Three Arabic Novels Starting with a Crime

The present study treats three Arabic novels that belong to different periods and use different narrative techniques. Yet they all start with the same theme: the discovery of a murder. Despite this apparent similarity in their beginnings, the murder plot develops in a different way in the three cases. Each beginning contains elements that announce the development of the story. The three beginnings serve the special purposes of their respective novels, in the way the murder is presented to the reader, in the elements each beginning tries to draw attention to, in the language used in this purpose, in the identity of the character who discovers the murder and even in the type of the murder itself. The three novels have, beside the murder plot, various thematic and ideological objectives that influence the way the novel starts and even overshadow, in some cases, the murder plot.