Mon 12 Sep 2016
Archived Review: RICHARD SAPIR & WARREN MURPHY – The Destroyer #31: The Head Man.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[4] Comments
RICHARD SAPIR & WARREN MURPHY – The Destroyer #31: The Head Man. Pinnacle 40-153, paperback original, 1977.
Threatened in this, the latest adventure of Remo Williams and his North Korean mentor Chino Chiun, is the assassination of a newly elected president who has a magnificent smile and comes from the South:
“Have you seen the Vice President?” Smith asked.
“We’ve got to save the President,” Remo said.
This particular president is a gutsy individual, who refuses to spend his tenure in office as a prisoner inside the White House, but of course that only makes the job harder. Sapir and Murphy have come up with a neat theory of bow presidents since Kennedy have avoided being assassinated, and their coarse comments on how affairs in Washington are conducted continue to cut across the grain of teeth-gritting liberals, but there’s no denying that the first half of this book is much talkier than usual.
Long-time fans of this series will be crying for the action to start, and anyone else should find an earlier entry and one more substantial to try their taste buds on.
Rating: C plus.
September 13th, 2016 at 5:59 pm
I preferred both writing alone over the Destroyer. Clever, but the cleverness did run thin with some of Murphy’s right wing opinions.
September 13th, 2016 at 7:17 pm
Though I accumulated large lots of the other men’s adventure series being published at the time, mostly by Pinnacle, the Destroyer books were the only ones I actively collected.
And even so, I don’t think I’d read one today.
Unless of course you paid me.
September 18th, 2016 at 11:04 pm
Chino? Wasn’t he in West Side Story?
September 18th, 2016 at 11:20 pm
Ouch! Yes, you’re right. I just fixed that. Thanks, Bob.