Warren Murphy worked as a reporter and editor and after service during 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.

Murphy says he has "the usual passle of snot-nosed kids, Deirdre, Megan, Brian, Ardath and Devin, some of whom now have their own snot-nosed kids."

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 whose members include Mary Higgins Clark, Peter Straub, Susan Isaacs, Lawrence Block, Judith Kelman, Mickey Friedman, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Justin Scott, Stanley Cohen and Whitley Strieber, and who occasionally produce mystery anthologies.

Favorite novels (not written by partners or friends)

The Great Prince Died, by Bernard Wolfe.
More than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon.
All The King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren.
One, by David Karp.
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville.

CREDITS Warren Murphy has written over a hundred novels -- (even he doesn't know exactly how many) -- plus short stories, films, comics, and columns of criticism. The Destroyer series which he began with the late Richard Ben Sapir is now nearing book Number 145, although Murphy points out that he no longer writes them. Shortly after Sapir's death, he began contracting out the series to various publishers who hire their own house writers to continue the series.

Among Murphy's other series characters are Digger, Trace, and Razoni and Jackson. Two books of a planned trilogy, revolving around the character of The Grandmaster, have also been written with Molly Cochran. With her, Murphy also shares writing credits on The Forever King and several novels under the name of Dev Stryker.

More solo novels by Murphy include Jericho Day, The Red Moon, The Ceiling of Hell, The Sure Thing and Honor Among Thieves.

Murphy has also written a number of short stories, mostly in anthologies with other members of The Adams Roundtable. His story, "Another Day, Another Dollar," in the last anthology, Murder on the Run, was honored by the Private Eye Writers of America as best story of the year. That was Murphy's second Shamus award -- the first being for the novel, The Ceiling of Hell, and five more of his novels won other PWA awards, including Trace, Smoked Out, Pigs Get Fat, Too Old a Cat and 47 Miles of Rope.

Murphy has also won Edgars from the MWA for Grandmaster and Pigs Get Fat and a special award for Trace, as well as other awards from the Romance Writers of America and The West Coast Review of Books.

An occasional screenwriter, the Jersey native has various credits on The Eiger Sanction, Lethal Weapon II, Remo Williams: the Adventure Begins, and the Murphy's Law ABC TV series. He helped develop the Bill Tilghman western film for Turner Pictures; his screenplay for The Forever King has been purchased by Warner Brothers and Dick Clark is now developing the Destroyer as a TV series. Murphy also has a longterm body of work agreement with a consortium of independent producers for TV and feature films.

AWARDS
Mystery Writers of America:
Edgar Award, The Grandmaster
Edgar Award, Pigs Get Fat
Special Award, Trace
Private Eye Writers of America
Shamus Award: The Ceiling of Hell
Shamus Award: "Another Day, Another Dollar" (short story in anthology, Murder on the Run)

Special Awards:
Trace
Pigs Get Fat
Forty-seven Miles of Rope
Smoked Out
Too Old a Cat

Romance Writers of America
Special Award:
The Grandmaster

West Coast Review of Books
Porgy Award: The Red Moon

WARREN MURPHY'S WRITING PHILOSOPHY

My apparent versatility is really based upon a character flaw: I have the attention span of melting ice cream.
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.

It's a habit I've hung onto and while it's often been death at the box office -- (publishers and readers do so prefer the predictable) -- it has kept me happy at the keyboard long past the time when anyone with even a smattering of common sense would have retired to become a golf bum. (I was aided in this by my instinctive ability to ally myself with wonderful writing partners, first Dick Sapir and then Molly Cochran, both of whose coats it has been a privilege to hold.)

So I keep writing books and stories in a bewildering variety of genres and if that qualifies me to offer advice to other writers, it's this:
--- Get a good gimmick for your story.
--- Get a good character to hang it on.
--- Get a good plot to move it along.
--- Write it. And when it's done, start writing the next one.