In the beginning... ...What?

It is said that Douglas Adams came up with the opening line:

"High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse."

And then didn't write the rest of 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency' for several years.  The sentence just sat there in his notebook like a grain of sand in an oyster.

This legend has always fascinated me so I thought I'd write some opening gambits for possible future use.  I don't mind if anyone wants to use them as long as I get a credit somewhere in the book.  They may not be just one line and it's something that I'm going to be doing when the muse takes me.  Who knows, I may even get mused up so much that I'll take it further myself and produce a best seller.

...and then I woke up!

Here goes then...

Detective Inspector John Collier hadn't been to many murder scenes before.  His rural beat mostly served up a staple diet of theft and RTAs.  He wasn't even sure if this was a murder scene.  SOCOs had been there quite some time before he had been summoned and with what they'd discovered so far, who ever was the victim of this... this... incident, wouldn't be sat with their feet up enjoying a tin of Fosters and the final of 'Strictly Come Dancing', this evening.


There was so much blood.  Dark, congealed and everywhere.  All over the clothes, the floor and the walls of the small, lockup garage.  Strangeness and the macabre had collided, however, when it came to the 'victim's' identifying features.  That's all that there was.  Arrayed in and around the clothes as if the rest of the body had just dissolved were a full set of recently and roughly extracted teeth, the tips of the fingers of each hand and a sizeable chunk of flesh, the skin on which bore a distinctive scar.  This had been discovered when the otherwise empty shirt had been delicately pulled back from a suspiciously soggy lump and had been the cause of much whistling and cursing.


DI Collier's mind was a crowded room of eager thoughts, jostling for attention.  Why me?  Why not me?  Where's the rest of him?  Am I up to this?  Is this murder?  Is this a crime, even?  God, I hope Lynda hasn't done that bacon joint for dinner.


The room was cleared suddenly by Sergeant Hepworth's dream come true.  He'd always wanted to say this, ever since he'd opened his first Colin Dexter, "I think you should see this, Sir..."...


There it is, then.  What now?