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Ronn Perea is exhibit A in the case that first-time novelists often choose themselves as a topic.

Perea's first novel "Smiles, Giggles & Laughs" is about the adventures of Ronn Greco, a comedy club producer who books shows along Route 66, and about the many comics who float into and out of Greco's life. Or should we say Perea's life.

Perea, 54, an Albuquerque native, is a veteran of the laughs-on-the-run circuit. He blazed the trail for the Albuquerque comedy scene, producing his first show at El Rey in December 1984.

"When I started, people here didn't know what a comedy club was," Perea said during a phone interview this week.

Over the next 20-plus years, he expanded his comedy operations, booking his growing army of comics into 25 Albuquerque venues, towns throughout New Mexico, stops along Route 66, clubs from Florida to California to Australia and eventually - as part of a United Service Organizations (USO) tour - to Thailand, Spain and Italy.

The title of his novel is taken from the motto of his Duke City Comedy Club.

Perea's career in comedy sounds as if it might make a good nonfiction book. So why a fictionalized account?

Perea said it would have been difficult to capture it all in a true story.

"I've put more than 1,000 comics on my stage," he said. "In my novel, I have written characters that are amalgamations of these people. Over the years, there were groupie incidents on the road. But I've condensed that into one episode in the novel."

Only persons who have died, such as Albuquerque promoter Frank Crosby, are identified by their real name in the novel. But other characters, such as Charles "Chaichi" Mendoza, Silver Vega and Tommy Chen, are easily recognizable to people familiar with Perea's circle.

Incidents in the novel - such as the time Greco and a Camaro full of comics get caught in a blizzard driving back from a Christmas Eve show in Tucumcari - are inspired by things that happened.

This second-chapter exchange takes place after the comics pile out of the Camaro to push the car out of an I-40 snowdrift while Greco remains at the wheel.

Jake shouted back at me in ominous tones, "Ronn! Put on the emergency brake. Get off the gas pedal. Don't move the car."

My foot complied in pushing down the emergency brake. "What's wrong?"

The ventriloquist spoke calmly. "You're six inches from sliding into a ten-foot drop."

One thing Perea has learned about comedy is that some things are funnier when you're looking back at them than they are when they're happening.

Comedy clubs started to suffer in the middle Õ90s when comedy acts were all over cable television. Karaoke and casinos finished off the grim business TV started.

"I was losing my showrooms left and right," Perea said. "Clubs will still pay for comedy, but they are sill paying what they were in 1990. You can't make any money at it anymore."

So now, Perea makes his living with real-estate investments and writes novels on the side.

He has already completed his second one, which he describes as an international Casanova story about an American man attracted only to foreign women. If this one is autobiographical, he won't admit it.

Right now, he's at work on his third novel, a story based on the historical fact that there was an Italian prisoner of war camp in Albuquerque during World War II.

"I'm at it one hour every morning," he said. "Either I'll write a page or scratch a page I've written. But I haven't torn up anything lately."

Ronn Greco - uh - Perea takes his writing seriously.