RE-READING AN OLD BOOK (this one was written in 1971) isn’t always a happy experience. You have to be awfully dumb to write sixty books in a series and not get better at your craft.
So now, when we look at Death Therapy, the sixth of The Destroyer series, we see a lot of mistakes that we hope we won’t make again. For instance, we got ourselves involved in a lot of nonsense about Remo having plastic surgery after each mission to change his appearance. If we had kept up that particular lunacy, now, a dozen years later, poor Remo would look like an extra in Night of the Living Dead. We canned that idea someplace along the way. There were a couple of gratuitous killings thrown into this book, too. When you’re writing about assassins, you can be pretty sure that sooner or later they’re going to have to kill people. But at least the targets ought to deserve termination with extreme prejudice. In writing Death Therapy, we hadn’t figured that out yet, so our apologies. The rest of the book stands up pretty well. The story isn’t bad either, although some of you might be familiar with it since it was ripped off in a television series, without cash or credit, a few years ago. (That’s something we’ve grown accustomed to.) Remo and Chiun are just fine, and for the first time Chiun tells his racist little story about how God created mankind. Remo doesn’t really believe it and, in truth, we never did either.
— Dick Sapir and Warren Murphy
November 1984
What racist story? Since when is the simple truth racism? Caution, readers. Pay no attention to anything that is in this book. These two moronic scribblers have gotten everything wrong again. It is what they do best.
— Chiun,
Master of Sinanju
Who cares?
— Remo Williams