C HR ISTOPHER H E ATHCOTE
First Words: Three Centuries of
an English-Language Wonder
T
his year marks the 300th anniversary of that
hand-sized wonder, the English novel. All
was triggered when a London printer of
Pater-Noster Row, behind St Paul’s Cathedral, took
a risk on a book-length fictional tale set entirely in
prose. Penned by the journalist Daniel Defoe and
marketed by a bookseller friend in Fleet Street, this
inventive narrative found a keen readership during
1719. Several other working writers followed Defoe’s
lead, their efforts being referred to around the city’s
coffee-houses as the nouvelle or “new thing”.
There was an eventual rumpus, dubbed the
“Battle of the Books”. The literati of Georgian
London, who never doubted the artistic and moral
superiority of verse over prose narrative, judged
novels an unsavoury commercial fad. That is why
Alexander Pope’s satire of mediocre writing and
journalism, The Dunciad, mentions Defoe, while
Jonathan Swift parodied the best-selling Robinson
Crusoe with a mock novel, Gulliver’s Travels. But the
“new thing” persisted.
Talk of novels ever since has tended to fix on
character and plot. Generations of readers have
been absorbed in the fictional lives of Jane Eyre
or Soames Forsyte, Mrs Dalloway or the Artful
Dodger, Emma Woodhouse or Hercule Poirot,
explaining personality traits, discussing behaviour.
And everyone relishes a good storyline twist: Jim
Dixon delivering the “Merrie England” lecture,
Winston Smith going to Room 101, the reappearance of Magwitch.
Opening passages can grip the attention, particularly a novel’s initial sentence. Those first words
are designed to set off the imagination—see how
Aldous Huxley thrust 1930s readers into the future
when beginning Brave New World:
A squat grey building of only thirty-four storeys.
Squat? Only thirty-four storeys? Huxley’s nine
words suggest much. This is not our world. It’s bigger, more constructed. And the building’s greyness
hints of monotony. There’s also economy, a sense of
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things being minimal and undecorated, shared by
buildings and words. The verbless sentence is short
and lean; which translates as an efficient and functional imagined world.
Compare that with an opening sentence by
Thomas Pynchon. He opens The Crying of Lot 49
with a sentence which is lengthy, excessive, overpacked with words:
One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came
home from a Tupperware party whose hostess
had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue
to find that she, Oedipa, had been named
executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate
of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate
mogul who had once lost two million dollars in
his spare time but still had assets numerous and
tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all
out more than honorary.
There is a breathlessness to this. The sentence
goes on and on and on in a way that makes you
feel you are running out of air; there are not enough
commas, which is deliberate, and there are the trivial asides. It’s like hearing someone gossiping on a
telephone. The clichéd talk and excessive detail of
this sentence are pitching to an urban reader of a
different time from Huxley’s audience. Modernity
has lost its sparkle and life is immersed in consumerist clutter. Things not only seem plentiful—having
them brings inconvenience. They are a burden on
your time.
Here is another overlong opening, a celebrated
sentence by J.D. Salinger, who uses punctuation to
replicate the pace and rhythm of a voice:
If you really want to hear about it, the first
thing you’ll probably want to know is where I
was born, and what my lousy childhood was
like, and how my parents were occupied and
all before they had me, and all that David
Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like
going into it, if you want to know the truth.
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We have the impression of a youth talking.
Besides the sentence’s cadence and overall measure,
the vocabulary conveys much about the speaker’s
character, adding slang touches to give tone (“lousy
childhood”, “kind of crap”). This voice continues in
an informal and confiding, at times insolent manner
through all 192 pages of The Catcher in the Rye.
Refraining from such a direct address, with its
implications of an individual viewpoint, Sam Selvon
uses conversational language throughout what is a
third-person narrative:
One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of
unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping
restlessly over the city and the lights showing
in the blur as if it is not London at all but
some strange place on another planet, Moses
Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of
Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to
Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from
Trinidad on the boat-train.
