We consider the initial boundary value problem for the movement of a rigid body in a viscous incompressible fluid. It is shown that, locally in time, a unique strong solution exists. This result has been known in the case of Newtonian fluids, in Hilbert spaces. Here, Banach space techniques are used to relax the conditions on the data and to extend the result to generalized Newtonian models. The proof rests on a suitable choice of coordinates, on maximal regularity estimates for the linearized fluid systems and on a suitable decomposition of the forces which determine the coupling of rigid and fluid parts. It works similarly in two and in three space dimensions, for exterior and for bounded fluid domains.