Thank you to the visitors who played along (see below).What surprises me is that no one has suggested Dorothy L. Sayers´ famous body in the bath “Whose Body” – the very first Lord Peter Wimsey story from 1923.
The teaser: a quotation from the first chapter of Ann Cleeves´ Hidden Depths.
“He had always been beautiful, even as a baby. Much lovelier than Laura, which had never seemed fair. It was the blond hair and the dark eyes, the long, dark eyelashes. Julie stared at him, submerged beneath the bath water, his hair rising, like fronds of seaweed, towards the surface. She couldn´t see his body because of the flowers. They floated on the perfumed water. Only the flower heads, not the stems or the leaves. There were the big ox-eye daisies which had grown in the cornfields when she was a kid. Overblown poppies, the red petals translucent now. And enormous blue blossoms, which she had seen before in gardens in the village, but which she couldn´t name.”
Promising, isn´t it? I am on page 92 now, and it just gets better … and better …
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2 kommentarer:
This particular scene is, I think, one of the very best pieces of writing by a fine author.
Martin, it is indeed excellent, both from a stylistic and a criminalistic point of view. I should probably have made it into a bait-in-the-box quotation, but I couldn´t wait.
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