Reading this spicy Jamaican patois in The
Lonely Londoners is to start ingesting aspects of
the “Windrush” experience of post-war Britain as
broadly encountered by West Indian émigrés.
Rating these sentences highly is not cultural
snobbery. Huxley and Salinger, Pynchon and Selvon
put language to work. Dip into their novels and you
see the skill of the author, his professionalism and
inventiveness, from the opening line. In comparison, the average commercial paperback starts with
a sentence more like this: “I’d been hearing about
the Tennis Club for years, but I’d never been inside
of it.” This is how the hard-boiled detective novel
Black Money by Ross Macdonald begins, although
that line is soggy and weak. You anticipate next
will come a description of the club, a lame one, too.
Curiously, with careful pacing and a firm narrative
drive, Black Money is Macdonald’s best thriller. Its
high reputation is deserved, yet the first line is flavourless and bland. Especially irritating are the two
words—“of it”—at the sentence’s end. They sit there
like a lumpy kink on a cat’s tail.
M
ost books start with dull sentences. It’s not a
convention. The novelists don’t intend to write
bad lines. They just don’t seem to have the necessary mix of inventive ability and craftsmanship. So
their opening lines are flavourless and bloated. John
Grisham’s best-selling The Firm could have begun
with this: “He was hungry; with his background, he
had to be.” But this decent sentence appears halfway
down the first page, which instead starts off lamely:
“The senior partner studied the resume for the hundredth time and again found nothing he disliked
about Mitchell Y. McDeere, at least not on paper.”
What a dreary line.
Many popular authors claim Raymond Chandler
among their key influences. Few of them understand
him in depth. Chandler had judgment and literary
flair in spades, as is instantly evident with the tight
sentence beginning Farewell, My Lovely:
It was one of the mixed blocks over on Central
Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro.
This opening stands alongside the best in modern prose fiction. It has a structure like the sentence
from Black Money cited above, but Chandler makes
language perform. Readers today shudder when they
encounter this opening sentence, because it’s not
politically correct. That’s the point—it never was.
Chandler mentions the unmentionable. His words
tell us we are in America, at a clear point in its history, and the narrator is white, urban, educated,
and prefers straight talk. So he’s not afraid to voice
unpalatable truths, like how neighbourhoods will
change ethnically. But is the sentence’s last word
bigoted? It is significant this narrator uses the polite
Negro rather than vulgar alternatives.
Here’s a variation of that abrasive type of opening line, this time by Graham Greene:
“That nigger going down the street,” said Dr
Hasselbacher standing in the Wonder Bar, “he
reminds me of you, Mr Wormold.”
That second word offends, and it is meant to.
We are about to slip into 1950s Cuba, and the line
is already sketching it in. This sentence launches
Our Man in Havana, and the speaker is one of
those Teutons who flocked to Latin America after
Germany lost the war. Notice the bar’s name,
Wonder Bar, which conveys a gaudy cheap dive
while echoing the German word wunderbar. A point
is also being made about Havana not being wonderful, an irony that is very British, and very Greene.
The casual way Hasselbacher is chatting indicates
he is talking to someone who won’t take offence at
the comparison. This man’s name is Wormold—“old
worm” rearranged—which is apt for a timid character. Greene’s first lines signal much.
Opening sentences that carry several clauses are
often weak. But some authors handle them with a
swagger. Here is another opening bar scene, this one
by Angela Carter:
The bar was a mock-up, a forgery, a fake; an
ad-man’s crazy dream of a Spanish patio,
with crusty white walls (as if the publican had
economically done them in leftover sandwiches)
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on which hung unplayable musical instruments
and many bull-fight posters, all blood and
bulging bulls’ testicles and the arrogant yellow
satin buttocks of lithe young men.
