I was writing an improv review, and thinking about how romances begin. Your challenge: name each of the great romances (book / friendship / love affair with puzzle solving overtones) that starts in something like the following manner...

It's designed to be just for fun, but if you'd like an incentive, the first person to email me a correct list of 15 will win a reading copy of Orlando Furioso (free postage)! Groups may play (crowdsourcing=xlnt), in the comments even, but would have to share the prize. Decisions of the referees are final *shakes fist*…

Caveats: These are modern paraphrases, to avoid style clues. They might be slightly flawed, because most of my books are in storage. I'm a bit shocked at how British these are! Here are some stats:

• 13 of the 15 were originally published in English (11 UK, 1 Aus, 1 US)
• 11 of the 15 are from the beginnings of multi-book series
• 8 involve guys having adventures (bromance=ugly word) and in 2 of those 8, the primary relationship is between a male character and [something] that is Not Human
• 6 involve heterosexual love stories
• 5 involve "sleuths"; 3 more involve lovers who solve puzzles
• 4 might be shelved as science fiction or fantasy
• 1 is in all of the preceding categories

And now for the paraphrases. Best of (British) luck!

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(1) My father taught me never to let an insult pass, but when I found myself with three duels on the same afternoon I wondered whether I had taken his advice too literally.

(2) She came out of the mist, suddenly, making my horse rear back and throw me off.

(3) To take my mind off my dismal situation, I attended a concert, but the man next to me was slapping his thigh on the first beat of every measure, except not accurately, even after I asked him to stop, and I just wanted to kill him.

(4) The world passes through my bazaar and I thought I had seen every person in it. I was drumming my heels on the big gun in front of the museum (I'd pushed off the son of the wealthy Chinese merchant, in his fancy little silk suit, and me in rags!) when a man came along that was like no man I had ever seen. When he went in to talk to the museum director, I crept along and listened.

(5) When I first saw her, she was in court, on trial for her life. She was convicted and sentenced to death, and I could do nothing - except call on her publishers and offer my services.

(6) When I interviewed Svard's former landlady, she told me plenty about his tightfisted ways and his paranoia. She laughed and said that he might have died in her building, but there was no way that his body would have lain, undiscovered, for so many days, because she wouldn't have permitted it! I was interested at once.

(7) The Chief Rabbit doesn't like being disturbed in the afternoon, but I thought he ought to hear the kids' warning. As soon as they left he chewed me out, and prophecy or no, I just don't like being told what to do.

(8) We met in the Block Arcade; she saved me from being beaten up! She had just returned from England a wealthy heiress and she needed a maid who wouldn't be shocked at the way she lived. Well actually I was quite shocked at first...

(9) On the hungriest and most dismal night of all, I tore the Son's medal from my neck and threw it out into the darkness. Praying and mourning at the same time, I offered my service and my life to any god who would pick them up, any god at all, in exchange for the lives of my men.

(10) I was still dizzy, crawling on hands and knees, when I felt something on the floor of the tunnel, and put it in my pocket.

(11) It was the Summer of Dissolution. Allie Marlowe invited to me to an odd meeting of rock stars in London; she'd invited Sage and the boys too, so we drove up together. I thought I saw the man I was stalking, and I followed him into a closed meeting, New Faces for the Upper Chamber. The Heads followed me...

(12) The boy from next door had clearly been crying. We argued about whose name was funnier, whose face was dirtier, and whether London was "a hole"*. I found out that he was upset because his mother was dying.

(13) She was locked out of her house; the boss and I stopped to help. Afterwards he called in her number plate -- his conscience wouldn't let him add "suspected violation" -- and got her name! I'd never seen him that way about a girl. I told him we could eat breakfast across the street every day if he wanted, until she came down those stairs again.

(14) He was different from the other suitors who thronged about the door of my dressing room: so quiet yet passionate, so British, and so very, very wealthy. I planned to live happily ever after, safely across the Channel. But to my dismay, the very day after our fashionable wedding, a horrible slander reached his ears, and turned him against me.

(15) When I told my former dresser I was hoping to share a flat, Stamford ushered me to the lab to introduce him as a possible roommate. He greeted us with the words, "I've found it! I've found it! I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by haemoglobin, and by nothing else."

*thanks to Jonathon Svendsen's review