The destroyer

Richard Ben Sapir (; July 27, 1936 – January 27, 1987) was an American author, best known for The Destroyer series of novels that he co-created with Warren Murphy. The first Destroyer was written in 1963, while Sapir worked as a city hall reporter in Jersey City and Murphy served as secretary to the city's mayor. Ahead of its time with a plot centered upon a brash young westerner trained in the martial arts by a master assassin from North Korea, they failed to get it published because, according to Murphy, none of them knew anything about publishing. But Sapir's father was a dentist, and one of his patients was a secretary at Pinnacle Books, which agreed to show the manuscript to a Pinnacle editor. The novel was eventually published in June 1971, spawning a highly successful adventure series with over 30 million copies in print by the late 1990s.