Book Review: Created, The Destroyer, by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

I saw the film Remo Williams:  The Adventure Begins in 1986 on a VHS tape that I rented from a video store several months after the movie came out at the theater. I enjoyed it very much, and was surprised that it didn't do better at the box office.  The character Chiun had many funny lines, and his evaluation of American soap operas was interesting (I won't reveal in case you haven't seen the movie).

About 4 or 5 years later, the film came up in a discussion at work.  It was at this point that I learned that the film was based on a series of books called The Destroyer (IMDB didn't exist back then).  I sought out these books at bookstores, but was never able to find any.  At some point over the next several years, I did come across one, and I believe it was in the early 100's - far to late to start reading the series.  So, I gave up and have not seen any books in the series since.

I just happened to come across the first book on Amazon, and noticed it was available not only in a Kindle edition, but was also re-issued in a paperback (it also appears that all of the books through #151 are available as Kindle editions).  I immediately downloaded the Kindle version and started reading.

This is a good origin story, and it definitely fits the time period when it was written, which is 1971.  What I found most interesting is how different this is from the film.  Aside from the character names and a few other details, the two stories are extremely different.  A few of the major differences are:

• In the book, Remo Williams is the characters real name.  In the film, this is his new name given to him by his employers at CURE.  How they gave him the name is amusing in the film.
• The method of his faked death is different.  In the film, it was an accident.  In the book, it was a faked execution after he was framed for killing someone.
• In the film, Joel Grey is amazing as Chiun, and he has many funny lines.  In the book, not quite as many.  I think the best stuff was in the movie.

Aside from a few similarities in the above, the are no others between the film and book.  I suppose it is possible that the film was like the Doc Savage movie by George Pal, which was an amalgam of a handful of the original 181 stories (though I have not read anything to this effect anywhere on the internet).  This was a big surprise to me.  However, when I read the novella The Day Remo Died (a kind of prequel seen from Chiun's viewpoint) I learned that Remo and Chiun are very different characters in the first two books of the series.  By book 3, they become consistent for the rest of the series, and match their portrayal in The Day Remo Died (which wasn't written until 1985), which I found to be more consistent with the characters in the film.

I really liked how the book started off with a foreword by Chiun, calling the story "lies".

Something of interest, at least to me, is that Warren Murphy was a writer on Clint Eastwood's The Eiger Sanction film, and on Richard Donner's Lethal Weapon 2, which are both good endorsements of his writing.

I do plan on reading this series at least through book 3, where there characters evolved into who they will be for the remainder of the series.  By book 3, the ratings for the rest of the books are consistently higher.  I'll make my decision on whether to continue the series based on my enjoyment of that book (though, 151 novels is a good investment of time and I do have plenty of other stuff to read).