May 19, 2008
Hi, Remo freaks:
I just received via parcel post a box full of new — well, actually, incredibly old — Destroyer novels for future review, including the notorious #30, “Mugger Blood”! Judging from the redolent odor, they came from a home occupied by an aged man who chain-smoked Lucky Strikes, which is very appropriate.
In the meantime, I’m about halfway through #27, “The Last Temple”, and it’s a corker. I should have a new review up for y’all by the end of the week.
May 14, 2008
PUBLISHED: 1973.
WRITTEN BY: Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy.
THE PLOT: Previously unorganized, incompetent terrorist gangs are showing unexpected levels of competence — and malice. Remo must stop them before they disrupt a major anti-terrorism summit; and Chiun suspects that there’s more to them than simple mayhem.
BODYCOUNT: approximately 22. Most of these — around a dozen, all terrorists posing as Army officers — are wiped out by Chiun; of the remaining ten, seven are killed by Remo. Astonishingly, the terrorists only kill one person in the whole book, and it’s a baby.
THE VILLAINS: Putatively, it’s a gaggle of terrorist outfits, from a Palestinian splinter group to a Black Muslim outfit to a Chicano Liberation movement patterned after the Black Panthers. Really, though, they’re being manipulated behind the scenes by Joan Hacker, a wealthy college student and wannabe radical, and she herself is a pawn of Niuhc, the evil nephew of Chiun , himself a master of Sinanju and a sworn enemy of Remo’s.
EMBARRASSING SEX SCENES: Call it one-half. Sapir and Murphy were clearly getting pretty tired of the grind, so to speak, and truncate Remo’s seduction of Joan Hacker to a couple of paragraphs. Another sex scene, later in the book, is played entirely for laughs.
SATIRICAL TARGETS: This one’s awfully right-wing in its choice of targets. Arabs are portrayed almost exclusively as dupes and abettors of baby-killing, Vietnam is no big deal, American radicals don’t know how good they’ve got it, and Remo slips from his life-hating cynic mode to drop cornball assessments about how we oughtta just lock up all of these stooges. Still, there’s some funny jibes at garden-party radicals, and you can see the warring voices with the two writers: one black radical turns out to be unexpectedly erudite, one Muslim hijacker advocates reason and moderation, and so on. It’s the we-hate-everybody feel of the comedy that salvages the more racist/xenophobic moments, and likewise, it’s the humanizing of some of the villains that keeps the Destroyer series’ more intensely reactionary bits from sticking too far in the craw.
THE WRITING: For much of the book, Terror Squad is plodding and obvious. The terrorist attacks read, more or less, like all the other yawn-inducing slaughterfests of other men’s adventure series. There are some fun bits (like Remo’s casual, chummy conversation with a skyjacker), but really, it doesn’t kick into gear until the first hints that Niuhc is behind the whole thing. It doesn’t exactly improve all that much then, but there is a lot of ominous pseudo-mysticism (almost like the “ritual reluctance” to name the Trystero in Crying of Lot 49) that creeps in and keeps it entertaining.
Remo’s characterization is all over the map in this one, too — in particular, the way he treats Joan Hacker is far more sympathetic than you’d expect given how casually he murders other abettors of terror who are a lot more sincere — but it does establish nicely something that I think is important to appreciating the series, which is that he’s really an unlikable bastard who no one in their right mind would like. Pretty much anyone he gets involved with has reason to regret it, even if he doesn’t kill them.
CHIUN STUFF: Chiun’s got a major role in this, and not just in support — he’s much better characterized than Remo, and spends much of the book trying to tip Remo to Niuhc’s plans without telling him outright and risking his going off half-cocked. He’s also shown as both deadly and fallible, as he doesn’t catch on to Niuhc’s master plan until the last minute, but he never lets his doubt interfere with his being a jackass. He also has some funny moments, especially his book-long quest to visit Brooklyn and see the shrine honoring the birthplace of America’s greatest cultural figure, Barbra Streisand.
THE VERDICT: The wandering plot (early on, there’s once again far too many scenes of the hapless Remo meandering from one place to another, never quite able to figure out how anything fits together), a strange subplot about Dr. Smith undergoing a midlife crisis, and the obvious and partisan politics slow this thing wy down, as does the lack of any particularly fine prose — until Nuihc shows up. The presence of a major villain, though, with a sense of continuity, a bunch of creepy mystical trappings, and a lot of great dialogue, redeems it somewhat. Let’s call this one a 6.0 on the Sinanju Scale of 1-10.
May 13, 2008
PUBLISHED: 1972.
WRITTEN BY: Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy.
THE PLOT: Someone has devised a machine capable of stopping earthquakes — or starting them. They’re using it to blackmail a California town, and if their scheme succeeds, the whole state is next to go.
BODYCOUNT: 21. Most at the hands of the villains, by a small majority. Best death: Remo runs a mafioso through an automatic car wash.
THE VILLAINS: Dr. Silas Forben, a.k.a. “Dr. Quake”, a renegade geologist (although it’s a bit murky as to whether he was truly behind the scheme); his two Mansonesque daughters, Jacki and Jill Forben, who spearhead the blackmail scheme; and the Beverly Hills mafiosi Don Fiavorante Pubescio and his henchmen, Gummo “The Pipe” Barussio and Manny “The Pick” Musso, who try to take over the earthquake protection racket. Interestingly, Remo misreads who’s behind the whole scheme from the very beginning, and holds more wrath for the mafiosi, who took out the man he’d originally pegged as the bad guy, than for the Forben Family.
