Giant Last and First Lines Clearance

Here at NC..JE we spare no expense to bring you the best in trivial nonsense. Right now our Last and First Lines research department is overstocked with opening lines from obscure hard-boiled detective fiction and our loss is your gain. We are giving away 10 opening lines from ten seldom or rarely reprinted forgotten pulp noir fiction "classics" for the low low price of...well, nothing. I said giveaway and I meant it. Check these out and if any makes you want to read on good luck because some of these babies are hard to find, and they could really cost you.

Remember it's First Lines Only for a limited time, but if you act now and e-mail me you will recieve the last lines at no additonal cost. But really you must act now. E-mail before midnite tonight. That's tonight as you are reading this not midnight of when I am posting because it's already almost 9PM EST, so chances are you won't even read this until tomorrow or the next day. Friday midnight is long gone. Friday may already be last week for you, or last month. Man, you are living in the future and you don't even know it. Weird, huh?

"As soon as Charlie Mock Duck saw Sam Lee he pointed a thirty-two calibre bulldog revolver at him, shut his eyes tight, and pulled the trigger as fast as he could."

Louis Beretti (1929) by Donald Henderson Clarke

"I sat between the two dicks who had been my friends."

Once too Often (1938) by Whitman Chambers

"Helen Brent had the best looking legs at the inquest."

Deadlier than the Male (1942) by James Gunn

"You can never tell what a drunken Irishman will do."

The Screaming Mimi (1949) by Fredric Brown

"It began, like almost everything in New York, with a phone call."

The Diary (1952) by William Ard

"I chopped, grubbed, and shoveled, and the deeper I dug the keener I felt it: I was being watched."

Galatea (1953) by James M. Cain

"A Jew was dead in the street"

The Damned Lovely (1954) by Jack Webb (no not that Jack Webb)

"On Ruxton Street, at ten past ten, the Chinese girl was flat on her back in the gutter."

Street of the Lost (1952) by David Goodis

"It never pays to resist arrest."

Tall, Dark and Deadly (1956) by Harold Q. Masur

"Grofield opened his right eye, and there was a girl climbing in the window."

The Damsel (1967) by Richard Stark a.k.a. Donald Westlake

And finally the answer to yesterday's L & FL: Darker than Amber by John D. MacDonald. The series is of course the great Travis McGee series, and Darker than Amber was originally published in 1966 and was the seventh book in the series. It's really amazing how quickly MacDonald produced the early books and still kept the quality so high. The Travis McGee books are still in print, and deservedly so. All of MacDonald should be in print, but that's a lotta books.

New Last and First Lines

Here is another opening and finale of the hard-boiled variety. This is from a book written in the mid 60's and part of a long-running series. I think it is one of sneakiest opening hooks I've ever read. A real sucker punch.

First Line: We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.

Last Line: I think I sat right there for a long time.
Just smiling.


I'm not going to say I'll be back tomorrow with the answer. But...

OK, so I took a little longer to post the answer to the previous Last and First than I promised. Actually it's a cute story. Sometimes I lose things. Sometimes I don't know how I can lose them so fast, but one minute I am reading a book or watching a video and the next minute it's gone.

This one time not that long ago (last month) I bought a DVD of The Heroic Trio (great Hong Kong Action Flick with three amazing women action stars Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung, and Michelle Yeoh). I bought it to give my wife for Sweetest Day because she likes stuff where women kick male butt (e.g. Buffy, Xena, Bird of Prey etc.), and so I hid it where she wouldn't see it until I was ready to give it to her. Only a few days later my friend, who manages a chain of video departments for a major grocery store chain, gave me a preview screener of the same film. So I figure I'll return the DVD, and get something different and we can still watch women kick butt, only there will be an occasional crawl along the bottom of the screen telling me to call the FBI and report my friend if he sold or rented me this tape.

Just one problem. I couldn't remember where I hid the DVD. I looked everywhere I could think of. Including both cars, work, attic, basement, library, office, closets, whatever. I looked for about a week. I even found the reciept, but still no DVD. I started to get paranoind, and even thought my wife might have found it and hidden it from me. I don't know why she would do that, but I was starting to get pretty freaked-out. I figured if I didn't find it in 30 days I wouldn't be able to return it. (Interesting Sidebar: I work with someone who also works at Borders. I had bought it from evil Borders. She said since I found the reciept I could return it anytime Apparently there is no statute of limitations on returns as long as you save the receipt. However they won't refund your money if all you have is the receipt)

So long story short (oops, already too late for that) I went out and bought another DVD, Near Dark, and hoped I would find Heroic Trio eventually, and not lose the receipt in the meantime. Turned out we liked it so much we decided to keep the DVD anyway, which I found at the bottom of a box of ex-library withdrawn books that I had brought home from work.

What does this have to do with the quote? Well I lost the book. Had it right next to the computer, right on top of the unstable tower of manuals, CD-ROMs, papers, old catalogs and, of course, books, and then it was gone. Of course I knew the name of the book and author, but I had wanted to quote from the book cover because I think it is one of the worst spoilers I have ever seen on a book and totally ruins the tension of the opening lines. So eventually I ended up buying another copy at the Flea Market for $.20 because it had to be an older copy with the same cover blurb. So if you want to read this let me know because now I have an extra copy.

The book is The Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon. However for some reason in the 50's and 60's when it was reprinted in paperback they changed the title to The Synthetic Man. That new title alone might be giving too much away, but read this blurb from the back cover (in all it's original capitalized glory).

THEY FOUND HORTY FREAKING OUT UNDER THE BLEACHERS
His name was Horty and he was eating ants.
Horty ate ants because every once in a while he just had to.
It wasn't generally known but Horty had these unusual cravings because he wasn't human.
Horty himself had no idea he was different than other people-not even when he lost three fingers and they grew back.
But then he discovered the truth about himself-and the truth blew his alien mind...

Ok, so Horty was eating ants under the bleachers. This blurb is a little different than the one on my older paperback from the 50's, but it still blows the surprise before you even know there is one, so when you read "They caught the kid doing something disgusting..." you just shrug and say "Oh yeah. He's eating ants. I knew that." Since this is the sixties Horty has to be "FREAKING OUT" and have his alien mind blown, but the end result is the same. Sturgeon's carefully modulated opening teaser is completely deflated.

Still that only gives away a suprise that comes on page 4 anyway, of course the fact that he is not human comes later, so they blow that for you as well. Still The Dreaming Jewels is well worth reading. There are plenty of treasures to discover and some damn fine writing in Sturgeon's first novel from 1950. Turns out to be fairly autobiographical because Horty runs away and joins the carny which is also an something Sturgeon actually did. As far as I know he never FREAKED OUT and ate ants. Still he might blow your alien mind!