A review by gengelcox
Created, the Destroyer by Warren Murphy, Richard Sapir

adventurous fast-paced

1.5

I remember running across this book series in the spinner racks and on used bookstore shelves when I was a teenager and enjoying them at the time, possibly for the focus on the use of martial arts over guns and knives (I was a big fan of the TV show Kung Fu and the Marvel comic Master of Kung Fu), but also how this series didn’t take itself as seriously as other pulp action books, even ridiculous ones like Doc Savage. The humor between Chiun, Korean master of the original of all martial arts, and ex-policeman Remo Williams is what kept me coming back. 

I’m not sure I ever read the first one back then, but I decided to start from the beginning because, one, I’m a completist who does things like that, and, two, why not? To answer that second question, it’s because the first book really isn’t that good. Or, to put it another way, Murphy and Sapir wrote the first book still in the mindset of going toe-to-toe with Mac Bolan, the Executioner, and hadn’t learned yet what set Remo apart from the other two-bit action heroes. There’s a new prologue in this digital edition, supposedly written by Chiun, that contains all the humor of the later volumes, but the novel itself lacks that spark.