And Then The Murders Began...

And Then the Murders Began - 2
And Then the Murders
Began.
Could a classic ever be improve upon? How about
their opening line?
This is a mashup of American Book Review’s fascinating
list of their 100 best opening lines of novels with a tweet
by Marc Laidlaw, who created a nice approach to
revisiting first lines of books. His 3 March 2017 tweet
said, “The first line of almost any story can be improved
by making sure the second line is, 'And then the murders
began.'”
The result is usually uproarious comedy.
I recently did the work of extracting the first lines from
Gutenberg.org's most downloaded books. (And you can
get that book on Amazon – currently in preorder - and
most online booksellers. Both ebook and paperback. Also
at http://calm.li/rsaunders )
For now, please enjoy this test of beautiful literature
reimagined darkly...
--o0o--

1. Call me Ishmael. And then the murders began. —
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man
in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
And then the murders began. —Jane Austen, Pride and
Prejudice (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. And then the
murders began. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
(1973)
4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel
Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant
afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. And
then the murders began. —Gabriel García Márquez, One
Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. And then the
murders began. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is
unhappy in its own way. And then the murders began. —
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance
Garnett)
7. Riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to
bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of
recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. And
then the murders began. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
(1939)
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were
striking thirteen. And then the murders began. —George
Orwell, 1984 (1949)
9. 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. And then the
murders began. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
(1859)
10. I am an invisible man. And then the murders began. —
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch
(Are you in trouble? —Do-you-need-advice? —Write-to-
Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk
and stared at a piece of white cardboard. And then the
murders began. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
(1933)
12. 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. And then the murders began. —Mark
Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one
morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he
was arrested. And then the murders began. —Franz Kafka,
The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)
14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new
novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. And then the
murders began. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a
traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)
15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing
new. And then the murders began. —Samuel Beckett,
Murphy (1938)
16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll
probably want to know is where I was born, and what my
lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were
occupied and all before they had me, and all that David
Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it,

if you want to know the truth. And then the murders
began. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there
was a moocow coming down along the road and this
moocow that was coming down along the road met a
nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. And then the
murders began. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man (1916)
18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. And then
the murders began. —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
(1915)
19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both
of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had
minded what they were about when they begot me; had
they duly considered how much depended upon what they
were then doing; —that not only the production of a
rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the
happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his
genius and the very cast of his mind; —and, for aught they
knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house
might take their turn from the humours and dispositions
which were then uppermost: —Had they duly weighed and
considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, —I am
verily persuaded I should have made a quite different
figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely
to see me. And then the murders began. —Laurence
Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–1767)
20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life,
or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these
pages must show. And then the murders began. —Charles
Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the
stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and

a razor lay crossed. And then the murders began. —James
Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in
torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was
checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the
streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling
along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty
flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
And then the murders began. —Edward George Bulwer-
Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home
from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps
too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa,
had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of
the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate
mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare
time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to
make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. And
then the murders began. —Thomas Pynchon, The Crying
of Lot 49 (1966)
24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone
ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on
the other end asking for someone he was not. And then
the murders began. —Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)
25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces,
I could see them hitting. And then the murders began. —
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
26. 124 was spiteful. And then the murders began. —Toni
Morrison, Beloved (1987)
27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do
not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one
of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and

keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. And then
the murders began. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
(1605; trans. Edith Grossman)
28. Mother died today. And then the murders began. —
Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)
29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to
divorce his wife, Shuyu. And then the murders began. —
Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)
30. The sky above the port was the color of television,
tuned to a dead channel. And then the murders began. —
William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. And then the
murders began. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from
Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)
32. Where now? Who now? When now? And then the
murders began. —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953;
trans. Patrick Bowles)
33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the
ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the
groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father
beyond this tree." And then the murders began. —
Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)
34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. And then the murders
began. —John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)
35. It was like so, but wasn't. And then the murders began.
—Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)
36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. And then the
murders began. —William Gaddis, J R (1975)
37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
And then the murders began. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway (1925)

38. All this happened, more or less. And then the murders
began. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
39. They shoot the white girl first. And then the murders
began. —Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)
40. For a long time, I went to bed early. And then the
murders began. —Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913;
trans. Lydia Davis)
41. The moment one learns English, complications set in.
And then the murders began. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos
(1990)
42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined
by literature. And then the murders began. —Anita
Brookner, The Debut (1981)
43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false
azure in the windowpane; And then the murders began. —
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)
44. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.
And then the murders began. —Zora Neale Hurston,
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as
generally happens in such cases, each time it was a
different story. And then the murders began. —Edith
Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)
46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and
Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's
admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another
African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an
awesome African army assembled and arduously
advanced against an African anthill, assiduously
annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex
astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's

antipodal ant annexation. And then the murders began.
—Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)
47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and
he almost deserved it. And then the murders began. —C.
S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the
Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now
without taking a fish. And then the murders began. —
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. And then
the murders began. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road
(1992)
50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably
smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again,
as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey,
Michigan, in August of 1974. And then the murders began.
—Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. And then the murders began.
—Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)
52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow,
we continued to fall. And then the murders began. —
Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)
53. It was a pleasure to burn. And then the murders
began. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one
chooses that moment of experience from which to look
back or from which to look ahead. And then the murders
began. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)
55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three
minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual
perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my

eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied
expression. And then the murders began. —Flann O'Brien,
At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a
good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a
Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a
good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade,
lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my
Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very
good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called
Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of
Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our
selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my
Companions always call'd me. And then the murders
began. —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the
street. And then the murders began. —David Markson,
Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988)
58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to
be thrown into relief by poor dress.
And then the murders began. —George Eliot,
Middlemarch (1872)
59. It was love at first sight. And then the murders began.
—Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad
poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems
are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and
well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to
the tops of her stockings? And then the murders began. —
Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual
Things (1971)

