The first novel introduces the dissipated insurance investigator whose assignments always seem to involve people who die not long after an insurance policy has been taken out on them. When Devlin Tracy – “Trace” – is not recovering from drink, gambling or womanizing, there is no one better at his job. The problem is, he’s always recovering from one, another or all three.

E-Reads is reprinting all seven thrillers in the Trace series. In the title novel. Trace’s part-time hooker girlfriend is off on an out-of-town trick, but alimony bills are piling up and his assignment is to find out if an idealistic doctor is dedicated to killing his patients instead of curing them.

The other novels in the series are:

And 47 Miles of Rope
Once a Mutt
Pigs Get Fat
Too Old a Cat
Getting Up With Fleas
When Elephants Forget

Trace was nominated by Mystery Writers of America for best book, and Pigs Get Fat won an Edgar award for best paperback original of 1985. The series was nominated for a Shamus award from the Private Eye Writers.

If you want to take a day off from Destroyer, pick up a Trace or two, or six or seven.

RC

That’s how the incredibly successful Destroyer series by writing partners Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir is launched, and as there are over one hundred adventures in print, Murphy (who took the series over solo after Sapir died in 1987) has obviously found a way to keep his protagonist in action despite executing him in Volume #1, Created: The Destroyer. So, beginning writers, don’t try this fictional technique at home.

E-Reads has reissued fifty titles in the series in both print and downloadable formats and there are more books on the way. Check out the selection and fill in the gaps in your collection.

And just to reassure you that any given Destroyer is as compelling as any other, check out Volume #50 and you’ll see that Remo and Master Chiun are still going strong. In typical Murphy fashion, Killing Time is about a fad diet with the potential to destroy Western civilization.

RC

In time E-Reads will issue more Destroyers as well as action adventure thrillers featuring other Warren Murphy heroes.

- RC

At last count there were over 140 Destroyer novels, not including the many books in other series that Warren Murphy (his co-creator passed away many years ago) has generated. For those of you who have written a novel, or who have labored over your masterpiece for five or ten years, it’s almost incomprehensible that one writer can be so prolific. It calls for determination, discipline, inventiveness and nimble fingers to produce hundreds of books over a career (and Murphy is still going strong), but as remarkable as it may seem to the lay reader or weekend novelist, Murphy is by no means the world’s champion. The French thriller writer Simenon boasted over 1000 books and there may be others of similar fecundity. Having written potboilers myself years ago I am not at all surprised. At 5000 words a day, I was able to complete a novel in about two weeks. Granting an author his or her sabbaths and a couple of weeks per year of vacation, that’s still about 20 or 25 books a year. Over an effective career of, say, forty years, that puts us close to 1000 titles.

But — are they any good? Well, Warren Murphy’s army of fans thinks so, and so do we. For a more detailed look at prolific authors, read about the bet I made twenty-five years ago that I know authors who can write books faster than publishers can cut checks. No publisher has taken me up on the bet, and for good reason.

I’m tempted to bet that Warren can write a Destroyer faster than you can read it, but I don’t think I’d win that one. Read one and you’ll know why.

- Richard Curtis

We’ve got your hero (maybe he’s even a superhero, even though he isn’t bulletproof—just nearly so). We’ve got your trusty sidekick. We’ve got a secret government agency. We’ve got specialized and mysterious training, with a hint of mystical stuff thrown in for spice. We’ve got a never-ending series of villains of all types, from the ordinary and merely venal to the megalomaniac Earth-conquerors in training. And we’ve got action. Boy have we got action. For books that start with a bang and never let up from beginning to end, there’s nothing that matches a Destroyer novel, except maybe a Richard Stark (that’s Donald Westlake under one of his many pseudonyms for those of you who care) novel about the professional thief, Parker, and his perennial misadventures with his crimes and the criminals whom he gets involved with.

We’re not talking finely-honed prose or literary masterpieces here, although each book is a small gem in its way. What we are talking is a perfect model of entertainment reading at its most entertaining. Start on page one and, more than likely, you’ll look up a few hours later, notice that a bunch of time has gone by, and reach for another volume so you can just keep going—and not worry to much about how late it is and when the alarm is going to ring in the morning. You might not be any smarter or more elegant than you were when you started reading but you will recall that your heart was racing and you couldn’t stop turning the pages to find out what happened next until it was all over.

You’re invited to check out what all the series readers know about how much fun it is to read a Warren Murphy Destroyer novel but don’t buy just one because when you finish the first, you’ll just have to get out of your chair, log on and buy some more.

Here’s the first in the series and here’s Warren Murphy’s bio page with a list of available tiles. And there are more to come.

Enjoy!