If you have a lot of time to waste, you never judge a book by its cover. But don’t try telling me you don’t judge it by its first paragraph.

What makes a great first paragraph? And which are the greatest? We all have favorites, some of which have become clichéd –– as happens to anything, whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, or if you grew up in a family that was unhappy in its own way. See what I mean?

In general it’s hard to beat Hemingway’s opening to “The Sun Also Rises” for laying out the narrator’s character, as well as the character being described: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed with that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.”

But what about crime fiction? Over the next few weeks, I’m going to look at some of the best first lines and paragraphs in the genre. Next week, we’ll do a little Chandler (how did you guess?) and then we’ll be on to Simenon, who was a nasty enough man to write perfectly bitter downbeat prose from the very start of his books.

Let’s begin, though, with the man who in many ways beats them all: Dashiell Hammett.

I bet you think I’m going to talk about “The Maltese Falcon,” which in the first paragraph describes Sam Spade as looking “rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.”

But I’m not.

No, we’re going to have a quick gander at the opening of “Red Harvest,” Hammett’s first novel, in which his Continental Op heads to a corrupt small town. It starts this way:

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

For the rest of this post, read The Man of Twists and Turns.