Warren Murphy (1933–2015)

Honestly, I'm not sure what I'm doing reading these books. This entry, in particular, is racist on a level that was likely shocking in the '70s, with dialogue for Japanese characters transliterated to "Engrish" with all of the Ls changed to Rs. It is appalling.

In fairness to this entry, the whole series appears to be like this, with every book choosing an ethnicity of the week, and then abusing them for a while from a position of profound American ignorance. That's above and beyond the show more magical Korean who is as much the protagonist as the titular Remo.

And then there is the fact that nothing has a whiff of authenticity; usually in a novel like this the author has spent a lot of time researching and thinking about how people or characters would behave in outlandish scenarios, but there is none of that here. It is, again, completely ignorant of people, women, governments, or anything really. It's impressive in a way.

Also, impressive is that these books somehow compel me to keep reading. Things happen the way I expect them to, and yet I'm still wondering how Remo and Chiun are going to get out of this one. I'm not proud of how many of these I'll have finished reading before I die, and I can rationalize by saying they offer insight into the conservative mind of 1970s-90s (which they very much do), or the the preferred popular fiction of the reading public (which is less clear). And yet, I have a feeling this won't be the last one logged. Heaven help us. show less

Marking the beginning of an adventure series that would spawn over two hundred novels and multiple adaptations into other formats, Created the Destroyer is the introductory volume of the Destroyer series, following the adventures of America’s personal assassins Remo and Chiun.

This is the origin story of the series that documents Remo Williams’ “recruitment” into the secret government agency CURE, as well as his introduction to his personal trainer Chiun (Master of Sinanju), and his show more first impromptu mission to eliminate the criminal elements destroying America from within.

Unlike the later part of the series where things tend to get a bit… silly, Created has its criminal elements rooted firmly in the gritty underworld of reality. No invisible suits or sentient robots yet, just street-wise bad hombres and hardened goodfellas.

THE BAD GUY: Remo’s nemesis for his first story is your straight-forward rich crime boss hiding in plain site as a legitimate businessman, this time played by the extremely muscular and cold-blood Norman Felton. Felton doesn’t resemble some of the Bond-type villains that pop up later in the series, and his background as a prostitute’s son that inserts himself into the criminal underbelly of society and creates his own empire is extremely plausible. Remo is forced to confront Felton in a desperate attempt to track down a mysterious unknown figure believed to be the head of the New York crime syndicate, known only as “Maxwell.” Felton also indirectly introduces the crime boss Carmine Viaselli, who I believe turns up in later novels as the Destroyer universe slowly builds its menagerie.

REMO & CURE: Being the origin story of the Destroyer, time is spent demonstrating how the organization works, including its exceedingly compartmentalized structure that prevents practically everybody involved from knowing what they are actually contributing to.

REMO & CHIUN: Chiun has just started training Remo at this point, so we haven’t reached the level of familiarity we’ll be used to later when the “Little Father” stage of their relationship begins. Now they’re (more or less) at a level of mutual respect.

REMO’S LADIES: One of the more entertaining aspects of the Destroyer series is how it plays on typical men’s adventure novel standards, and my personal favorite is the Destroyer approach to the male hero sleeping around with various women throughout his adventures. Created gets the ball rolling right away with CURE ruining Remo’s taste for anonymous sex by arranging some unfulfilling part-time call girls from the steno pool for his “entertainment.” While Chiun hasn’t fully ruined sex for Remo yet, he teaches him enough Sinanju pick-up techniques to ruin the thrill of the hunt. The only other woman Remo beds in this novel is college student Cynthia Felton, whom he seduces in order to get closer her father, wealthy crime boss Norman Felton. Instead of your typical Bond girl full of sexual mystery and clever quips, Cynthia is an emotionally unstable and spoiled brat that creates more headaches for Remo than he needs. Total romantic tally this round, two.

BODY COUNT: I wasn’t planning on counting dead bodies in the series until I started writing this, but off the top of my head I’d say that Remo racked up a meager tally of six dead bodies in his first mission. show less

I recently, on the occasion of Fred Ward's death, re-watched Remo Williams: the Adventure Begins, and I still like it in spite of their being so many intrinsically racist assumptions (compounded by the fact that they cast Joel Grey as an 80-year-old Asian man), not least the specific stated thesis that the biggest problem in America was (implicitly minority) crime.

So I decided to read the original (Remo Williams) book before I wrote up my thoughts on that movie, and oh lord. All of the worst show more instincts of the movie are here, but compounded by the fact that the author, as far as I can tell, had never met a woman (his mother possibly excepted), and probably not a older Korean man either, in spite of the latter being the co-hero of these books. 8-chan incels have a more realistic mental model of women than Warren Murphy did.

