Warren Murphy (1933–2015)

His name was Remo and the hot Newark night offended him, and the smells from the alley where rats scratched inside open garbage cans filled his senses with decay and the occasional street lights cast more glare than illumination.

Sometimes it's the simplest villains that are the most effective in the Destroyer series, and in this case, it doesn't get simpler than corporate millionaire sociopath (is there any other kind?) James Orayo Fielding. Content on squishing bugs (as he sees people) on a show more small and diplomatic scale, a terminal diagnosis of leukemia inspires him to crank his sadism up to eleven with a diabolical plan to personally create a plague capable of wiping out millions under the guise of solving world hunger.

If that isn't bad enough, not only does Fielding con Remo into believing his con, but paranoid mobster Johnny "Deuce" Deussio is beginning to suspect that there is a secret government organization out there trying to stop organized crime, and his snooping around the edges of CURE, as well as putting hits out on Remo, only complicates matters further.

For an old-school fan of the Destroyer novels like myself, this is the kind of straight-forward plot that made the series what it was in the early days. No fantastic sci-fi elements or mystical subplots, just crazy Bond villains and ruthless gangsters. Remo spends some time obsessing over being without a home, and considers abandoning CURE with Chiun, but this has more to do with providing a story arc for a reoccurring character then it does with challenging a plot structure that had yet to become stale so early in the series. One of my personal favorites of the series. show less

His name was Remo and he feared nothing.

A straight-forward stand-alone entry in the Destroyer series, Chiun and Remo (aka Remo Schwartzenegger) are tasked with guarding the life of a deposed Middle Eastern sovereign on his deathbed in New Jersey. Things get complicated when a wimpy broke inventor (Elmo Wimpler) stumbles upon the recipe for invisible paint and decides to become a professional hit man. As the Midnight Man he sets Remo, Chiun, and the Emir of Bislami (whose ancestors have an show more unpaid debt to the house of Sinanju) in his sights, others suddenly start attempting to kill Remo and Chiun, sending the CURE assassins on a wild chase to find out who is trying to kill who and why as they attempt to keep the Emir alive until he dies. Never a dull moment.

This is one of the more entertaining and endearing Destroyer novels because of the unlikely titular villain, the Midnight Man. Coming up with potential threats to unstoppable death machines like Chiun and Remo can be a bit rough, so it's refreshing when they're thrown up against a character that embodies an element of the unknown, but is also a haphazard wildcard with no real chance for success. Enter Elmo Wimpler. Instead of pseudo Bond villains or crime lords, we get an inept failure at life who bumbles his way half-assed into the role of amateur assassin. Despite having the book named after him, he's little more than a complication to the real story involving the Emir, but an entertaining distraction that you almost end up rooting for. The Destroyer series wades into some dramatic waters of the course of its run, and these lighter adventures are always welcome. show less

His name was Remo, and all he wanted was to enjoy a Saturday-afternoon ballgame.

Another lighthearted entry in the Destroyer series, Blue Smoke and Mirrors revolves around the rather silly premise of a vibration suit that allows the wearer to walk through walls - among other things - being utilized by Russian spies to steal military technology. There's a lot of humor throughout the book, including lengthy dialogues between Remo and Chiun about baseball, a thinly-veiled Dan Quayle joke, a show more kleptomaniac Russian spy, and the standard big-breasted military intelligence officer who ends up tagging along for the ride. As a matter of fact, while there isn't enough to actually scream copycat, there are several elements in Blue Smoke and Mirrors - female military sidekick, bogus technology, lighthearted presentation - that might remind the reader of the Remo Williams film from a few years previous. Like Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, this is definitely a PG-13 version of the boys from Folcroft.

Other than that, it's all just an upbeat caper. No mystical visions, no dark brooding, and no body count, although in the end Chiun does apologize to Smith for the latter. Ghostwritten by Will Murray, Blue Smoke and Mirrors is a fun, easy read driven by character-based humor rather than over-the-top violence. This might annoy some fans of the series, but for others it will be a welcome change of pace.

On an interesting side note, the Russian spy in this one does a trick with a telephone that comes up again later in the Matrix franchise. show less

One of those rare books about which I was enthused at first but then slowly fell out of love with as I went on. By the last sixty pages or so, I had to force myself to carry on to the end. The idea is that King Arthur has been reborn as a ten- year-old boy in contemporary times; Galahad is a washed-up FBI agent. Merlin is flitting about (I won't spoil plot points here), and a villain known to them all from the Middle Ages is plotting plots. The Holy Grail is involved. I was intrigued at show more first and really enjoying seeing how Cochran and Murphy were slotting things together. But by the time things started to come to a head, the intrigue had fallen out of the bottom of the thing. This is possibly partly due to the habit (common among thriller writers, I find, and that's fine) of the writers dwelling on and wallowing in the gruesome details of violence and death, especially of characters who have been made interesting to you just a paragraph before only in order to then be killed horribly. I despise this. /tangent about my idiosyncratic personal preferences in fiction. The more compelling reason I probably stopped caring about the story so much was that it stopped feeling relevant to a better, fuller, or more entertaining understanding of the Arthur legends. While the first half of the book felt invested in reinventing and retelling Arthuriana, by the end the bits felt a little tacked on. There also wasn't much in the way of exploring what it would mean to be King Arthur in the twentieth century, which is what I was most excited about seeing. Ah well. show less