Great leads for hooking the reader

“He was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime. No more baffling, exasperating soldier ever wore a uniform. Flamboyant, imperious, and apocalyptic, he carried the plumage of a flamingo, could not acknowledge errors, and tried to cover up his mistakes with sly, childish tricks. Yet he was also endowed with great personal charm, a will of iron, and a soaring intellect. Unquestionably he was the most gifted man-at-arms this nation has produced…”

That’s part of the lead-in to “American Caesar,” a biography of Gen. Douglas MacArthur by the late William Manchester published nearly 30 years ago by Little, Brown. One of the 20th century’s great authors, Manchester sure knew how to write a lead that would reach out and grab a reader by the lapels, demanding his undivided attention.

When I began re-reading Manchester’s classic on Thanksgiving Day, I was reminded of late-night newsroom discussions of yore when talk might turn to literature’s greatest, and worst, opening paragraphs. We’d sit around, twiddling our thumbs while waiting for the bulldog edition of the newspaper to come up from the pressroom so we could peruse it and correct our more conspicuous errors of fact, typography and what-not before calling it a night and booking it for home.

Invariably, someone would nominate the usual suspects such as Dickens or Twain or some Russian with an unpronounceable name, as being best of show in the lead-paragraph sweepstakes. But I always thought the masters got too much play in our little ad hoc parlor game. The memorable lead, I believe, is where you find it, regardless of an author’s prestige, be the medium book, magazine or newspaper.

A good lead cajoles the reader with novelty or paradox, humor or pathos. It nudges his curiosity and tugs at his cape until the reader succumbs, bagged and tagged by a wordsmith using every weapon in his arsenal to git ‘er done. You may not be able to always tell a book by its cover, but you can get a pretty good idea of its potential staying power by its lead paragraphs.

This hardly revolutionary thought occurred to me as daylight gave way to darkness on the storm-smitten holiday and I rummaged through my book stash in search of a good read to keep from going stir-crazy. I decided to test my theory by checking out the lead paragraphs in some of the books, selected at random.

In “Seize the Sky,” a Bantam novel about Gen. George Custer, author Terry Johnston hooked me immediately, making me a virtual spectator at the bloody battle of the Little Big Horn: “Clouds of black powder smudged the late-afternoon ridges like yesterday’s coal-oil smoke. Yellow dust floated into the broiling air beneath the countless unshod pony hooves and moccasined feet scurrying through the gray sage and stunted grasses beneath a relentless summer sun. …”

As always, P.J. O’Rourke quickly nudged my newsman’s curiosity in his book “Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut” (Atlantic Monthly Press) with this lead: “I began to write for pay in the spring of 1970, albeit that pay was mostly peanut butter sandwiches and mattress space. The mattress was not very clean. But neither was I.”

Peter Golenbock tugged at my sleeve in his book “Wild, High and Tight” (St. Martin’s Press), a masterful biography of former New York Yankees baseball player and manager, the mercurical Billy Martin, when he began: “Billy Martin was driving, despite everything written to the contrary. It was Christmas Day 1989, and as he sat behind the wheel of his Ford F250 four-wheel drive three-quarter ton pickup truck, he was heading back to his farm just outside Binghamton, New York, to celebrate a holiday he hated with a wife he despised, except when they were in bed together.”

But perhaps my favorite lead in the lot was found, as you might have guessed, in the memoirs of an erudite talking dawg. In his delightful book, “A Dog’s Life,” published by Alfred A. Knopf, Peter Mayle’s four-legged protagonist begins: “Life is unfair, as we all know, and a good thing, too. If it had gone according to plan, I would still be chained up outside some farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, living on short rations and barking at the wind. …”

For literary snobs, that’s not exactly in a class with Melville’s oft-cited “Call me Ishmael” opener in “Moby Dick,” perhaps. But it’s a whale of a lead, nonetheless. For an old dawg.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact him via e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.