This hurdy-gurdy description launches Shadow
Dance. There is a delicious zaniness to the mounting
imagery, and the reader anticipates a journey into the
fantastic. Mind you, Carter really knows word-craft,
launching her sentence with a firm Latinate tricolon
which would please a Roman orator (mock-up, forgery, fake); then ending on a more shaggy extended
tricolon (blood and testicles and buttocks) cheekily
interwoven with Saxon alliteration. Try to top that.
Kenneth Fearing is not as technically flamboyant, yet there is an understated invention to this
opening line which runs to a mischievous paradox:
I first met Pauline Delos at one of those
substantial parties Earl Janoth liked to give every
two or three months, attended by members of
the staff, his personal friends, private moguls,
and public nobodies, all in haphazard rotation.
Look closer at the rising order of that list of
invitees: staff, friends, moguls, then nobodies. The
author might have halted with the deflationary
nobodies, but, after a comma, he shoots off a deftly
nuanced oxymoron (“haphazard rotation”). In other
words, the planning is a veneer. Things are hit and
miss at these lavish parties.
Given this sentence opens a novel titled The Big
Clock, connecting haphazard with rotation does not
bode well. The story’s setting is a New York media
company—a caricature of Henry Luce’s Time
Inc.—and much is made of staff working to clocks,
schedules and deadlines. Time will soon be ticking
down for the narrator, a reporter anxious to solve
a murder before a closing deadline. He’ll be in the
frame if he doesn’t. The author milks the language
of time management throughout his thriller, building the urgency.
The poet Sylvia Plath wrote one novel, The Bell
Jar, which opens with a memorable line. She does
this by positioning an attention-catching clause in
mid-sentence:
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they
electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know
what I was doing in New York.
This would be an undistinguished sentence if not
for the insert. The punctuation is ungainly, yet those
six words about the convicted spies Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg leap out like the “pow” sign in a Pop Art
canvas. They not only cement time, place, mood;
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they inject foreboding. And, yes, the narrator, a
young innocent from the Mid-West who has won
a New York trip, is on track for disaster. This may
explain that fourth word, queer—the city is where
danger lurks ready to prey on unwary, decent folks.
Philip Kerr’s period thriller The One from the
Other likewise opens with a gem. As with Plath, it
mixes weather, mood and history. But Kerr does not
insert a clause. Instead he shapes a quick dual sentence, with a line fragment extending from a first
sentence proper:
I remember how good the weather was that
September. Hitler weather, they used to call it.
F
irst sentences are significant, although some
novelists excel when devising an overall opening
paragraph. This one by David Goodis, which sets off
his novel Dark Passage at a brisk pace, is outstanding:
It was a tough break. Parry was innocent. On
top of that he was a decent sort of guy who never
bothered people and wanted to lead a quiet life.
But there was too much on the other side and on
his side of it there was practically nothing. The
jury decided he was guilty. The judge handed
him a life sentence and he was taken to San
Quentin.
Those clipped sentences tell you about Parry.
Their bluntness conveys his decency. He is a man
of few words, a mister average, not deep, who says
things as he sees them. This prose is firm and factual
with no fudging or frothy phrases. At the same time
the succession of short sentences conveys where he
is, how all has followed a step-by-step process. For
Parry, there is no manoeuvring. He’s caught up by
circumstances. This is where an absence of emotional
colour to language is significant: the sentences have
that same procedure-based coherence of the legal
system. And, as in a police report or judicial notice,
he is already a bare surname. The scales have tilted
against Parry, even though the second line affirms
his innocence.
Rhythm is critical here. Notice an absence of
commas. There is a short sentence (five words),
another short one (three words), then a long one of
twenty-two words. They establish a pulse. We move
to another long sentence, which at eighteen words
is around the same length, then back to a short
again (six words). This rhythmic pace is propulsive,
driving the reader along. The novel shifts between
those lengths. It will be several short sentences,
then a long one. Or a couple of long ones, then a
short. For a time Goodis’s style was so admired that
script writers for the television crime drama Dragnet
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modelled Sergeant Joe Friday’s dialogue upon it.
