When I was a kid, I loved the Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison.
The main character of the series is James Bolivar “Slippery Jim” di Griz, a master thief turned elite police agent in an interstellar civilization in the distant future.
The first several books of the series were among my favorites. I reread them recently and found them enjoyable. Much of the appeal for me is, and was, the author’s voice. The books are narrated in the first person and Slippery Jim is a wisecracking insouciant anti-hero.
James Nicoll reviews the first book in the series, “The Stainless Steel Rat.” He doesn’t care for it. He compares it to another series of books that I love, Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder series.
“Dortmunder’s adventures are just as implausible as Jim’s, but they work for me,” Nicoll says. “I think it comes down to how Jim and Dortmunder’s plots fail, when they do fail: Jim seems confident that he really only ever needs one plan, whereas Dortmunder is gloomily aware he needs at least one more plan than he has, even when he takes into account needing at least one more plan than he has.”
The books do PhilipKDickian things with reality. In the first novel, Slippery Jim takes a cocktail of mind-altering drugs to turn himself into a psychopath so he can catch a psychopath, then tricks his psychopathic self into reverting back.
The galactic culture of the Harrison books is a benevolent technocracy. Government has absolute authority to brainwash people or do anything else it wants and it all works out because it’s scientific and only for the good.
Harrison did another series of novels I loved, Deathworld, about a professional gambler who visits a planet where everything is out to kill you all the time. Children are trained in kindergarten to carry guns and use them instantly and lethally.