
Let me know when you’ve found another book that throws down the gauntlet in the opening stretch like this one does. The Problem of the Wire Cage? The Judas Window? The Red Widow Murders? Maybe. I scan my bookshelves and I struggle to find a book that comes out with as solid of an opening as The Hollow Man.
There are plenty of mystery novels that start strong. I’ll write you a whole post on the first sentence of Rim of the Pit or The Red Right Hand if you want. Those are perfect opening sentences, and the paragraphs that follow them are fine as well. There are also books with storming opening chapters; see the suffocatingly impossible hellscape we’re confronted with in chapter one of The Judas Window.
Continue reading “The Hollow Man (The Three Coffins) – John Dickson Carr (1935)”