The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)

Read the opening chapter The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy →

I fell in love with this book aged 18 because it’s so funny but much later I realised that chapter one is a perfect example of a character in a place with a problem, and of a scene-level problem that echoes the big novel-wide problem. Arthur starts off doing ordinary things ‘kettle, plug, fridge, milk, coffee’ and by the middle of the first chapter is lying in front of a bulldozer, by the end of it Ford Prefect (who turns out to be from ‘Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he usually claimed’) has telepathically persuaded Arthur to accompany him to the pub for a pint instead. I also love how Hitchhiker has been adapted and rewritten in so many forms, meaning you can compare their openings: originally a radio play, it’s been on stage and on the small and large screens, as well as being turned into a novel.

Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

Read the opening chapter of Beloved →

This novel also starts with a house: 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, Ohio. From just the opening 500 words – in fact the opening line – we know the house is dangerous. The use of sensory writing is magical: ‘two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake’, the ‘kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap’ and ‘bring a little lavender in, if you got any. Pink, if you don’t’. Part of the reason I love this opening is because, like Hitchhiker, ‘it begins with a house’ and houses are perfect (or imperfect) containers for stories: the twist being that in Hitchhiker the house is about to be demolished; in Beloved it’s haunted. We’re straight into the ghost story from the opening line: probably one of the greatest opening lines ever written in the way it draws you in and forces you to confront the ghost, along with suppressed, memory, unprocessed trauma, troubling histories.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez (1981)

Read the opening chapter of Chronicle of a Death Foretold →

The opening of Chronicle of a Death Foretold is incredible: ‘On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.’ We know the plot and we even know who’s going to kill him within a few pages. We spend the whole of this novella knowing the inevitability of Santiago Nasar’s death while simultaneously hoping that it won’t happen. The other astonishing thing about this opening is that we also find out early that at least some of the witnesses knew Santiago was going to be killed but no one warned him, the implication being that everyone knew. In other words, even the story’s twist is given away in the first few pages. Without giving it away, the house, particularly the inside and outside of the house, is also important in this story.

And Then There Were None (1939) and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) by Agatha Christie

Read the opening chapter of And Then There Were None →

Read the opening chapter of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd →

No plot spoilers, but I challenge you to read these and to re-read the openings immediately afterwards. I once did this with Hercule Poirot’s Christmas: seemingly obvious plot points stood out glaringly on rereading. Try that one too once we get to December! Christie’s skill at misdirection is nothing short of chilling. We’re encouraged to ask questions of all these openings; that’s what keeps us reading. ‘Chekhov’s gun’ means that if something appears prominently in the first act of a play it should turn out to be significant to the plot by the play’s end. It’s a warning against foreshadowing for no reason. Christie reverses that idea, hiding the ‘guns’ so well that we don’t notice them until we re-read. Apparently Chekhov’s novel The Shooting Party could have influenced (foreshadowed?) Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, making it ironic that none of the murder victims in these novels are shot.

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch (2011)

Note: You can read the first few pages using the sample function on online bookshops.

This is a police procedural/urban fantasy crossover, which has spawned a whole series as well as graphic novels and a TV adaptation. This novel is deeply, and I mean deeply, rooted in London. It is (literally) a fantastic example of novel that uses place as a constraint. Constraint is good: it contains your story. In And Then There Were None the island serves this function and in Roger Ackroyd, like a lot of Christie’s, it’s a grand house and its village. In fact, all of the novels mentioned involve death and houses. Rivers of London is no exception, with The Folly – like Scotland Yard but for supernatural crime – appearing 20% of the way through the first book. It is the London setting that drew me to this book as I was living there at the time but it’s the unusual crime/urban fantasy premise that keeps me buying Ben Aaronovitch’s books.

How do the hooks work?

Unhelpfully, ‘hook’ gets used in different ways. Some people are referring to the thing that happens on the first few pages that keeps readers reading, by which they mean readers of that particular genre. This can be misinterpreted as ‘get to the action quickly’: yes, that’s usually good advice, but that action doesn’t have to be complicated, and it doesn’t have to be the main action of the novel. Better make the action simple (Arthur lies in front of a bulldozer, here are the various small ways a ghost is haunting 124, Santiago Nasar has an ominous dream, a police constable is guarding a crime scene in Convent Garden). Use this action as a prelude to what we can expect across the novel: a house being knocked down when Vogons are about the destroy the earth, for instance.

Others use ‘hook’ to mean: what’s unique about your pitch? What’s different or interesting about your story? There’s a magical branch of the police based in Russell Square, on a mysterious island invited guests are being murdered one by one. Yes, there’s a guide book that will show you how to hitchhike around the Galaxy for ‘less thirty Altairian dollars a day’, but note how Adams scatters backstory throughout his opening. He gets away with it because his asides are so funny: in fact, they operate as the hook. Sci fi we’re seen before, but at the time it was written, funny sci fi was this novel’s USP.

Stakes

Unless we count Douglas Adams’ humour, only one of these opening reveals this kind of premise hook at the opening: everyone knew Santiago Nasar was going to die in Chronicle of a Death Foretold – it’s there in the title. In fact, as I said, it’s the push and pull between knowing he’s going to die and hoping he gets away that operates as the hook all the way through the novella, even though it’s being told at a 30-year distance. That this (brilliant) hook gets revealed on the front cover is unusual: a definite USP. Although Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison, both Nobel laureates, don’t need USPs: the use of language alone is enough to draw us in. The lesson there is that you can use Chekhov’s gun (see what I did there?) to hint at your unique premise but you don’t have to reveal it straightaway.

Look how Aaronovitch gets away with a chunk of backstory that would make a Creative Writing tutor’s eyes water. How does he get away with it? In the first paragraph a ‘street performer and […] gigolo’ finds a headless body. By 600 words in, we’ve met a ghost.

Each of these openings – no matter what genre – open with high stakes. In fact, they all open with the highest of stakes: life and death. Worse than death. Planet-wide destruction, haunting by a dead child, multiple deaths, gruesome murder, death where every witness turned a blind eye. The biggest problem I see in the novels I read for students and when I write editorial reports is this one: the stakes aren’t high enough.

In practice

I recently tested this in a novel writing class I was teaching, and looked at the jeopardy in all of the (rather random) examples I had used across the year, in a range of genres written from the 1800s until now. The score was 80% – most of them mention it on the first page – and 99% when the first three chapters were included. It isn’t unusual for the stakes to be death or worse in a novel opening, it’s almost obligatory. Find five or six novels in the genre you’re writing in and read the first three chapters to test this theory.

It’s probably obvious by now how irony is working in Chronicle of a Death Foretold although I can’t tell you how irony is operating in each of these openings without giving far too much of the plots away. I will say this though: if you are having trouble with either kind of hook: the thing that keeps us turning the first few pages or the unique angle at the heart of your book, consider the use of situational and dramatic irony. When you read those five or six novel openings, you might like to consider whether there’s a reversal of expectations at play somehow.

Ghosts

Finally I’d like to mention haunting. There’s a ghost at the opening of Rivers of London, we know there’s a ghost in Beloved, and we could argue that thematically the memory of Santiago Nasar haunts the narrator like a ghost in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. We could even stretch the metaphor and say that a murder mystery is haunted by the presence of the murder victim. Ghosts are used for comic in the Hitchhiker series. In other words, all of these novels, from a wide range of genres, contain ghosts. I don’t think this is unusual either. It’s not enough for the stakes to be life and death, that must haunt the novel thematically too. That’s the real secret to writing a hook.