Dark Passage is American “pulp fiction”, yet that
certainly doesn’t mean it is defective writing. To
position the author in his 1940s context, Goodis was
struggling with, learning from, and reacting against
this prose crafted by Ernest Hemingway:
In the late summer of that year we lived in a
house in a village that looked across the river
and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the
river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and
white in the sun, and the water was clear and
swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops
went by the house and down the road and the
dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.
The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the
leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops
marching along the road and the dust rising and
leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and soldiers
marching and afterward the road bare and white
except for the leaves.
This watershed passage opens A Farewell to Arms.
A lilting rhythm to the words, drawing us along,
is immediate. It stems from the author’s progressively lengthening sentences (syllables are measured
throughout); how he punctuates, deploying the
commas sparingly; his cadenced use of the conjunction and. Then there is his choice of clear concrete
words. There are no adjectives, adverbs or qualifying
terms. Hemingway sticks to nouns and verbs of few
syllables; so you could read any of these sentences
to a child, and they would grasp it without trouble.
Then there’s imagery. The author is describing
countryside in the Veneto region of northern Italy
during those early weeks of the Great War. This
rural autumn is portrayed as serene, attractive, clean,
fresh, but it is overtaken by movement and busyness.
A river runs, troops march, dust rises, a breeze stirs,
leaves fall. And about those troops. Three times they
are said to be going along the road, the cumulative
effect suggesting there were many, many marching
soldiers. Then, at paragraph’s end, tranquillity has
returned although change has occurred. The empty
road is white with dust and littered with dead leaves.
Contemporaneous readers saw symbolism, too.
After a funeral the minister recites the phrase “ashes
to ashes, dust to dust” over the grave. Likewise, the
troops move “down” the road as if going graveward,
while raising a dust which coats all as they march.
As well, that image of bare tree trunks powdered
with dust foreshadows the wasteland of trench
warfare.
Hemingway’s opening is purged of “voice”, quite
deliberately so. Even as he was trying to achieve
this, other modern writers like the English novelist
Jean Rhys were reinventing how “voice” might be
handled. She opens Good Morning, Midnight like so:
“Quite like old times,” the room says. “Yes? No?”
There are two beds, a big one for madame and
a smaller one on the opposite side for monsieur.
The wash-basin is shut off by a curtain. It is
a large room, the smell of cheap hotels faint,
almost imperceptible. The street outside is
narrow, cobble-stoned, going sharply uphill and
ending in a flight of steps. What they call an
impasse.
This carries mood so effectively. It doesn’t only
describe place, which is urban France. It suggests
how the narrator, Sasha, has hit dead end. Her being
trapped is not only conveyed in the room’s squalor,
but in small turns of phrase: the basin is “shut off”,
the street is an “impasse”. Those words hint this
is what Sasha’s current life is: shut off, stuck at an
impasse, which is French for “dead end”—impasse
means literally “no way”. And it’s all set in present
tense. So the language makes it now, saying, “This is
where I am at, and what I am trapped in.”
Notice, too, how Rhys has the paragraph start
out with the room talking. It’s effectively saying,
“Here you go again, you haven’t learned, have you?”
Having inanimate things feel or talk—the pathetic
fallacy—was associated with syrupy Victorian writing, so most modern authors spurned the device.
Rhys makes it suit her purposes by having such a
harsh opening: the room moralises, and by using the
“Yes? No?” it shoves all in Sasha’s face. This is like
the cop at the police cells saying you’re a deadbeat,
a loser; although Rhys has the room pass judgment.
Of course, this is a device. Really Sasha is judging,
and finding herself wanting. Here you are, girl, she’s
thinking, back at this again, you fool.
The passage by Rhys reinforces how essential awareness is to literary genius. Great writers
exhibit heightened understanding. And it’s part of
the demand reading fiction makes on us—of our
reading meaningfully—not to confuse sentiment or
cant with wisdom. Certain openings aspire to lofty
insight into human nature, but they exhibit more a
studied cleverness.
