"And Then The Murders Began"

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About

"And Then The Murders Began" refers to a series of tweets testing the theory that the first line of any story can be improved if its second sentence is changed to "And then the murders began."

Origin

On March 3rd, 2017, author Marc Laidlaw tweeted "The first line of almost any story can be improved by making sure the second line is, 'And then the murders began.'"^[1] The tweet gained over 1,600 retweets and 347 replies.

Spread

Twitter users were immediately enamored with Laidlaw's theory and began writing "And then the murders began" after famous first lines of literature. For example, @ldlapinski^[2] applied it to the first line of Peter Rabbit and gained over 130 retweets (shown below).

Neil Gaiman dubbed the theory #LaidlawsLaw^[3] when he paired it with the first line from Dickens' A Christmas Carol. The replies Laidlaw received were compiled into a Twitter Moment^[4] that afternoon.