"I knew him for..." or "I had known him for..."?

I'm writing a short story, and I'm unsure about the right tense to use. The first two sentences are:

I knew Mr. Brown for exactly 15 minutes. He had met me at the entrance and was now accompanying me to the meeting.

I'm not sure about the tense in the first sentence. Normally I'd write:

I had known Mr. Brown for ...

However, then the first and the second sentence would use the same tense, which also looks weird. What is the right tense to use?

Solution 1:

If I were reading a story that began

I knew Mr. Brown for exactly 15 minutes. He had met me at the entrance and was now accompanying me to the meeting.

I would expect the following things of the story:

1. Mr. Brown would die 15 minutes after he had met First Person Narrator.
2. FPN's second sentence would begin a narration of the circumstances of his death.

(1) comes from the use of past knew in the first sentence; one cannot use the present perfect construction with a dead subject or object, so using the simple past is a tipoff that they're dead.

And the time lapse is only 15 minutes, well within the narrative scope of the story, whence (2).

There's a (3), as well, but it's just a flag to watch for while reading -- Mr. Brown's death may be a red herring, and merely a way into a different story, rather than being the point of this story.

I don't know whether that helps, or not.

Solution 2:

In practice native speakers probably wouldn't use the word knew that way in such a context.

It's fine to say something like "I knew him back in the 80s when we were at college together", because the implication is you "knew" him for years (you might or might not still know him).

But for a period as short as 15 minutes, it really doesn't make a lot of sense. Firstly because that's barely enough time to "get to know" someone. Secondly, if we allow that you could do so, and if a few minutes later someone asked "Do you know Mr. Brown?" you'd presumably answer "Yes". Because you still know him, even if he's just left (unless, as John Lawler suggests, he just died :).

OP's "I had known Mr. Brown for exactly 15 minutes." is just about credible, but it seems a bit "dated/formal/literary" to me. More natural phrasing would be something like...

"I had only known Mr. Brown for 15 minutes."

Personally, I'd prefer met rather than known, for the reason given above. But that just creates more problems when OP uses the same verb with a slightly different sense in the next sentence.