Some fans of Jane Austen idolise her first line
to Pride and Prejudice—“It is a truth universally
acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a
good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” She roughdrafted that at the age of twenty-one, and it shows.
Many youngsters sometimes strain to craft sentences like this. Teachers who have marked student
essays recognise the attempted pearl of wisdom from
someone with simulated knowledge of the world’s
ways. Compare that early opening with Austen
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twenty years later, in Persuasion, when the passage
of life has matured, and ripened, her. Here is that
other Jane at full throttle:
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-Hall, in
Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own
amusement, never took up any book but the
Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle
hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there
his faculties were roused into admiration and
respect, by contemplating the limited remnant
of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome
sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed
naturally into pity and contempt, as he turned
over the almost endless creations of the last
century—and there, if every other leaf were
powerless, he could read his own history with an
interest which never failed—this was the page
at which the favourite volume always opened:
ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH-HALL.
Instead of describing the appearance of a key
character, we are told of his mental habits, which
reveal much about his personality, and also the
world of the subsequent story. This is full-bodied
social satire, yet it stays above condescending caricature. If we are amused by Sir Walter’s imaginative
life—a snobby fixation with status, pedigree and
smug pleasure at his own family’s condition—he is
not a one-dimensional comic figure. There is psychological depth here. And it shows how wisdom
in late Austen arises from a capacity to understand
human foibles.
D
aniel Defoe gave writers two ways of opening
a fictitious story when he invented the English
novel. One was to have the narrator introduce himself or herself, stating the locality they hail from as
well as positioning them socially:
I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York,
of a good family, tho’ not of that country,
my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who
settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by
merchandise, and leaving off his trade lived
afterward at York, from whence he married my
mother, whose relations were named Robinson,
a very good family in the country, and from
whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by
the usual corruption of words in England, we
are now called, nay, we call our selves and write
our name Crusoe, and so my companions always
called me.
This is how Defoe’s first effort, Robinson Crusoe,
of 1719, begins. It was an instant best-seller. Defoe
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used variants of this format over the next twenty
months in his follow-up novels Memoirs of a Cavalier,
Captain Singleton and, another runaway success,
Moll Flanders.
He minted a different method in 1722, when he
shifted to an anonymous narrator for A Journal of the
Plague Year. He now opened by sketching a context
for what will happen:
It was about the beginning of September,
1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours,
heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was
returned from Holland; for it had been very
violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam
and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they
say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others
from the Levant, among some goods which were
brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it
was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus.
It mattered not from whence it came; but all
agreed it was come into Holland again.
Despite slight differences both openings supply
background, the when and the where. A modern
reader may find them long-winded. Defoe’s sentences go on and on due to early customs of punctuation. Commas are rampant, and he handles
semi-colons like medieval cathedral builders with
flying buttresses, putting in another when he wants
to keep adding. Often a Defoe paragraph is an inordinately drawn-out single sentence.
Early imitators repeated these mannerisms—
until the publisher Samuel Richardson took up a
goose quill in 1740. If you have waded through much
eighteenth-century literature, the opening line of his
first novel, Pamela, stands apart:
Dear Father and Mother, I have had great
Trouble, and some Comfort, to acquaint you
with.
This beginning is not only brief. The author foreshadows events related over the next two pages, as
well as the tangled tale which will unfold across
several hundred pages in this two-volume work.
Where Defoe pulls the reader in by addressing him
or her like a garrulous speaker who doesn’t pause
for breath, Richardson announces. No details, no
contextual colour, just the enticing bald statement
of serious news to relate.
It takes a strong craftsman to use this innovation successfully; which is probably why the long,
discursive opening held sway among early novelists.