EMBARRASSING SEX SCENES: One. Although this was far enough into the series that the always-fun Remo/Chiun relationship was getting really fleshed out, it wasn’t far enough that the writers had gotten bored with pandering stroke material, and we get a doozy here between Remo and the Forben twins. There is a funny bit where the girls invite Chiun to join them for a romp, and he refuses, saying “The last woman I had I was twelve years getting rid of.”
SATIRICAL TARGETS: Most of it’s pretty mild here, with a few cheap shots at the liberated Manson-feminist Forben twins on the one side and the homophobic, anti-Semitic southern sheriff on the other. However, since most of the action takes place in California, there’s some fun gags at the Golden State’s expense: Remo refers to the state as “the place where all the misfits of the world congregate, under the assumption that since they were going to be miserable anyway, they might as well be warm”, and Dr. Smith has a conversation with the President (then Nixon), who says he’s willing to pay the ransom to save California, and implying that it would be a different story if it were, say, Texas.
THE WRITING: Surprisingly good at the start; the introductory chapter contains this nice little piece of prose about earthquake country:
Every man owes God a life. California owes Him a disaster, payable about twice a century.
For those people not hurled hundreds of feet in shifting earth; for those not buried alive in their homes along with the fear-triggered refuse of their bodies; for those not deposited deeper than any gravedigger’s plan, these disasters are considered a simple geological adjustment.
There’s also some nice little psychological bits about Remo choking on his own disconnected hate; Don Pubescio is left open as an effective future villain; and there’s a good line about the ideal way of getting rid of the Mafia: stopping the manufacturing of Cadillacs.
CHIUN STUFF: Chiun (still referred to as a ninja here; this is before they really pushed the idea that all martial arts sprang from Sinanju) still isn’t a major character yet, but he’s got some fun scenes: this book has some of the first scenes of him chiding Remo for his meat-eating and “bubbling drinks laden with sugar” habit, for one thing. He also destroys the earthquake machine and notes that “nothing works in America except me”, and has a great bit where he throws out a AAA road map of California because it doesn’t have Korea on it.
THE VERDICT: The plot gets pretty lost towards the end, and while it’s nice to see Remo portrayed as essentially too dumb to figure stuff out (he gets some basic training in geology early on in the book and forgets it all by the fifth chapter), he does spend a good hunk of time wandering around aimlessly not picking up on obvious clues. So, plotwise, it’s a bit of a wash, but it doesn’t have too much exposition, there’s nothing extremely embarrassing outside the sex scene, and there’s a lot of funny bits. Let’s call this one a 7.0 on the Sinanju Scale of 1-10.
May 13, 2008
In case you’re unfamiliar with the background of the Destroyer universe, here’s a precis:
In 1962, President Kennedy, sensing unprecedented challenges in his New Frontier, commissioned a secret organization known as CURE. Its job was to work outside the Constitution in order to defend it — to avoid the twin evils of anarchy and totalitarianism. To that end, he recruited two men: computer genius and brilliant intelligence analyst Dr. Harold Smith, and ex-soldier/enforcer Conn MacCleary. As time passed, Smith realized that he’d need a nearly unstoppable assassin to help him fight America’s enemies; in order to build one, he bought the services of an ancient martial arts master named Chiun.
Chiun, an irascible and intolerant master killer from the tiny North Korean coastal village of Sinanju, was the latest of a long line of deadly assassins. In the mists of time lost, the people of Sinanju, reduced to poverty and desperation, hired themselves out as killers, utilizing a mysterious martial art they named for themselves — a martial art so invincible, all others were but weak shadows of it; a martial art so sophisticated that its users seemed possessed of supernatural power. The seemingly amoral Chiun didn’t care who hired him, as long as they paid him in gold and showed the proper deference to his greatness; but he likewise had no loyalty to America. That’s where Remo Williams came in.
Dr. Smith needed the perfect, untraceable assassin, and who better than a dead man? In order to get one, Smith & MacCleary arranged for the frame-up of a New Jersey cop for a murder he didn’t commit. He was sent to the electric chair, but he only seemed to die; the policeman, who had no friends or family, emerged from a false death and was assigned as Chiun’s student. MacCleary didn’t live past their first mission, but the newly dubbed Remo Williams proved extraordinarily adept at the martial art of Sinanju, and, with the aid of Chiun, who began to think of him as his adopted son despite his unfortunate lack of Korean ancestry, he became CURE’s unstoppable super-assassin. Remo didn’t exactly have the most patriotic attitude towards his homeland — if anything, he proved to be even more cynical than his Korean master — but he always fought against any threat to its safety.
And there were always threats…
May 13, 2008
The Destroyer series, first published in 1971 and created by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy, is an odd duck in the so-called “men’s adventure” genre. Despite robust sales figures in the first two decades of its existence, the Destroyer series — which told the adventures of covert government assassin Remo Williams and his troublesome Korean mentor, Chiun — set itself apart with unconventional thematic elements (including frequent use of sci-fi, espionage, and even superhero trappings), better-than-expected prose, and, above all, a sense of humor.
Where its rivals, like the humorless Killmaster and Executioner series, were characterized by grim violence and grimmer sex, the Destroyer books (of which there were 149 at last count, by a dozen authors over almost four decades) never lost a sly sense of satire, mocking current events, pop culture, and even itself. It wasn’t always great, but it was always better than it needed to be. It represented a curious modern transition of old pulp traditions, and it brought us a handful of memorable characters and occasionally hilarious dialogue that transcended its origins.
When this blog was started (May 12, 2008), I happened across a massive cache of Destroyer novels from my younger days that I’d stored away and forgotten about. The purpose of this blog may eventually grow to a more ambitious Remo Williams fansite/archive, but for now, my intentions are simple: I will read and review, in inchoate order, the Destroyer books in my possession. I welcome your thoughts, and hope you enjoy the Destroyer Project.
