- Born
- Died
- Birth nameWarren Burton Murphy
- Warren Murphy was born in Jersey City, where he worked as a reporter and editor. After the Korean war, he drifted into politics, "but when everybody I worked for went to jail, I thought God was sending me a message to find a new line of work." The first Destroyer novel followed soon after.
He has been an adjunct professor at Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA, and has also run workshops and lectured at many other schools and universities. His hobbies are golf, mathematics, opera and investing. He has served on the board of the Mystery Writers of America, and also has been a member of the Private Eye Writers of America, the International Association of Crime Writers, the American Crime Writers League, and the Screenwriters Guild.
Murphy is also a member of the Adams Roundtable, a New York writers' social group, among whose members are Mary Higgins Clark, Peter Straub, Susan Isaacs, Lawrence Block, Harlan Coben, Judith Kelman, Mickey Friedman, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Justin Scott, Stanley Cohen and Whitley Strieber, and who occasionally produce mystery anthologies. He lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
- IMDb mini biography by: Brian Murphy
- SpousesNancy Cartwright(December 24, 1988 - 2002) (divorced, 2 children)Mariko "Molly" Cochran(February 14, 1984 - ?) (divorced, 1 child)Dawn Walters(June 25, 1955 - 1973) (divorced, 4 children)
- ChildrenJackson MurphyLucy Mae Murphy
- Frequently writes with a collaborator
- Announced the signing of a multi-book contract with Tor Books, part of the St. Martin's publishing group, for the publication beginning in 2007 of the long-running Destroyer series.
- Announced that he had signed a Destroyer film production deal with Robert Evans independent production company in Hollywood. The deal covers film and television, as well as computer games and merchandising.
- Creator, with Richard Sapir, of The Destroyer (Remo Williams) who has appeared in more than 100 action/adventure novels.
- Helped develop the Bill Tilghman western film You Know My Name (1999) for Turner Pictures.
- Won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1985 for his novel "Grandmaster" (co-authored with Molly Cochran).
- [on co-writing Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)] Shane Black and I were contracted to work on the screenplay together. But partnering is very difficult, especially if one of the partners is a contentious pain-in-the-butt like I am. Eventually, we turned in a draft, took a story credit, and went our separate ways. Shane is, by the way, simply a great film writer.
- [on the possibility of another movie featuring Remo Williams, The Destroyer] "Look, guys, what do I know? We'll have a destroyer movie when somebody, not me, is willing to put 25-50 million dollars to make one. From my lips to god's ears. Let's hope."
- Please feel free to tell anyone who asks that I am not, repeat NOT, married to Bart Simpson's voice.
- Early on, when The Destroyer series was just getting started, Dick Sapir and I agreed that we did not want to keep writing the same tale over and over, which was the usual procedure in series books at the time. That led to us tweaking the rigorous confines of the action-adventure novel into a vehicle where we could write about myth and magic, androids and vampires, fantasy and its corollary, political satire, and just about anything else that caught our fancy.
- [on Remo Williams: The Prophecy (1988)] The TV pilot was better because it was based on a novella that Dick and I had written, and it got the basic point right in that it was about the growing father-son relationship between Remo and Chiun.
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