Free Gun in Cheek by Bill Pronzini Page A

his own backyard with him standing only feet away, hard to swallow in a hurry, found the answer. ( The Horrible Man )
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The door chimes were still disturbing Beethoven in his grave when I rushed to meet him. ( The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse )
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His freshest laurel wreath was his recent interpretation of such tough aces like Stravinsky and Shostakovich; rendering their works on violin strings was like pushing peanuts up Mount Everest with your nose. ( Killer on the Keys )
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Her hips were beautifully arched and her breasts were like proud flags waving triumphantly. She carried them high and mighty. ( The Case of the Violent Virgin )
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She . . . unearthed one of her fantastic breasts from the folds of her sheath skirt. ( The Horrible Man )
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Her breasts and hips would put a scenic railway to shame. Or maybe make an artist drown himself in his fixative. ( The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse )
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Holly Hill's figure didn't take your breath away. It just never gave it back. . . . Her breasts weren't only round and full. They pulsed and throbbed like living perfections. The deep well of her stomach fell away to the superb convex leading gracefully to strong, starkly rendered thighs that were as firm and full as sixteen-inch guns. ( The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse )
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Her breasts were twin mounds of female muscle that quivered and hung and quivered and hung again. The pale red of her nipples were two twinkling eyes that said Go, Man, Go. ( The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse )
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If her eyes were like baseballs, her breasts took you from sporting goods to something like ripe cantaloupes. ( The Case of the Violent Virgin )
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"I've done a stupid thing, Ed," Opal Trace musicaled. ( The Case of the Violent Virgin )
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"Opal . . ." she hoarsed. ( The Case of the Violent Virgin )
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"Obviously!" she crackled, laying a whip across me and then turning with a sexy flounce she vanished through the glass doors, dragging her hatbox and portmanteau behind her. And my mind. ( Shoot It Again, Sam! )
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I looked at the knife. . . . One half the blade was soaked with drying blood. Benny's blood. It was red, like anybody else's blood. ( The Voodoo Murders )
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Dolores came around the bed with the speed of a big ape. . . . She descended on me like a tree full of the same apes she looked like. ( The Tall Dolores )
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It had been a journey into the absurd. A trip into Darkness.
And maybe a one-way ticket to Hell. And whatever lays [sic] beyond that. ( Shoot It Again, Sam! )
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    In the sixties and seventies, the plots of private-detective novels began to grow increasingly sophisticated.   To be sure, there were – and still are – a few around with Ed Noonish premises;   but a number of serious (and pretentious) writers began to emulate what Ross Macdonald had been doing for years: using the PI novel as a vehicle for salient commentary on all sorts of social, political, racial, sexual, ecological, and psychological topics. A certain percentage of these writers have achieved critical acclaim and widespread popularity—despite the fact that, almost to a man, they are unabashed imitators of one or all of the so-called Big Three of Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald. Their books are riddled with conventional cops, conventional wisecracks, conventional toughness, conventional violence, and conventional relationships with conventional female characters. They take their detectives as seriously as they take their subject matter, never admitting for a moment that what they are writing is pure and simple pastiche. They have, in short, brought nothing new to the form, the mystique, the Eye.
    Only one writer has brought anything new to the Eye in the past thirty years.
    His name is Ross H. Spencer.
    His detective's name is Chance Perdue.
    The first Chance Perdue novel was published in 1978. Under the title The Dada Caper.
    It is full of wisecracks and other conventions.
    But it is still unique.
    It is unique because Spencer has a