and explaining who these people were and what they were doing and why. In the Tanner books, a secondary purpose was served by this technique. The opening chapter or chapters generally left Tanner up against the wall — suspended in a bamboo cage in northern Thailand in Two For Tanner, and informed that he’s to be executed at sunrise; on a train in Czechoslovakia in The Canceled Czech, with a cop asking him for his papers; and literally buried alive in Modonoland in Me Tanner, You Jane. This tension was maintained and even heightened by forcing the reader to pause for a flashback; the effect was that of a cliffhanger in an old-fashioned serial.
This business of beginning after the beginning is a natural for novels of suspense and adventure and action. But it works as well in the sort of novel in which characters do not get tossed off Czech trains or buried alive or shot at sunrise. If your story is one of a young man’s loss of innocence in the big city, you don’t have to begin with him arriving in town. You can choose instead to open with a scene involving him and a girl he’s taken up with some weeks after his arrival. They’re at a party, or in bed, or having a fight, or whatever — you’re writing this, not me. Then in the next chapter you can fill in whatever background has to be filled in. The point, remember, is to involve the reader, to make him care what happens next. You do this by showing your characters in action, in conflict, in motion, not sitting on a park bench musing about the meaning of life.
Innumerable examples of mainstream fiction of the highest order are structured along these lines. They open with a scene designed to get things off to a good start. Indeed, I’ve read a slew of novels in which the first chapter poses a crisis, the ensuing thirty chapters recount the hero’s entire life up to the moment of that crisis, and the final chapter resolves it. Jerome Weidman’s The Enemy Camp is a vivid example of this approach. By and large this strikes me as too much of a good thing; if the problem is such that it can be stated and resolved in two chapters, why must we wade through a hundred thousand words of background between the statement and the resolution?
Is it always a mistake to begin at the beginning?
Of course not. Always is a word we’re trying to stay away from, remember? There are very few absolutes in this business of novel writing, and the First-Things-Second Principle is definitely not one of them. It’s extremely useful, and it’s always worth considering, but there are times when the best way to start a novel is the most natural way — i.e., at the beginning.
Here are some examples from my own work:
Deadly Honeymoon features a newlywed couple. On their wedding night thugs kill a man at a nearby lakeside cabin. Almost as an afterthought, the bad guys beat up the husband and rape the bride. Our leads do not report this to the cops but hunt down the villains themselves. Here I felt the rape scene was of paramount importance, supplying the motive for everything that follows and making the vigilante activity acceptable and even laudable. Furthermore, there’s more action and involvement in that rape scene than in the rather plodding chapters which follow, in which Dave and Jill set about the nuts-and-bolts work of tracking the killers. To open with them making phone calls and checking city directories and then flash back to the rape scene would be spectacularly senseless.
Such Men Are Dangerous — written under the pen name of Paul Kavanagh — concerns a burnt-out ex-Green Beret on the verge of a breakdown who hies himself off to an island in the Florida Keys and lives a hermit’s existence. Then a CIA type drops in and involves him in a caper. This would have been a natural for the First-Things-Second approach, but I was more interested in establishing the lead’s character at the beginning since I saw that as the most important single element in the book. Moreover, I wanted to show the character going through the process of personality disintegration before he found his way to the Keys, then show the contrast achieved through some months of solitude and self-sufficiency.
The Sins of the Fathers, the first of three books about Matthew Scudder, begins with his being hired by the father of a murder victim. The action which follows is gradual and I felt the book would build more effectively if events were dealt with in chronological order. The two succeeding Scudder books, however, open First-Things-Second.
There are two schools of thought about the opening of a novel. One holds that the important thing is to get it written, the other that the important thing is to get it right. Both of them are quite valid, of course; the distinction is one of emphasis, and it will vary with the writer and with the particular novel.
In my own case, a book is never entirely real for me until I begin putting words on paper. The words of an outline or treatment somehow don’t count. I have to be doing the actual writing, pulling finished pages of prose and dialogue from my typewriter. The pages may not be finished in any true sense; I may throw them out, or rewrite them any number of times, before the book is in final form. But they have the look of finished pages, and when they begin to accumulate to the left of my machine, I know I’m really engaged in the curious process of writing a book.
Because of this, I probably start some books prematurely, before they’re as well thought out as they might be. My first drafts of my first several chapters are frequently a part of this thinking-out process. It’s in the course of writing them that I find out a lot of essential information about my characters and the plot in which they’re caught up.
This happened in The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling.
Having already written two books about Bernie Rhodenbarr, I probably didn’t have to type out fifty pages of first draft in order to make his acquaintance. Nor was I running blind as far as plot was concerned; I already had a pretty clear view of the plot for at least the first hundred pages when I sat down to write page one.
Even so, fifty pages in I decided I didn’t like what I’d done. The pace felt wrong to me. There were some characters I wanted to drop, some scenes I wanted to compress. There was a relationship between Bernie and his sidekick Carolyn Kaiser which I knew more about for having written the fifty pages; as a result I wanted to do them over so I could redefine it in the early pages. There were some things I knew about the plot that I hadn’t known when I started, and I wanted to lay the groundwork for them in my opening.
On the other hand, I wrote a book called After The First Death knowing a great deal about the opening and not too much about what would happen later on. The premise is simple enough: a man has spent time in prison for killing a prostitute during an alcoholic blackout. He wins his release via one of those landmark decisions of the early sixties — Miranda, Escobedo, Gideon, one of those cases. The book opens First-Things-Second style, with Alex waking slowly, coming out of blackout in a Times Square hotel room, seeing a dead woman on the floor in a pool of blood and rocked with the thought that he’d done it again. In the second chapter he decides not to turn himself in, as he did the first time, but becomes a fugitive from justice. Then we’re at last told who he is and what it is that he seems to have done again, and then, the flashback completed, he searches his memory and gets a tiny flash of the moment just before he went into blackout, enough of a flash to convince him that he didn’t kill the hooker after all and that he has to find out who did. The rest of the book concerns his attempts to do so.