I found out today that Will Murray died on August 24th.
I never met Will. I never attended a comic book or a pulp convention. I didn’t know him personally.
Yet I read everything he wrote that I could get my hands on.
I suspect that was still a small percentage of his literary output. Like the pulp writers that he so cleverly emulated, he published his work in so many different venues and under so many pseudonums that I doubt a complete list of his works will ever be compiled.
Being roughly my age, most likely his interest in the pulps was triggered the same way mine was: by the James Bama covers of the Bantam Books reprints of the Doc Savage novels. Or perhaps he was captivated by the rows and rows of Ace and Ballantine Books reprints of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs that lined the book racks of the era.
It was a wonderful time to grow up, even if we missed out on the original Doc Savage magazines and the rest of the pulps published in the 30s and 40s. In large part due to Will’s work, reprints of The Shadow, The Spider, G-8, and many others appeared over the years, many of them with new introductions by Will.
Will was an authority on the pulps, publishing short articles to full-length scholarly books on the subject. But most marvelously, he added to the pulp literature by writing stories, emulating the style of the old pulp masters. Whether it was Tarzan, John Carter, The Spider, or Doc and his crew, Will was fantastic at bringing these old heroes back to life. But he didn’t stop there. He conjured up anything from Lovecraftian tales to new adventures of Holmes and Watson, seemingly effortlessly.
After having read all of the original Doc Savage stories, it was fun to reenter that alternative universe in the form of Will’s “Wild Adventures of Doc Savage” books. I think their only flaw was that they were too polished to have been written by a pulp writer of the 1930s who stayed alive by churning out millions of words per year.
In fact, I sometimes corresponded with Will by email, both to compliment him on his writing and to point out the occasional errors that were in the text. I remember he seemed to mix up Ham and Long Tom in one scene, so I asked him if he did that on purpose, to better emulate the errors of the original pulp tales. Those stories were written in such a rush that they were rife with errors, to the point that errors were a part of the breathless, head-long style that characterized pulp literature.
He wrote back and told me no, it was just a mistake and he would correct it in the ebook edition.
He regularly sent out emails about upcoming projects–I received one not too long ago. I know that he had books in the works that sadly will never come to fruition.
Like I said, I never met Will, and I am sure many who did know him well will be writing about him on a more personal level. I only knew him through his writing. Nevertheless I felt a real sense of loss when I read of his death. My condolences to his friends and family, and may he rest in peace.
