Top 10 first lines in fiction - Guardian article

Only one I heard of was Perfume and that was because I saw the movie.

Bullcorn! (Pardon the strong language.) Those are all recent publications. Has Liz Nugent read anything before the 1980s? “The House On Haunted Hill” is the earliest of the titles, published in 1959. No other came before 1985.

Here is the real answer (one of them, anyway) to the Top 10 Best:

10. “I, poor, miserable Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked during a dreadful storm, came on shore this dismal, unfortunate island which I call the Isle Of Despair.” Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

9. “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” Ulysses by James Joyce

8. “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.” The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

7. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

6. “When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.” The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

5. “In the year 1878 I took my degree of doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the Army.” A Study In Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

4. “When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

3. “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” Catcher In The Rye by J. D. Salinger

2. “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

1. “Call Me Ishmael” Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

"The Man in Black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed." - Stephen King, The Gunslinger

Those are a couple of stunners, yes.

You probably already know that "It was a dark and stormy night" is an actual novel first line from "Paul Clifford" (1830) by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It is also used as a first line in Madeleine L'Engle's Newbery Award winning YA fantasy novel "A Wrinkle In Time" (1962).