Still, the form was given a twist by Henry Fielding
who imported into fiction customs from the sermon and the moralising essay. We see this with
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his Joseph Andrews, of 1742, penned as a riposte to
Richardson. Spurning the rustic matter-of-factness
of Pamela, which he loathed, Fielding began with a
lofty reflection:
It is a trite but true observation, that examples
work more forcibly on the mind than precepts:
and if this be just in what is odious and
blamable, it is more strongly so in what is
amiable and praise-worthy. Here emulation
most effectually operates upon us, and inspires
our imitation in an irresistible manner. A good
man therefore is a standing lesson to all his
acquaintance, and of far greater use in that
narrow circle than a good book.
Literary mischief is afoot here. Fielding’s sermonstyle opening sets the reader thinking he is being
serious; although once into the story, it is apparent
that with those remarks the author was having a sly
dig at novels, and the ostentatious talk now becoming attached to popular fiction. This went over the
heads of some readers—and writers—which led to
the pretentious sermonising stuck at the opening of
countless leaden novels.
Long-winded first paragraphs were settled in
English fiction until century’s end. Ann Radcliffe
moved towards a tight opening with her romances,
progressively trimming her first sentence in each
successive book. By 1794, with The Mysteries of
Udolpho, she had cut back the wordy opening common in novels to:
On the pleasant banks of the Garonne, in the
province of Gascony, stood, in the year 1584, the
chateau of Monseiur St Aubert.
This is lean prose when set against Radcliffe’s
contemporaries, although there is a clunkiness
brought out by punctuation. There’s no flow, no easy
rhythm here, which may indicate the romance genre
was losing steam. Contrast that first sentence with
this one:
Scarcely had the Abbey-Bell tolled for five
minutes, and already the Church of the
Capuchins thronged with Auditors.
Here is a break into something new. It starts off
The Monk of 1796, a racy gothic novel by Matthew
Lewis. It’s not just a matter of concision. Using a
single comma, he tightens the descriptive focus.
This ensures the reader’s attention is not laboriously
taken Defoe-like from one thing along to another,
then the next, adding on excessive descriptive detail.
Instead Lewis uses direct, concrete, scene-setting.
B
y this point all the literary techniques and
devices existed that start up most English novels.
From Ivanhoe to The Solid Mandala, from Brideshead
Revisited to Riders of the Purple Sage, the first sentence stems from literary constructions developed
by these innovators. There is only one further innovation, for which we appear indebted to Charles
Dickens. We see him adroitly employing it to start
Hard Times:
“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys
and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are
wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out
everything else. You can only form minds of
reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will
ever be of service to them. This is the principle
on which I bring up my own children, and this is
the principle on which I bring up these children.
Stick to the Facts, sir!”
This bombast plonks the reader right in the middle of things—the novel starts mid-conversation as
a key character, Mr Gradgrind, is holding forth.
Merchant, factory owner, banker, principal citizen
of Coketown, Gradgrind presents himself through
the book as a pinnacle of civic virtue. But by its end
we know him to be the source of local corruption.
Readers find that the Gradgrind circle prospers by concealing “Facts”. Gradgrind’s companion
Mrs Sparsit is a malicious parasite; his upper-class
friend Mr Harthouse is an idler and seducer; his son
Tom is a closet gambler, and frames a decent man
for theft; Gradgrind himself conceals his true past,
banishing his mother under another name to a distant town. So besides introducing this opinionated
figure and his public persona, the opening passage
craftily prepares one of the novel’s driving themes:
moral hypocrisy and deceit.
Entering a fictional world mid-conversation
is demanding. Few authors can carry it off. John
Marsden has a novel pivot on a tantalising query
uttered by a teenager to his best friend. The two
youths have been just knocking about, eating fresh
strawberries, and are about to play kick-to-kick with
a football. Here is the opening line:
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Horatio asked him.
Re-presenting Shakespeare as a novel can be asking for trouble. But Marsden’s Hamlet is a gripping
page-turner. Reading that opening sentence, I was
hooked.
Christopher Heathcote, who lives in Melbourne, wrote
“From Bullitt to Dirty Harry via the Supreme Court”
in the March issue.
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