GREAT HOOKERS I HAVE KNOWN by Stephen King [Found in SECRET WINDOWS (a companion to ON WRITING)]

This essay is about great first lines in novels—the lines “hook” you.  He lists some hookers throughout the piece and then list ten other great hookers.

...Well, I got curious, and so I spent an hour or so browsing through my books (those by other people, I mean), looking for hookers.  I think I’ve mentioned my favorites already, and so won’t go through them again.  But let me list ten other great hookers that I either found or remembered . . . and let me add one other thing:  I arbitrarily disqualified Elmore Leonard after two listings, or else he would own the list, top to bottom.  When it comes to hookers, he’s the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of fiction.  But otherwise, in no particular order, check out these opening lines…

“Every time they got a call from the leper hospital to pick up a body Jack Delaney would feel himself coming down with the flu or something.”  BANDITS, Elmore Leonard.

“They were watching Ryan beat up the Mexican crew leader on 16mm Commercial Ektachrome.”  THE BIG BOUNCE, Elmore Leonard.

What’s your favorite Hooker?

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”  HST, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.

The first sentence of The Seersucker Whipsaw by Ross Thomas, which I can’t find online to quote here.

“THE CHURCH HAD BECOME a tomb where forty-seven bodies turned to leather and stains had been lying on the concrete floor the past five years, though not lying where they had been shot with Kalashnikovs or hacked to death with machetes. The benches had been removed and the bodies reassembled: men, women and small children laid in rows of skulls and spines, femurs, fragments of cloth stuck to mummified remains, many of the adults missing feet, all missing bones that had been carried off by scavenging dogs.”

“Louie pulled off his bra and threw it down upon the casket.”

Nick Tosches, Hand of Dante

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

The Last Good Kiss, James Crumley