How a 3-piece chicken box made news history
Use brief lead sentences to grip readers
“Gary Robinson died hungry.”
Edna Buchanan, the Pulitzer Prize winning Miami Herald crime writer wrote brilliant lead sentences.
Her brief intro transformed otherwise routine police blotter notes into journalism masterpieces.
The tale of an unruly customer in crime-ridden Miami killed over a chicken order is now legendary.
As Calvin Trillin wrote in a New Yorker profile of Buchanan, an impatient Robinson -who may have been overserved with drink- decided to stop at a chicken joint for a three piece box.
Robinson, an ex-convict, jumped the line in the joint. The clerk told him to get back in line and await his turn.
Robinson objected, then made threats. He was in a rush. The cashier persisted and he finally went to the back of the line.
That’s when fate intervened in the form of an apparent run on chicken that fateful night in Miami.
Robinson finally arrived at the counter after a ten or 15 minute delay. He repeated his order for a three piece box.
Robinson had played by the rules. But as fate would have it, the shop had run out of chicken pieces.
Offered chicken nuggets, he punched the clerk. Hard.
Buchanan’s first sentence captured the moment. A security guard intervened. After a lengthy struggle, Gary Robinson lay shot dead.
And a legendary “lede” was born .
Pulling a reader into a story has lost shimmer as social media has dimmed headline and lede value.
Twitter and Facebook have already told us what happened.
But in Medium, a crisp lede can benefit our unique stories, pulling eyes into our novel ideas.
Mary DeVries has done a well researched Medium story on the best first sentences of recent entries in the Medium Writers Challenge.
Her story mentioned my lede among dozens of others. She curated stories whose first sentences she believed compelled readers to scroll further.
Buchanan was an expert at summoning pathos. She elevated the crime beat from a gritty tabloid headline and three graphs into a pungent commentary on human existence.
Let this Buchanan lede sink in: “His last meal was worth $30,000 and it killed him.”
Hint: think digested condoms leaking cocaine
“The corpse had a familiar face.” was her lede for a fatal car crash. Upon arrival, she recognized the victim, a prominent person she had covered in the past.
Her ability to grasp the reader is standard in tabloid headlines that yank you by the collar.
The greatest headline is likely that of New York Post editor Vinnie Musetto’s world famous April, 1983 masterpiece:
It heralded a brutal attack by a man who murdered a nightclub manager, then took a hostage and forced her to decapitate the victim.
The blaring tabloid stunner is the stuff of legend.
These are the stories that pulled in eyes before social media took away the who, what, when and where. But there were 19th Century eye pullers:
“Call me Ishmael.”
We need only read Herman Melville’s opening line in his 1851 masterpiece Moby Dick to imagine a stranger unraveling an incredible tale over a rum draught.
The short sentence summoned an image: a disheveled whaling crewman sharing a sea story in a dark harborside tavern.
Of course there are great run-on opening lines that hurl a reader into a grand fable. Memorable long openers are few. This one surely worked:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” -Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.
But we’re neither Dickens nor Melville. So brevity is our friend, pulling eager eyeballs into our work.
We all have stories. To get readers scrolling, a well wrought opening can lure readers on.