The Music of Words

"The corpse without hands lay in the bottom of a small sailing dinghy drifting just within sight of the Suffolk coast. It was the body of a middle-aged man, a dapper little cadaver, its shroud a dark pin-striped suit which fitted the narrow body as elegantly in death as it had in life. The hand-made shoes still gleamed except for some scruffing of the toe caps, the silk tie was knotted under the prominent Adam’s apple. He had dressed with careful orthodoxy for the town, this hapless voyager; not for this lonely sea; nor for this death.

(Unnatural Causes - P.D.James)

Another great opening scene, this one by the British writer who uses murder mysteries to explore the depth and range of human emotion. The description is simple, precise, and elegant.
Read it aloud and tune your ear to the wonderful, subtle patterns of repetition. Listen for the alliteration (repeated consonant sounds) and assonance (repeated vowel sounds) that keep us moving though those images. Note the four initial "s" sounds in the first sentence, spaced just far enough apart so as not to draw attention to themselves. Hear the echo of the "ing" in "dinghy" and "drifting," as well as their alliteration. Enjoy the assonance that makes "a dapper little cadaver" (spoken with a British accent, of course) such a perfect phrase.

Look at the last sentence, Shakespearean in its elegance. If I had come up with the phrase "this hapless voyager," I would have been tempted to open the sentence with it. James starts instead with the anonymous "he," then inserts the appositive later in the sentence, refusing to strand the victim without some form of identification.

I love those semi-colons in the last sentence; they force us to pause and ponder the twist of fate that turned a voyager into a cadaver.