‘Peter Karras learned to swim one afternoon at the tail end of a heat wave in early June. The heat had come upon D. C. like a bad dream and had killed several old timers and a few who weren’t so old. Two had succumbed the day before.’
This is the way to open a novel. It ensnares our attention because it evokes something within us that seems real. It sounds right with it musicality, its cadence. We are transported to the ‘tail end’ of a particular June afternoon and our speaker has promised we will learn to swim with him.
This is how attraction works! Rapport is created here within a second of the narrator beginning to speak: you surprise and then involve through a personal anecdote. ‘..the tail end.’ The death count fuels our belief that this is a retrospective narrative and legal and illegal death will figure highly!
This anecdote also creates a vivid sense of voice, even if we find this voice slightly stylized as perhaps it is affecting a knowingness and sophistication that the narrator would not have enjoyed at the time of the original experience.
Sounds like Raymond Chandler with access to a gritty time machine!