The first sentences of novels have rightly received a lot of attention for their ability to hook readers and to establish the novel’s voice. But what about last sentences? Are they important or memorable? Are they even supposed to be?
Literary novels sometimes have distinctive final lines. One of the best is in A Farewell to Arms, a final sentence that Hemingway apparently rewrote forty-seven times before settling on the published version. It depicts Frederic Henry on learning that his lover Catherine Barkley has died in childbirth. “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” One critic called it “one of those perfectly Hemingway sentences, expressively drained of expressiveness.”
What about the last lines of crime novels and mysteries? Here are five examples.
Spoiler Alert: I don’t think these lines alone reveal the ending. But if you intend to read any of these novels, you might want to skip the entry.
THE LONG GOODBYE by Raymond Chandler (1953)
“I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.”
The speaker is Chandler’s detective, Philip Marlowe. He’s just shaken hands and said goodbye to the swindler Terry Lennox. He’s leaving behind not just Lennox but all the other people he’s met in the course of the case. Marlowe’s voice is filled with revulsion for Lennox, a fatalism for the turn of events, and a weariness for the police with whom he has a contentious relationship.
ROSEANNA by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (1967)
Round-shouldered and whistling Martin Beck walked through the pulsing, white mist to the subway station. People looking at him would probably have been surprised if they knew what he was thinking.
Here comes Martin Beck and it’s snowing on his hat. He walks with a song; he walks with a sway! Hello friends and brothers; it squeaks underfoot. It is a winter night. Hello to you all; just give a call and we’ll go home to southern Stockholm! By subway. To my part of town.
He was on the way home.
This passage comes at the end of the first of the ten Martin Beck novels, where Beck and his Homicide Squad investigate the murder of an American tourist named Roseanna McGraw. It’s a difficult case, lasting months and with a particularly nasty killer. Beck, who is ill and miserable in almost every novel, is uncharacteristically joyful here, having found justice for the victim he had come to care for.
STICK by Elmore Leonard (1983)
“Well, she wants back pay, ten grand a year for the seven years since the divorce, which comes to—”
“Seventy thousand dollars,” Stick said, so quietly they barely heard him.
“If you don’t have it, you don’t have it,” Barry said. “I would advise you, though, to seek employment quick and keep mailing in those payments or you’ll be going back to you know where . . . Hey! . . . Hey, where are you going?” Barry looked at Cornell. “Where’s he going?”
“I doubt he knows,” Cornell said, and watched him cross the lawn to the driveway and pass from view around the corner of the garage.
There you are, Stick thought.
At the end of this novel, Ernest Stickley, or Stick, realizes he’s suddenly, almost miraculously, acquired seventy-three thousand dollars. It’s more than he’s ever dreamed of. But almost immediately he also learns his ex-wife wants seventy thousand in child support. This is one of the best of the master’s novels. The ending is classic Elmore Leonard, who often lets his characters get off a final wise crack or, as here, a knowing bit of resignation.
STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG by Kate Atkinson (2011)
He was about to start the engine when his phone rang. Louise, the screen informed him. Jackson hesitated, imagining what might happen if he didn’t answer it.
And what would happen if he did.
In this novel, Jackson Brodie, Atkinson’s detective, is working a missing person case in Leeds, England. But he’s also allowing himself to wander aimlessly around Yorkshire, exploring historic sites and visiting tea shops. Brodie’s willingness to let life happen to him is reflected in these last lines, where he receives a call from Louise Monroe, the Scottish police detective with whom he has an on-again, off-again relationship, and about whom he’s never quite made up his mind.
BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD (A HIGHWAY 59 NOVEL) by Attica Locke (2017)
Did that make him no better than Mack and Mack no better than the killers in Lark? No, that couldn’t be right. But Darren wasn’t sure of anything anymore, his righteous clarity clouding in his bourbon-soaked brain. He looked across the dark porch at his mother. A pack of mosquitoes buzzed around her head, but she stood perfectly still, a faint smirk on her painted lips. In her dry and calloused hands, he saw she was clutching a sequined handbag. She’d dressed up for this, he thought. He sank into a metal lawn chair as he realized that of course she’d pocketed the gun when she found it, that she had it in her purse right now, that she held his entire career as a Texas Ranger in her hands.
Here Texas Ranger Darren Mathews realizes his mother has the .38 revolver that could incriminate him. In the preceding paragraph, there’s a wonderful line: “He got it confused sometimes, on which side of the law he belonged, couldn’t always remember when it was safe for a black man to follow the rules.” I also admire the phrase here “his righteous clarity clouding in his bourbon-soaked brain.” This last paragraph is a precisely described piece of revelation and leaves the novel and the fate of Mathews up in the air.
Frederick Weisel’s debut novel, THE SILENCED WOMEN: A VIOLENT CRIME INVESTIGATIONS TEAM MYSTERY, will be published by Poisoned Pen Press in February 2021. It is the first in a new police procedural series set in Northern California about a team of homicide investigators.
