Review: Created, the Destroyer by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir
Destroyer 1 Created, the Destroyer by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir
I’ve decided to reread the Destroyer series, which has over 150 books and a daughter series. I picked up this first novel in Hole in the Wall Books in Falls Church (or was it Arlington) Virginia in the early 1980s and then stumbled across the series on a Kmart bookrack some twenty years later and ended up reading the whole series. They are nothing close to high literature, and if memory serves, some were really bad, but overall I remember them as a lot of fun.
This first novel is essential reading for anyone truly interested in the Destroyer series, but be forewarned that it also represents a time before the authors understood what they are writing about. Remo Williams is a NJ cop who is framed for murder and “killed” in the electric chair so that his identity can be wiped away and he can be trained to become a government assassin for a secret unconstitutional agency called CURE. Their job is to protect America and its constitution by eliminating threats that are two big to handle through the existing legal mechanisms. In this first book, that threat is organized crime.
The recruiting and training of Remo is pretty well done. Chiun, Master of the Glorious House of Sinanju, is introduced, although neither Murphy nor Sapir realized what they had created in the Master of Sinanju yet, so he has a very small role. The mystery is also fairly good. The New York City crime syndicates are run and protected by a man named Maxwell and Remo has to infiltrate, identify Maxwell, and kill him, before a congressional committee investigating organized crime reaches NYC.
One of the things that Murphy and Sapir do very well is bring the chief villain to life. At times, we are learning so much about his past that he takes over the novel, all of which adds to the credibility of the story.
What you don’t get in this novel is the trademark banter between Remo and Chiun and the superhuman abilities that Sinanju imparts upon Remo, but it’s still a very important start to a very fun series.