61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. And
then the murders began. —W. Somerset Maugham, The
Razor's Edge (1944)
62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered
she had turned into the wrong person. And then the
murders began. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were
Grownups (2001)
63. The human race, to which so many of my readers
belong, has been playing at children's games from the
beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a
nuisance for the few people who grow up. And then the
murders began. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of
Notting Hill (1904)
64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father
gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my
mind ever since. And then the murders began. —F. Scott
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
65. You better not never tell nobody but God. And then
the murders began. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple
(1982)
66. "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling
from the heavens, "first you have to die." And then the
murders began. —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
(1988)
67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they
electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was
doing in New York. And then the murders began. —Sylvia
Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so
does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
And then the murders began. —David Foster Wallace, The
Broom of the System (1987)

69. If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought
Moses Herzog. And then the murders began. —Saul
Bellow, Herzog (1964)
70. Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for
only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish
digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson,
who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag
the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting
and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of
its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top
to keep the dogs from digging it up. And then the murders
began. —Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away
(1960)
71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my
keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight;
there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the
shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed
type like me. And then the murders began. —GŸnter
Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)
72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick
Gibson. And then the murders began. —Stanley Elkin,
The Dick Gibson Show (1971)
73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four
friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were
summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of
the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West
Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth
of April, there to await the End of the World. And then the
murders began. —Robert Coover, The Origin of the
Brunists (1966)
74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but
he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at
which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a

face positively pale with the irritation that had brought
her to the point of going away without sight of him. And
then the murders began. —Henry James, The Wings of
the Dove (1902)
75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a
village that looked across the river and the plain to the
mountains. And then the murders began. —Ernest
Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
76. "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she
climbed down from this animal on her return from High
Mass. And then the murders began. —Rose Macaulay, The
Towers of Trebizond (1956)
77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet,
powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a
slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed
from-under stare which made you think of a charging
bull. And then the murders began. —Joseph Conrad,
Lord Jim (1900)
78. The past is a foreign country; they do things
differently there. And then the murders began. —L. P.
Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear
and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the
Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long
time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. And
then the murders began. —Russell Hoban, Riddley
Walker (1980)
80. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this
world you have the law. And then the murders began. —
William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)
81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. And then
the murders began. —J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. And then the
murders began. —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
(1948)
83. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa
would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a
crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward
her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing." And
then the murders began. —Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
(1983)
84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was
to be found among the fops and fools of the London
coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer
Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more
talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of
whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or
Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more
fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so
rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship,
had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires
of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves
and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut
with similes stretched to the snapping-point. And then the
murders began. —John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
(1960)
85. 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 of
Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine
spring afternoon. And then the murders began. —James
Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)
86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff
reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole
town (the whole county too for that matter) had known

since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.
And then the murders began. —William Faulkner,
Intruder in the Dust (1948)
87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-
that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all
my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either,
known to my friends and relatives and associates as
"Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the
Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor
Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange
history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and
continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of
change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-
one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the
"golden predicament" from which I have never since
become disentangled. And then the murders began. —
Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most
common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. And then
the murders began. —Charles Johnson, Middle Passage
(1990)
89. I am an American, Chicago born —Chicago, that
somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself,
free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first
to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock,
sometimes a not so innocent. And then the murders
began. —Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
(1953)
90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist;
austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy
as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. And then the murders
began. —Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the
hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted
sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint
and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies
bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of
parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's
underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which
somehow survived the distressing years of my life between
her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear
black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant,
and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my
harmless and sanguine self. And then the murders began.
—John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)
92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that
the world was mad. And then the murders began. —
Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)
93. Psychics can see the color of time it's blue. And then
the murders began. —Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away
(1986)
94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were
always together. And then the murders began. —Carson
McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather
stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to
record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word
and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what
is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a
somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and
quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a
room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking
facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New
York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the
story of another person—a shy young man about of 19

years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had
come to America the land of opportunities from France
under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in
five languages—who himself had come to America from
Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly
established sometime during the war after a series of
rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the
war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the
young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to
know if he the father and his family had survived the
German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to
learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and
touching letter written in English, not by the young man,
however, who did not know a damn word of English, but
by a good friend of his who had studied English in school
—that his parents both his father and mother and his two
sisters one older and the other younger than he had been
deported they were Jewish to a German concentration
camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt
having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and
that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a
displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to
escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in
Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given
the opportunity to come to America that great country he
had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to
start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and
become a good, loyal citizen. And then the murders began.
—Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)
96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions
of space. And then the murders began. —Margaret
Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)
97. He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the
fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in

the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from
the rafters. And then the murders began. —Virginia
Woolf, Orlando (1928)
98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of
1969, two professors of English Literature approached
each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.
And then the murders began. —David Lodge, Changing
Places (1975)
99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the
white people did. And then the murders began. —Jean
Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the
retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills,
resting. And then the murders began. —Stephen Crane,
The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
--o0o--

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