Warren MurphyRecensioni

#505 in our old book database. Not rated.

#431 in our old book database. Not rated.

#430 in our old book database. Not rated.

#429 in our old book database. Not rated.

#369 in our old book database. Not rated.

#368 in our old book database. Not rated.

#367 in our old book database. Not rated.

#358 in our old book database. Not rated.

#357 in our old book database. Not rated.

#356 in our old book database. Not rated.

#354 in our old book database. Not rated.

#353 in our old book database. Not rated.

#6 in our old book database

#5 in our old book database

#117 in our old book database. Not rated.

This book suffers from the problem of middle-aged authors trying to capture the sound of teen slang. It never rings true. Remo & Chiun are hired to protect a teenaged government witness who is obsessed with following a popular rock band. Someone has an open contract on her, so Remo faces everything from amateur hitmen to seasoned professionals, all trying to make a quick million. Meanwhile, Chiun is plagued by teenage fans convinced he must be "Somebody".

Improved in many ways from other Destroyer novels I've read. The book still posits that joyless acupressure can make a women fall madly in love with one, which is not my experience, certainly, though I suppose I may be telling on myself Ben Shapiro-style.

Nazis as the bad guys is always a workable idea, though I'm beginning to think one of the authors had a bad experience with a Doctor, as along with dictators, they seem to be the most frequent villains. Having Chiun be respectful and friendly with lepers feels weirdly progressive for the '70s?

A lot is made of Jewish heritage, which also feels very '70s, that idea there is a higher loyalty to religion than country. In the catalog of racist sins from this book series, that's an awfully brief entry.

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 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.

The shortest of the three Destroyer novels, proper, that I've read, and better for it.

Appallingly racist, as usual, with offensive stereotypes deployed against Arabs, Jews, the French, and American liberals[1][2] (not that, as an American liberal, those upset me). But the two improvements are that much of the information for the first two has been cribbed from John le Carré books (which is smart in that if you're going to steal, steal from somebody good), and it rolls. Once a certain point is reached, it's tough to put the book down.

___________________________

[1] "If liberals love people in large masses, [that] is the price they pay [in order] to hate people individually." 2 points, there: I had to clean it up. As with most semi-clever things in these books, a good editor could have added some clarity. Also, I'm not sure he's wrong, or right. It's an interesting idea. I've highlighted a few other lines to give an idea of the prose, both good and bad.

[2] Mind, the book is also largely about the villainy of the oil companies, so it's definitely coming from what is now a leftist position. Of course, in the seventies, "oil companies good" was not the pillar of Republicanism that it is today.

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.

This was better than the first book, likely at least partially because it was written more than a decade later. The gambit of having a near-ancient Korean man at the center of the narrative has begun paying off not because the author(s) ha[ve] anything to say about Korean people, or that the book isn't still substantially racist in its assumptions, but because it is clear Chiun is there to comment on the insanity that is the American way of life. For all that he is depicted as other, Chiun's critiques of capitalism and consumption are awfully on point for a quintessentially Reagan-era-America book series.

Again, I'm not recommending these to anybody (in spite of both book #0 and #1 being free on Kindle), but considering how tired I am when I go to bed, the fact that I finished this (admittedly short novella at about 68 pages) in only two nights says something.

These mid-period entries around #50 are considerably better. There are still disastrous first-person chapters every so often, and knowledge about women is thin on the ground, but the humor works better than in earlier (or later) entries, and the occasional foregrounding of the Smith character makes the story work more as a buddy-comedy, with Remo and Chiun travelling together, and Smith as the straight-person.

The prose has evolved to something tolerable, and the dialogue between Remo and Chiun has reached above-average, which is fantastic compared to earlier installments. The plot is silly in a fun way, with "science" based on misunderstandings of American Scientific articles conjectured out to infinity.

I read most of it in one night, and stayed up entirely too late to do so.

A slightly more philosophical entry in the Destroyer series, pondering the ways in which change and time can protect a culture vs distort it. The literary fiction version of this would be a riskier gambit, pitting the antagonist Actatl and their ideas about heritage against Chiun's traditions of Sinanju, but the philosophy in this version doesn't go nearly that deep. Instead the Actatl are merely a secret society of sorts who really don't know who they are messing with.

There are the standard significant issues when it comes to treatment and descriptions of women.

The action is briefly rollicking at the end; bringing in Smith as a potential combatant means there are stakes that the default indestructability of Remo and Chiun usually undermine. I'm don't think it's the best Destroyer book I've read, but I'm also not sure it isn't.

I find it interesting how tight a bead '70s conservative men had on con artists, and how the entire conservative movement was subsequently co-opted and corrupted by the most con-artisty swindler of them all in Donald Trump.

Standard Destroyer pleasures, here, with some amusing dialogue, and a propulsive narrative that makes one want to keep reading. The specifics of this particular book faded fairly fast, and the treatment of women and minorities will never not be a problem, I guess, but as these things go, an entertaining (relatively) early entry.

Even sillier than the average Destroyer novel, and I assure you that it is very silly indeed.

But there is a kernel of something interesting about sport (and the Olympics), and this is in the middle of the Golden Age of Destroyer prose, so it's a very quick read.

As occasionally happens in these books, you can tell Sapir or Murphy visited the ostensible (Eastern European) location shortly before writing, or at least watched an engaging documentary about it, and wanted to get all of his/their ideas about that nation on paper. Which is an approach with both pluses and minuses.