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The Destroyer #79

by Warren Murphy

A Japanese corporation has Yuma, Arizona on its hit list, with an action movie star as the unsuspecting lead. Remo has taken taken a leap from a US military airplane with a defective parachute and the hard desert floor is unforgiving. Chiun steps in to mediate while Shiva, the Shatterer of Worlds steps in for Remo. Will the final destruction obliterate the Master, the Destroyer and Yuma?

282 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 2, 1990

About the author

Warren Murphy was an American author, most famous as the co-creator of The Destroyer series, the basis for the film Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. He worked as a reporter and editor and after service during the Korean War, he drifted into politics.

Murphy also wrote the screenplay for Lethal Weapon 2. He is the author of the Trace and Digger series. With Molly Cochran, he completed two books of a planned trilogy revolving around the character The Grandmaster, The Grandmaster (1984) and High Priest (1989). Murphy also shares writing credits with Cochran on The Forever King and several novels under the name Dev Stryker. The first Grandmaster book earned Murphy and Cochran a 1985 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original, and Murphy's Pigs Get Fat took the same honor the following year.

His solo novels include Jericho Day, The Red Moon, The Ceiling of Hell, The Sure Thing and Honor Among Thieves. Over his career, Murphy sold over 60 million books.

He started his own publishing house, Ballybunion, to have a vehicle to start The Destroyer spin-off books. Ballybunion has reprinted The Assassin's Handbook, as well as the original works Assassin's Handbook 2, The Movie That Never Was (a screenplay he and Richard Sapir wrote for a Destroyer movie that was never optioned), The Way of the Assassin (the wisdom of Chiun), and New Blood, a collection of short stories written by fans of the series.

He served on the board of the Mystery Writers of America, and was a member of the Private Eye Writers of America, the International Association of Crime Writers, the American Crime Writers League and the Screenwriters Guild.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 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.

[Gilbert Stack · Rating 2 out of 5]

The most important thing about this novel is the introduction of the character Sunny Joe Rome, leader of a small Native American tribe near Yuma and movie stuntman. Clearly Murphy is already thinking about the big reveal that is roughly 21 books away. There are amazing similarities between Sunny Joe’s people’s customs and those of Chiun’s. It provided a nice little subplot to an otherwise weak novel.

A Japanese industrialist who is still angry that Japan lost World War II has thought of a way to humiliate America—by using a movie cast to take over Yuma and get the U.S. government to nuke it. Yes, that plot makes no sense in summation and it made no sense while reading it. Sylvester Stallone is also weakly satirized during the book. Chiun is on the scene, but because the Japanese have taken many children hostage, he is not able to take any action (out of fear for the children). Remo has his own serious problem.

No real surprises in this one as we continue through a weak period in the series.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating 3.5

Feel that had all of the usual elements of a better than average destroyer novel but it didn’t quite click for me.
Perhaps it was the not very good English of all the Japanese characters, it wasn’t funny when first published and it probably less funny now.
The introduction of sunny joe and his tribe’s connection with Sinanju felt like it should have made this a better novel, well that and the return of Shiva.

Overall an okay read but even for a novel in this series it wasn’t quite good enough to rate it a 4 star.

[Little Timmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the big men's adventure series from the 70's than ran an impressive 145 books. The series while an adventure/action story is also full of satire toward much of the mainstream fads and icons of the time. An interesting main character and the sarcastic mentor makes this a funny action/adventure read. Nemuro Nishitsu has held hatred for Japan's defeat for over 40 years. During those years of infamy, he has prospered from a common soldier to his nation's leading industrialist. With the money that he possesses, he has the means to start the war again and try for a much better answer. Recommended