Snapshots

A. S. Byatt on why Middlemarch may be the greatest English novel. A wonderful essay. Not only reminds you why Eliot is so good but Byatt, too.

book/daddy is happy that Gail Collins is back writing regular op-ed columns for the New York Times. She's a funnier, sharper political writer than Maureen Dowd. But you have to have TimeSelect to read her online.

And while still at the Times, Stephen Metcalf has fun with the political conversion experiences of conservatives when they were still in college -- compiled in a new anthology about turning right. Having taught quite a few at UT-Austin, book/daddy says Metcalf pegs it just about right -- except that the well-off, conservative, white male students only think of themselves as downtrodden outcasts with the campus liberals as the alpha dogs. At a university like UT -- with its tiny black student population and a campus run by oil millionaires -- the conservative students have their successful connections waiting for them.

Over at Detectives Beyond Borders, Peter Rozovsky asked about favorite opening lines for detective stories, and readers offered some, including the great first sighting of Fireball Roberts at the start of James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss. Surely, one of the most memorable is John Gregory Dunne's opener for True Confessions: "None of the merry-go-rounds seem to work anymore."

But a flourish to open with, a drumroll, a fanfare -- these can call too much attention to themselves as eye-catchers. Affectations. James Ellroy -- book/daddy's favorite example of a prose stylist with a heavy mitt on the "Overwrought" button -- likes to go socko from the get-go and keep beating the shit out of a reader because that's the gutsy, tabloid-y, hard-boiled, sub-Norman Mailer way, innit?

"An abandoned auto court in the San Berdoo foothills, Buzz Meeks checked in with ninety-four thousands dollars, eighteen pounds of high-grade heroin, a 10-gauge pump, a .38 special, a .45 automatic and a switchblade he'd bought off a pachuco at the border -- right before he spotted the car parked across the line: Mickey Cohen goons in an LAPD unmarked, Tijuana cops standing by to bootjack a piece of his goodies, dump his body in the San Ysidro River" -- L.A. Confidential. For book/daddy, it's the "San Berdoo," the "pachuco" and the "bootjack a piece of his goodies" that make this particularly chucklesome-bad.

It's worth noting how rarely such masters as Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard or Ross Macdonald open with anything more than a clean, simple statement. Yet those declarations draw in expectations, get things rolling, especially when the author keeps the snap for the end:

"Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns" -- The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins.

"I sat in my brand-new office with the odor of paint in my nostrils and waited for something to happen" -- "Find the Woman" from The Name is Archer by Ross Macdonald.