The Destroyer (fiction) - Background

Background

The series is about Remo Williams, a Newark cop framed for a crime and sentenced to death. His death is faked by the government so he can be trained as an assassin for CURE, a secret organization set up by President Kennedy to defend the country by working outside the bounds of the Constitution. The sitting US President and the head of CURE were initially the only other people that know about the organization, though over the years this circle of people in the know has increased slightly. The head of CURE is Harold Smith, a man selected by the President because of his brilliant mind but more importantly, because of his integrity. Smith was a former law instructor at Yale and served in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.

Remo's trainer is Chiun, a deadly assassin and the last Master of Sinanju. Over the years, Remo and Chiun's relationship has transformed from student-teacher to one more akin to a son and father. It's also been discovered over the years that Remo is the Avatar of Shiva, as prophesied in the legends of Sinanju. In 1985, a companion book entitled Inside Sinanju was published. This was a revised and updated book that was formerly titled The Assassin's Handbook. Most of the book is written in the first person, from Chiun's perspective. It covers anecdotes as well as information on the various villains and story arcs from the series.

Although the series settled down into its formula by around the third book, there are many elements which are not present in the first book, Created, The Destroyer. Many of these have, however, been "retconned" into later stories about the early days of Remo's training. In the first book, the word Sinanju is not used at all to describe the martial arts that Chiun teaches Remo. Zen, karate, aikido and judo are used instead. Remo has many trainers for other aspects of being an undercover operative; he is taught to use different types of firearms, and trained in close-quarters assassination. He smokes tobacco, drinks alcohol, and eats red meat, all activities that would later prove harmful or impossible as his body became changed by the harsh Sinanju training regime. Remo uses a gun to shoot somebody, although it is only to wound, and all his actual kills are hand-to-hand. He does make a conscious choice not to use weapons, after a fight in which he kills a man who had been pointing a gun at him. He realizes that Chiun never carried a gun and is over 70, whereas MacCleary, who had told him to always carry a gun, is dead. The retelling of Remo's origin in the story "The Day Remo Died" in The Assassin's Handbook and in Destroyer #120-121 square his origin more fully with later developments.

Chiun is a minor supporting character who appears only briefly in this book in an early training sequence, and is not referred to again. Much of the humour that comes in the later books from the relationship between Remo and Chiun is correspondingly absent. The book also lacks the 'signature' touch, in that the first line of chapter two does not start with the words: 'His name was Remo'.