Great First Line

THE SMOKE CARRIED UP FROM THE Cahuenga Pass and flattened beneath a layer of cool crossing air. From where Harry Bosch watched, the smoke looked like a gray anvil rising up the pass. The late afternoon sun gave the gray a pinkish tint at its highest point, tapering down to deep black at its root, which was a brushfire moving up the hillside on the east side of the cut.

Connelly, Michael - The Black Ice

Yep, I am back to writing out the first lines of books. Micheal Connelly's first lines are just as good as Lawrence Sanders who I think is the best of them all.

In these first few sentences Michael Connelly does all of the things that I find both intriguing and irritate me about Californians. Connelly (and most Californians) are obsessed with the nomenclature of their area and particularly so when discussing traffic patterns and highways. I despise this but I suppose he is trying to immerse the character in the writing and the setting.

The other thing that Connelly does that Sanders does as well is use color in the imagery. That "gray anvil" or "pinkish tint" and "deep black" are all there giving more depth to the sentence. I like the fact that there is that next level of modifiers in first sentences. These tell me that Connelly, unlike other sentences and passages that just move the story along, this first sentence is crafted and tuned to what it is now.