Slog

…and his Destroyer series of books, which has been published on a semi-regular basis for thirty years, has been cancelled.

right now, everything with the destroyer is basically on hold and i think remo and chiun, series-wise, are going on vacation for a while. tor hasn’t offered us a contract and, frankly, if they did, i don’t think i’d entertain it. they were just not efficient at getting the books out on time and the operative word with a book series is “series.”

Every once in a while, I’ll read a Destroyer novel for the hell of it. The novels, which were the basis for the horrible Remo Williams movie, are about a kung-fu assassin and his master, Chiun. The books were often sci-fi and fantasy tinged, and my favorite part of the books is a conceit with the writing. The series was written by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir, and one author would begin a book, get Remo and Chiun in a bind, and then hand it off to the other author, who would have to finish the book. It made for good action writing, I think, to have a fresh author conclude the adventure.

Things went downhill when Sapir died in the late eighties, and Murphy took over the writing. The characters became highly conservative-minded, and very few Destroyer books have been written since then that did not include a tribute to Ronald Reagan. But if you like cheap and breezy thrillers that can be read in an hour or two, you should pick up a 70’s or early 80’s Destroyer novel if you come across one in a used bookstore. At its prime, they were wonderful fun. Macmillan recently published a The Best of the Destroyer book that includes three of the best novels of the entire run. It’s a pretty great read to take on vacation and demolish in a half day’s sitting.