A review by gengelcox
Death Check by Warren Murphy, Richard Sapir

adventurous fast-paced

The second in the Destroyer action-adventure pulp series about Remo Williams and his Korean tutor Chiun. This is still early in the series (although the time between the first book and this one seems to be around a decade), before Murphy and Sapir realized that Chiun was the more interesting character, so this one is a bit dull as Chiun only appears as a thought in Remo’s head, although there’s one good “Korean proverb”: Only rub your eye with your elbow.

The plot is standard fare allowing the authors to comment on nazism (bad), women who tease (bad), academics without any common sense (bad), and think tanks that receive government funding (bad). Remo, for all his superhuman abilities, makes several mistakes, supposedly because the government has kept him at peak readiness. That, of course, enables the book to have points of interest as the reader tries to determine if Remo can extricate himself from this situation. Of course he does; there’s another 148 books (as of this writing) that he stars in.

I’m reading these as an exploration of how a particular kind of thriller/pulp is written, analyzing the plot points against Lester Dent’s formula and other pulp patterns. What was interesting here is how often Murphy and Sapir tell you something is going to happen, typically at the end of a chapter. You’d think that would remove the tension, but it actually heightens it as you wonder exactly how that is going to occur. A nice trick.