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Introduction to THE COMPLEAT CHANCE PERDUE

Mike Resnick

A couple of decades ago I went to the bookstore, looking for a nice,
hard-boiled detective novel in the Raymond Chandler mold. I picked up _The
Stranger City Caper_, primarily because of the cover art, which showed a
private eye in a trenchcoat. I'd never heard of the author before, but I
bought it anyway. Well, let me tell you: covers can be misleading. I got home,
opened the book -- and twenty minutes later I was laughing so hard that I was
literally gasping for breath. I knew long before I finished the book that Ross
Spencer was a comic genius -- an opinion that has only become firmer over the
years -- and I spent the next couple of days scouring the stores for any other
Chance Perdue adventures that I could find. Writers don't write fan letters to
other writers, but within a week I had written one to Ross, a charming man who
then lived about 40 miles away from me in Illinois. (We have both since moved
to Ohio, though we're now a couple of hundred miles apart.) He responded not
with a letter, but with an audio cassette -- he actually hates to type -- I
responded in kind, and we've been friends ever since. When I finally met him,
he turned out to be a fun-loving, white-haired, cigar-smoking gent with a
twinkle in his eye -- exactly the kind of person you would pick to be the
creator of the immortal Chance Perdue. Ross kicked off his late-in-life
literary career by writing and selling five Perdue novels. He's since sold a
batch more books, and has gone on to greater fame than Chance ever brought him
-- but to me Chance Perdue is classic, archtypal Ross Spencer, than which
nothing is funnier. It's the kind of thing he does both effortlessly and
better than anybody else. Perdue is the perfect parody of the hard-boiled
detective. He doesn't feel much pain, especially if you hit him above the
neck. He's just about irresistable to women. He's so dumb that he can't even
spell FBI. If there are twenty right ways to solve a crime and one wrong way,
he'll invariably opt for the wrong way and solve it anyway. He is incapable of
writing a two-sentence paragraph. (Footnote for historians: Ross once showed
me the unfinished manuscript of his very first creation, detective Clay
Pierce, who is a clone of Chance Perdue in every way but one: Clay is
incapable of writing a paragraph of less than two thousand words.) Shortly
after discovering Ross's work, I loaned a couple of the Perdue books to my
friend, the award-winning science fiction writer Barry Malzberg. His comment
upon returning them: "I never saw so many one-liners in my life. The man is
the Henny Youngman of mystery novelists." Actually, Ross isn't a mystery
novelist at all. What he is is the funniest writer alive. I know this, because
when I sit down to write humor I am the second-funniest writer alive, and I
can't hold a candle to Spencer. So what lies ahead of you in this five-in-one
volume? Well, let me give you a very brief hint. First there's _The DADA
Caper_, in which we meet Chance Perdue, a detective so dumb that his IQ would
freeze water, as he goes up against DADA, an enemy whose acronym stands for
"Destroy America! Destroy America!" -- which will show you how committed (and
redundant) they are. Next comes _The Reggis Arms Caper_, in which Chance saves
the world from another Japanese invasion, and first meets the CIA's sexiest
agent, Brandy Alexander. Then there's _The Stranger City Caper_, in which