In the Beginning...

"You must begin well and end well." This was a dictum pronounced by Maurice Chevalier, quoted often by Stephane Grappelli.

We thought of it when reading "Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein," the wonderful new book by Linda Bailey, which has a perfect beginning.

And then we thought of other memorable opening lines, remembering that maybe you can't tell a book by its cover, but you can tell a lot by its first paragraph.

Here are a few:

"It was the morning of my hundredth birthday." Len Deighton, "Billion Dollar Brain."

"Willis Wayde, before he went to sleep, could shut his eyes and see every detail of the Harcourt place." John P. Marquand, "Sincerely, Willis Wayde."

"I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte." Dashiell Hammett, "Red Harvest."

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since." F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby."

Probably the most famous opening line, apart from "Once upon a time" and "It was a dark and stormy night" is "Call me Ishmael" from Herman Melville's "Moby Dick." But almost as famous, and, we think, much better, is "For a long time I used to go to bed early," the beginning of Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past."

That might be our favorite. Although to our cluttered, dusty bookshelf mind, it is hard to top the first sentence of Ernest Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast," which is like a jazz solo that ignores the opening melody and goes straight to the improvisation: "Then there was the bad weather."

And Ms. Bailey's fine opening to "Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein"? "Here is Mary. She's a dreamer. The kind of girl who wanders alone, who stares at clouds, who imagines things that never were."

It's a book intended for young readers. Never mind. After that opening, this reader is hooked.