QUICK SHOTS: The Destroyer #44: Balance of Power by Warren Murphy

Gotta love Remo and Chuin. During my teenage reading years, I first discovered Gregory MacDonald's Fletch books and devoured most of them. The Fletch books had a very distinctive cover design and Signet must have noticed when they put out Warren Murphy's Trace books because they aped them pretty spectacularly. It worked because I bought them based on covers alone. But, as the old adage goes, it's not the cover that needs to be judged, it's the inside. I quickly preferred Trace to Fletch and became a long-time Warren Murphy fan.  

I wasn't reading Men's Adventure then, but I couldn't help but notice Murphy's name on these Destroyer books. So, Remo and Chuin were some of my earliest guides into the world of Men's Adventure fiction. I was in good (deadly) hands. Then I tracked down the movie "Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins" and I was completely sold and I have become the man you see before you today.

I read a Destroyer fairly regularly, pretty much choosing from the stacks based solely on the copy. But I searched out Balance of Power because it had a few interesting behind the scenes tidbits going on. Like a lot of Destroyers, we start with the story in progress with "guest star" of the book getting into trouble before Remo and Chiun show up. This "guest star" is Barney Daniels, a burned out, completely drunken ex-CIA agent who had a rough experience in a South American country but all the torture he was submitted too has left him with a form of amnesia. But a mysterious woman wants Barney to kill a civil rights leader and all that ties into the South American country and his now forgotten past. Spies and their problems, am I right?

Remo and Chiun play second fiddle to Barney and his story. They only pop into first try and kill him, then try and protect him, track the progress and occasionally kill random baddies, and then lend a hand during the finale. That's the only bummer about this book. But it all makes sense when you find out that a good chunk of the book was a previous attempt by Murphy and Sapir to put a new series called "Black Barney" and when that didn't sell Murphy eventually handed it off to Molly Cochran to turn it into a Destroyer tale. The pieces surprisingly fit together fairly well and tell a pretty impactful simpler, less fantastical Destroyer book. I'm fairly sure this was Cochran's first work in the series, and she proves herself admirably. Barney is an entertaining character, reminding a little bit of Digger or Trace as a super-spy.

All in all, I read this one because I knew of its history and was curious to see how it all laid together and what the "lost Murphy/Sapir series" was like. And surprise, I liked it. I would have liked to have read a 70s spy series by Murphy and Sapir written in-between Destroyers, Digger and the like. It's not favorite Destroyer and I wouldn't recommend it to a new-comer but it's a solid/interesting entry if you have read a bunch of them.