The Destroyer #38: Bay City Blast

The Destroyer #38: Bay City Blast, by Warren Murphy

October, 1979  Pinnacle Books

I’ve never been the biggest fan of The Destroyer, but I’ve been aware of this particular installment for years, as it features Remo and Chiun taking on spoofy parodies of the protagonists of other Pinnacle series: namely, The Executioner, The Butcher, and Death Merchant. But as ever Warren Murphy (writing solo this time, without early series co-writer Richard Sapir) is more focused on the “spoofy” nature, with hardly any focus on action. Despite the trappings, The Destroyer is a comedy series, and one must admit that Bay City Blast is occasionally very funny, even if it isn’t the “Pinnacle All-Stars” novel one might have preferred. (It still surprises me that Pinnacle editor Andy Ettinger never conceived of a one-shot that would’ve united all of the series protagonists in a big story, like a prefigure of Gold Eagle’s later Stony Man books.) 

First of all, I want to note that the long-limbed black beauty in a bikini with the submachine gun on Hector Garrido’s cover art does not exist in the actual novel. This of course is a bummer. But then, girls don’t much exist in The Destroyer. They are for the most part cipher-like, and never exploited as they would be in the typical men’s adventure novel, due to the sad fact that hero Remo Williams has zero in the way of a sex drive. As I’ve complained before, Remo’s more robot than man; Bay City Blast even features a “pretty” secretary (“pretty” being the extent of what Warren Murphy gives you in the exploitative goods) who constantly throws herself at Remo, and he remains disinterested – and also Remo goes without a woman for the entire book. Some men’s adventure progatonist! 

My assumption is the gal with the gun on the cover might be Garrido’s interpretation of Ruby Gonzales, who appears briefly in Bay City Blast and reports to Smitty, the boss of CURE. But she is fully clothed throughout and for the most part breaks into a building to check its security level; I get the impression Ruby has been in other volumes, but I’m by no means an expert on The Destroyer. So I could be wrong, but it just seemed to me that Ruby was an already-established character, and all told she’s only in the book for a few pages. 

I always rant and rave about The Destroyer and what I wish it was, but truth be told Warren Murphy is a good writer, and clearly has a good sense of humor – one that he’s able to convey via the narrative. We already know Bay City Blast will be funny from the start, when a mobbed-up “businessman” named Rocco Nobile moves into slummy Bay City, New Jersey, and promptly takes it over by blackmailing various dirty politicians. The humor comes in the recurring image of Rocco’s bodyguard constantly putting his hand in his pocket, and the dialog throughout is, as ever, pretty humorous. 

The biggest humor comes via The Eraser and The Rubout Squad, a subplot that comes out of nowhere but ultimately overtakes the narrative: this is the name of Murphy’s pseudo-Pinnacle squad. First there’s Sam Gregory, a gun manufacturer with dreams of taking on the Mafia and wiping it out with his own squad. To this end he recruits three men: Mark Tolan, a psychopath who was court martialed in ‘Nam for gunning down a village of women and children (the Mack Bolan parody); Al Baker, a guy with delusions of being a torpedo who has decided to go against the Syndicate, but in reality is just some loser who’s seen The Godfather too many times (the Butcher parody); and finally Nicholas Lizzard, a six-foot-five failed actor who is now a full-time drunk and whose biggest talent is dressing up in drag so that he can make himself look like “a six-foot-four woman” (the Richard Camellion parody, and the one Murphy seems to have the most fun with). 

Meanwhile Sam Gregory dubs himself “The Eraser,” and it is he who has the trademark bit of dropping broken pencils at scenes, a la Bolan’s marksman medals or The Penetrator’s arrow heads. My assumption is Gregory is intended as Murphy’s spoof of The Penetrator Mark Hardin, but other than the name and the broken pencils bit…the character seems to more be a parody of Don Pendleton. This is mostly because he is the one who plans the hits and also comes up with alliterative titles for them: first is “Bay City Blast,” and later the Eraser plans on others with similar, Pendleton-esque titles, like “Salinas Slaughter.” 

Murphy also has a lot of fun spoofing Mack Bolan via his psycho duplicate Mark Tolan; in Tolan’s scenes, Murphy recreates Don Pendleton’s style, down to the recurring “Yeahs” that punctuate the narrative. He even gets double bang for his spoofing buck with Tolan often vowing to “Live Huge,” parodying Bolan’s “Live Large.” I seem to recall Warren Murphy saying years ago in a Paperback Fanatic interview that he felt Pendleton’s ego was getting a little too large at the time, hence he had some fun mocking him in Bay City Blast. One can well imagine Don Pendleton being unsettled at how psychopathic his character is made to seem: Tolan, who names himself “The Exeterminator,” is a nutjob who is ready to explode at any moment, and indeed gleefully guns down children in Bay City Blast. 

