"Mike Resnick - Compleat Chance Perdue" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

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."