«Right,» came the voice from the phone.

Remo hung up.

«Who was it, darling?» Cynthia asked sleepily.

«A man about business.»

«What business, dear?» she murmured.

«My business.»

AFTERWORD

When was the last time you saw a hero? Not one of those mindless, looney-bin rejects who line the bookracks: The Exterminator, The Extincter, The Ripper, The Slasher, The Wiper-Outer, The Mutilator, The Ix-Nayer, all those same series, with their same covers, their same plots, and their same moronic machine-gunning leads who figure the best way to solve a problem is to shoot it.

No. A real life-saving, mind-craving hero for the world today.

Not Tarzan, he won't help. He's in Africa. Not Doc Savage, he was in the thirties and forties. Not James Bond. He was left behind at the turn of the decade.

For the seventies and eighties, the word is in. It's The Destroyer.

Why The Destroyer? Why the phenomenon that has writers, editors, literary agents, ad men-people who deal in words, and who you think would know better-following these tales of Remo Williams and his Korean teacher Chiun with the same kind of passion and faith that only a few like Holmes and Watson have instilled?

Why has this… this… paperback series drawn such high reviews from such lofty heights as The New York Times, Penthouse, The Village Voice, and the Armchair Detective, a journal for mystery fanatics?

Honesty.

Look beyond the facts that The Destroyer books are written very well and are very funny and very fast and very good.

The Destroyer is honest to today, to the world, and most importantly to itself.

And who is The Destroyer? Who is this new breed of Superman?

Just sad, funny, used-to-be-human-but-now-isn't-quite Remo. Wise-assing Remo whose favorite line is: «That's the biz, sweetheart.»

What's this? A hero who doesn't like killing? Not some crazy who massacres anything that moves with lip-smacking pleasure?

No, Remo doesn't have the callous simplicity of a machine gun to solve the world's problems. He uses his hands, his body, himself. What he's saying with «that's the biz, sweetheart» is that you knew the job of fighting evil was dangerous when you took it.

But somebody has to punish these soul corrupters, and reality has bypassed the government and the police and the media and the schools and has chosen Remo.

And who's he to argue with reality?

The other fist backing up The Destroyer is philosophy.

Yes, that's right. Philosophy.

It isn't just the incredibly drawn supporting characters who are written so real that you see them on the street everyday. Not just the «future relevancy» of the books' strong stories, even though The Destroyer has beaten the media to such subjects as radical chic, world starvation, detente, and soap operas. Not only that, but The Destroyer gets it better with a more accurate view. Chiun was delivering the truth on soap operas long before Time magazine's cover story. When the literati was pounding its collective breast over the struggle of «the noble red man,» Remo was up to his neck in the movement, and delivering some telling truths about «the Indians from Harlem, Harvard, and Hollywood.»

No. What's different here is the philosophy of Sinanju, that forbidding village in North Korea-it's real-which spawned Chiun and the centuries of master assassins preceding him. The philosophy culled from its early history, a history of starvation and deprivation so severe that its people became killers for pay so the babies wouldn't have to be drowned in the bay.

Kind of chokes you up, doesn't it?

Chiun too. He'll tell you about it. And tell you about it. And tell you about it. And he'll tell you other things.

Chiun on Western morality:

«When a Korean comes to the end of his rope, he closes the window and kills himself. When an American comes to the end of his rope, he opens the window and kills someone else. Hopefully, it's just another American.»

Chiun on old girlfriends:

«Every five years, a white person changes. If you see her again, you will kill her in your eyes. That last remembrance of what you once loved. Wrinkles will bury it. Tiredness will smother it. In her place will be a woman. The girl dies when the woman emerges.»

Chiun on Sinanju:

«Live, Remo, live. That is all I teach you. You cannot grow weak, you cannot die, you cannot grow old unless your mind lets you do it. Your mind is greater than all your strength, more powerful than all your muscles. Listen to your mind, Remo. It is saying to you: 'Live'.»

Philosophy. It makes the incredible things they do, just this side of possible.

And it says that Remo and Chiun are not vacuous, cold-hearted killers. Nor are they fantasy, cardboard visitors from another planet with powers and abilities, etc., etc.

They're just two a-little-more-than-human beings.

Chiun must have been reincarnated from everybody's Jewish momma. Remo is the living embodiment of every-man, 1970s style.

Will Chiun ever stop kvetching about Remo being a pale piece of pig's ear and admit the love he feels for him?

Will Remo ever get the only thing he really wants, a home and family?

Keep reading and see. Destroyer today, headlines tomorrow.

Remo Williams, The Destroyer, didn't create the world he's living in. He's just trying to change it. The best way he know how.

And for the world's greatest assassin, that's the biz, sweetheart.

-Ric Meyers,

a still-born fetus

in the eyes of Sinanju.