Getting Your Hands on The Destroyer Series Collections
The Destroyer books by Warren Murphy were originally published as mass-market paperbacks starting in 1973. The series ran for dozens of titles featuring Rick Dare and Logan Mountstuart. These books went out of print decades ago. What you find online now are either used physical copies or digital scans that people have uploaded. There is no official modern publisher releasing these right now. When people talk about collections of The Destroyer series, they are usually referring to compiled PDF bundles that circulate on forums and file-sharing sites. These aren't released by any legitimate publishing house. They are assembled from scanned images of the original paperbacks. The quality varies enormously depending on who scanned them and what equipment they used. Some are legible. Many are not. I spent a few years tracking down the complete run just to read them in order. The original publication order is different from the numbering on the spines, which confuses people constantly. The numbers on the spines were assigned by the publisher later for inventory purposes. If you want to read the books chronologically as they came out, you have to ignore those spine numbers entirely. Here is the actual first-published order for the early ones: The Killer Inside Me (1973), Dead Match (1973), No Flowers For corpse (1974), The Black Market Killers (1974), and so on. A few fan sites have attempted to document the correct order but they are incomplete and sometimes wrong too.
The main practical problem I ran into was that many of the scanned PDFs are image-only files. That means you cannot search within them. You cannot copy text. You cannot adjust the reading size on most e-readers without the text becoming pixelated garbage. I ended up spending maybe thirty minutes per book running them through a free OCR tool called OCRmyPDF. It takes the scanned images and runs them through Tesseract to generate selectable text underneath. The results are rough. Names and place names often come out garbled. But it makes the files actually usable for quick reference when you are trying to remember which book a particular character appeared in. Another issue is missing books. The series had roughly 45 titles across the main run. Some entries like The Last Ride or The Killing Kind are genuinely rare because they had smaller print runs or were part of special editions. If you are assembling a complete set digitally, you will likely hit gaps. I filled most of mine by trading scans with people on dedicated pulp fiction forums. Those communities are small and most members are in their sixties and seventies. Don't expect fast replies. Expect people who actually know the material going back decades. If you want to track down the files yourself, the usual places are old Usenet groups that have been archived, certain Reddit communities focused on paperback collections, and a handful of independent scan sites that have been around since the early 2000s. One site called "DestroyerFiles" has been hosting scanned copies for years. Another is the Usenet archive at deusexmachina.scrye.com which has full Nzb files for the complete series. Both require some effort to navigate. The downloads themselves are free but nothing is officially authorized.
One counter-intuitive thing about these collections: the later books get noticeably worse. The early ones were written tight under deadline pressure. Murphy and his co-writers were churning out pages fast and the pacing carried the plot. By the mid-1980s the writing gets padded. The action scenes drag. If you are planning to read all of them, I would skip ahead starting around book twenty-five unless you are doing a complete scholarly read. The core three or four protagonists from the first dozen books disappear or get renamed in later entries anyway. Physical copies still turn up on eBay and Amazon Marketplace but pricing is unpredictable. A complete set in decent condition can run anywhere from two hundred to six hundred dollars depending on the condition of the spines. The paper in these books was cheap. Even well-kept copies have yellowed pages and cracked bindings. I would only buy originals if you specifically want something to hold. For actual reading, the scanned PDFs work fine once you run OCR on them. The TV movie adaptations from the late 1980s starred Bo Svenson as Logan Mountstuart and there was also a later TV series. Neither is directly related to the book collection beyond sharing characters and names. Some people looking for "The Destroyer series" end up watching those instead of reading the books. They are fine television but they change a lot of the source material. The books are where the actual plotlines live.
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If you run into a scanned file that simply will not open or the OCR fails completely on a specific volume, the workaround is usually to try a different source. Different people scan the same books at different resolutions. A 150 DPI scan that OCR refuses to process might open fine at 300 DPI from another uploader. I learned that after wasting two evenings on a particularly corrupted copy of Death Takes a Holiday.