But on the other hand, these books are very readable in a Dan Brown sort of way, with action coming fast and frequently, and the dialogue between Chiun and Remo consistently amusing. I can't, in good conscience, recommend anybody else read these, but I also can't promise I won't keep reading them myself, as a weird look into the '70s male mentality, and a thorough cleanser of deep thoughts. show less

Mugger Blood is the thirtieth – and perhaps most infamous – of the long-running Destroyer series. The premise here is the same as always: Remo Williams (the eponymous Destroyer) and Chiun, Master of Sinanju, are the assassin/enforcement arm of a secret U.S. government agency (CURE) that exists outside U.S. law to preserve the Constitution and the Republic. The series exists as a vehicle for both action-adventure fun and Murphy and Sapir’s criticisms and satire of American culture. The show more plots of all the books are relatively thin (this one being no exception), but the novels shine in their witty dialogue and “color” provided by the bickering protagonists.

Mugger Blood has been reprinted a couple of times and has gained some measure of infamy. To be clear, it has been decried as a thinly-veiled racist diatribe. It is certainly not the kind of book that would ever be printed in 2011. It simply couldn’t be: we take ourselves too seriously now and because the political correctness that Mugger Blood satirized in 1977 has become all-pervasive thirty years later, many outlets of social commentary are cut off for us.

The book’s temporal and spatial contexts matter here: we’re talking about mid-1970s New York City. The 1970s were the nadir for New York City. Crime was at its highest levels, with tales of new atrocities being committed a daily occurrence. Local politicians and the police force were seen as both corrupt and incompetent (one or the other traits would have been acceptable, but this was the worst combination possible). Literacy rates and public education were likewise demonized by an increasingly frustrated population as the city seemed to be descending into chaos. The 25-hour blackout of 1977 – the year in which this book came out – led to an almost total breakdown of civilization in wide swaths of the city, with massive fires, looting, and riots occurring in black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Close to 5,000 looters were arrested, and more than 500 cops were injured in the riots. New York City in the 1970s was hell. In response to the seeming powerlessness of civil authorities, the idea of the vigilante – a private citizen who would take matters into his own hands and exact a measure of justice (and vengeance) – took hold in the public consciousness. This was the era of Charles Bronson and the Deathwish films. Curtis Sliwa formed the Guardian Angels two years after the book’s publishing. Five years after that, Bernard Goetz gunned down four muggers and was alternatively praised and condemned for his actions (Goetz had already been mugged once previously, receiving permanent injuries from the first attack), restarting the national conversation on vigilantism and continually increasing crime rates. That’s a long-winded way of describing the environment in which Murphy and Sapir wrote Mugger Blood.

The Destroyer series is always filled with (right-leaning, white) working- and middle-class social commentary and criticism of contemporary America via biting satire, and Mugger Blood is no exception. Here we see political correctness, ineffective policing, corrupt and incompetent politicians, and the public educational system thoroughly roasted. Remo and Chiun are ostensibly sent by their boss Smith to New York City to recover a gizmo invented by an expatriate German scientist. The reality, though, is that Remo has become fed up with the rampant urban crime rate and wants to do something about it. He does. Remo and Chiun take on a black street gang and an Al Sharpton-analogue race-baiter. Blacks are certainly not the only group criticized here – the New York City Police Department are depicted as abject cowards unwilling to do their jobs; academics are shown to advocate obfuscatory and dangerous political correctness rather than helping solve actual problems; and the teachers and administrators of the public school system are taken to task for doing worse than nothing to educate students. Ultimately, Remo and Chiun are assassins – they can kill a few people and temporarily satisfy the reader by getting revenge on some of the worst offenders in society, but they can’t solve all the country’s moral and social ills. That’s up to all of us.

Mugger Blood has been flatly described as “racist.” I think that’s too simple a criticism, and one that simply dismisses the book without analyzing it and delving deeper into why the book was written and what it seeks to accomplish. I don’t want to come across as too defensive of Mugger Blood. It’s entirely over-the-top (as satire often is, almost by definition), and yes, it’s reasonable to call some of the depictions “racist.” So let’s be clear: I think Mugger Blood serves the useful purpose of depicting a time when many Americans were crying out for help and not getting any from the civil servants they were paying. How much you think things have changed since 1977 depends on how much of a cynic you are, I guess.

I give this controversial book 4 stars out of 5. And I know that that rating is itself controversial. But it’s an interesting, useful artifact of its time. If you are a fan of 1970s and ‘80s men’s adventure novels, you should read this one.

Review copyright 2011 J. Andrew Byers show less