Remo Williams—The Adventure Continues

[In the Great Minds Think Alike category of phenomena, here is a post I composed before reading Hunter Baker's contribution of this morning.]

In today's edition of National Review online, novelist James Mullaney has a wonderful appreciation of Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir's "Destroyer" novels that featured the character of Remo Williams (badly depicted in a lame movie in the 1980s). Mullaney describes the appeal of the series as follows:

Five years before Blackford Oakes was Saving the Queen, a far less cultured, far more blue-collar super spy by the name of Remo Williams was taking popular fiction in a direction unheard of in the culture wars at that time: To the right.

If you're wondering where you've heard the name Remo Williams even though you've never heard of The Destroyer novel series, which has been chronicling Remo's adventures since 1971, lay blame at the feet of Showtime, Cinemax, and about a million UHF stations which have been running the dreadful 1985 film Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins" in endless midnight rotation for the past 20 years. And if you're unlucky enough to have seen the movie, rest assured that the film has about as much in common with the books that inspired it as Roger Moore's campy Bond had with Ian Fleming's cold, calculating master spy.

The foundation for all that follows is set up in the first book, Created, The Destroyer. Remo, a simple Newark beat cop, is framed for a murder he didn't commit, is sentenced to die in an electric chair that doesn't work, and is revived and bamboozled into working for CURE, a super-secret agency that operates only at the suggestion, never at the order, of the president. By the end of Created, Remo has become CURE's enforcement arm — its Destroyer — who, with the mercenary Chiun, does battle with America's enemies at home and abroad. It's a fight for truth, justice, and the American way, and if there's cynicism in the books it's directed at those who view such clear-eyed pro-Americanism as dated, jingoistic cliché.

Often the villain in a given Destroyer novel is guided by a left-wing agenda. Back in the 1970s, the Wounded Knee protesters were mercilessly mocked; the conservative dream of a U.N. out of the U.S. was finally, blessedly (albeit fictionally), realized; and Carter CIA head Stansfield Turner was rightly called to task for making a hash of Central Intelligence. More recently, the Clintons and their cronies came under repeated fire. The humor in the series is wickedly pointed and decidedly un-P.C. Environmentalists, Hollywood celebrities, and journalists in particular have been targets of satire in The Destroyer for years.

The Destroyer books really are great fun, and I hope that they will find a new publisher who is more in tune with what has made the series so popular during the past three decades.