But as mentioned it’s Nicholas Lizzard, the Richard Camellion spoof, who draws the most laughs. Curiously, Lizzard is presented as a roaring drunk who lives off vodka, making one wonder if Murphy was making any insinuations about Camellion’s creator, Joseph Rosenberger. Speaking of whom, Murphy does not mimic Rosenberger’s style in the Lizzard sections (but then, not many could), but he certainly makes Lizzard just as psycho as Tolan. The recurring humor here is very un-PC in today’s era, as Lizzard often dresses like a woman, but isn’t fooling anyone. This though is the extent of Lizzard’s schtick, other than the heavy drinking, so he isn’t a “cosmic lord of death” or whatever Richard Camellion was. 

As for The Baker, he’s nothing at all like the character he’s spoofing. Whereas Bucher the Butcher is a terse, cipher-like death machine, Al Baker is at heart a good-natured sort who is only in it for the money, and in fact harbors a lot of concern about the increasingly-violent nature of the Rubout Squad. Not that this subplot goes anywhere. Baker still takes part in the Squads raids on Bay City’s “underworld,” ie gunning down innocent men, women, and children. The latter I think is where Murphy goes a little too far in his black humor; the Rubout Squad shooting down prepubescent Chinese children in a “heroin factor” (really a fortune cookie bakery) doesn’t really elicit many chuckles. 

Remo and Chiun are often lost in the shuffle, but on the positive side Remo is treated with less scorn in this one. His opening sequence is pretty cool, and another indication of the comedy nature of the series, as he takes out a house filled with recently-freed criminals, killers and rapists who’d been put away but released by shady lawyers; humorously, all of them have hyphenated, Joe-Bob type names. But unlike The Executioner or any other Pinnacle series, it’s all played for laughs, with Remo easily and casually killing each of them off one by one, and becoming more concerned with where to put their cars after killing them. 

And that again brings me to my central issue with The Destroyer. Everything is so easy for Remo and Chiun that there’s no tension or drama or anything. Killing is simple for Remo. Along with the lack of sex drive, this makes Remo Williams an altogether poor men’s adventure protagonist, because you can’t really feel anything for him. Perhaps this is why Murphy and Sapir grafted on the “treat Remo like a fool” subtext, to try to make Remo more relatable. And also again the action scenes are not presented the way I prefer; as ever they are relayed via the impressions of the person about to be killed by Remo, with the reader never getting a good idea of what Remo is actually doing. 

So it’s the comedy that carries the story, with every sequence always devolving into satire or parody. Like when Remo and Chiun go fishing for vacation, and a great white shark chases them – Remo even referring to Jaws while it happens – and Chiun merely “calls” the shark with his fingers in the water and then kills it with a single blow. The climactic faceoff with the Rubout Squad is also fairly anticlimactic, with Murphy again returning to his standard trick of killing villains off-page, which is a big letdown. And even here Remo dispatches his enemies with such ease that the reader who actually wanted to see a pseudo “Pinnacle All-Stars” square-off will be mightily underwhelmed. Only Tolan really goes face-to-face with Remo, Murphy apparently wise enough to know his readers would expect a little more from him for his Bolan parody, at least. But even here it’s more for laughs, with Remo almost like a god up against Tolan. 

As for the plot, it moves quickly, and Murphy spends more time with the Rubout Squad bickering and bantering with each other before gunning down innocents in their war to “cleanse” Bay City. Meanwhile Remo and Chiun are called into act as bodyguards for Mayor Rocco Nobile, the mobbed-up bigwig who showed up in the opening pages; this subplot I thought was pretty cool, ie Nobile’s real intent in Bay City, but again Murphy sort of loses site of it as the book progresses. Even here it’s comedy, with Remo and Chiun just happening to get a hotel room right next door to the Rubout Squad, but neither party realizing it. There’s also comedy in the Eraser’s growing anger that the newspapers, for some mysterious reason, never report on the Rubout Squad’s hits. 

The ”climax” is on us before we realize it, and while it might not be the action spectacular you’d get in a more “straight” men’s adventure novel, it does feature the Eraser in a tank going down Main Street in Bay City. But the confrontation with the Rubout Squad is quick, anticlimactic, and mostly off-page, so I wouldn’t use Bay City Blast as an indication of how Remo Williams would fare against the Death Merchant, the Butcher, or the Executioner. But then, Warren Murphy presents Remo as so omnipotent that he’d probably handle the real deals just as easily as he does the spoofs. 

Murphy does score huge points for somehow seeing through the mists of time and describing what passes for a “journalist” in our miserable modern era. Murphy’s intent apparently is to spoof the hiring standards of The New York Post (this is during the section in which the Rubout Squad is incensed that their hits aren’t making it into the news), but little does Murphy realize that he’s describing what will be the required background for a “journalist” in a few decades: 

Overall though, Bay City Blast is fast-moving and fun, but again The Destroyer just isn’t my kind of men’s adventure series.