EDitorial Comments

William Patrick Murray (1953-2026)

The Murania Press blog has been moribund for several years now, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about resuscitating it. But I certainly didn’t want to revive it with a post like this one….

Last Friday I read on Facebook that my old friend, novelist and fellow pulp-fiction aficionado Will Murray had passed away unexpectedly on Monday. The news hit me hard, because I’d seen and spent time with him just a few weeks ago at PulpFest, the annual convention for pulp-fiction collectors and enthusiasts, and he didn’t strike me as being ill or in any particular distress. On the contrary, we enjoyed our usual collegial discussions about upcoming projects and possible collaborations. And, as always, he ended one of those conversations with what had become a predictable teaser: “I’ve got a good idea for a BnT [Blood ‘n’ Thunder] article for your next issue, but I want to make sure there’s enough to it before I officially pitch you.” In the past he’d always made good on such proposals, and it pains me greatly that his byline will no longer appear on the zine’s Contents page.

Will and I were contemporaries, born six weeks apart in 1953. We both developed an interest in vintage pulp fiction as kids in the Sixties, reading newly issued paperback reprints of decades-old adventures featuring Tarzan, Doc Savage, The Shadow, and Conan the Barbarian—all of them shining stars in the pulp-magazine firmament. Will’s fascination with such fiction led him early on to engage in serious study of it, his research going beyond the stories themselves to discover as much as he could about the authors and their methods of working.

Will Murray first came to my attention in the late Seventies, when he was writing articles for pulp-oriented fanzines such as Duende and Age of the Unicorn. I was particularly taken with his 1980 book The Duende History of The Shadow Magazine, a comprehensive survey of the 325 issues published between 1931 and 1949. (I still remember when and where I bought it.) Back then I primarily collected 16mm prints of early movies and hardcover first editions of Golden Age mysteries, but every now and then I purchased vintage all-fiction “woodpulp” mags—mostly issues of The Shadow and “weird menace” titles such as Terror Tales and Horror Stories.

In 1995, at the urging of old friend and fellow collector Mark Trost, I attended my first Pulpcon, the original yearly confab of pulp-fiction devotees. At that time the hobby was still dominated by first-generation readers—that is, folks old enough to have bought the magazines off newsstands as they were published. But a statistically significant percentage of Pulpcon attendees were roughly my age—baby boomers who’d discovered the stuff via those Sixties and Seventies paperback reprints.

At the convention Mark pointed Will out to me, so I introduced myself and told him how much I enjoyed his pulp scholarship. He was polite and gracious but seemed a tad diffident. It took several years of interactions with him at subsequent Pulpcons before I realized this demeanor was just part of his personality. Will was phlegmatic, and I say that not in a pejorative way. He was one of the most even-tempered guys I’ve ever known; in our 30-plus year friendship I don’t remember him ever being flamboyantly emotional one way or the other. He wasn’t the type prone to uproarious laughter when happy or howling invective when angry. He responded to humor mostly with quiet chuckles and to antagonism with barely perceptible frowns and, when the occasion called for them, wryly delivered putdowns. Of course, I always saw him at cons; outside such settings we were not intimates. He may have behaved differently with people he knew longer and better than me, but I tend to doubt it.

We grew somewhat closer and interacted more frequently after Mark Trost and I began publishing Blood ‘n’ Thunder, which we introduced at the 2002 Pulpcon. Will was an early if not immediate supporter and, to my delight, offered me an article on principal Doc Savage author Lester Dent perhaps a year into the zine’s existence. He became a regular contributor, which was flattering because I knew he was so busy. Among other things, Will was a prolific fiction writer. Having become the literary executor for Lester Dent’s estate in 1979, he eventually published 21 Doc Savage adventures (as by “Kenneth Robeson”) written from Dent’s outlines for uncompleted series entries. Will’s early Eighties interview with Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir, co-creators of the Destroyer series of men’s-adventure paperbacks, inaugurated a relationship that led to him ghostwriting some 40 Remo Williams novels between 1984 and 1997. He also penned one or two novels tied in to the 1996 Mars Attacks movie. And I still remember him telling me in 2000 that he had just finished a novel about Marvel Comics hero Nick Fury, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

We corresponded via e-mail more frequently as the 21st century progressed. Occasionally I wrote in the hope he could confirm some aspect of pulp history I’d recently uncovered, but just as frequently he would query me about a vintage movie that had come up in his own research. Every now and then Will would refer me to some other historian looking for information, and periodically I recommended to him a correspondent asking me questions about The Shadow or Doc Savage that I knew Will could answer definitively.

Ours was not a relationship built on the exchange of personal information; neither of us wrote or phoned the other just to “shoot the breeze.” It wasn’t a “How ’bout those Red Sox?” kind of friendship. Yet our face-to-face interactions at such yearly gatherings as Pulpcon and the Windy City Pulp and Paper Expo were always congenial and I looked forward to seeing him at those events, even if we seldom spoke as long as I might have liked. Frequently at these confabs we did panel discussions together; he preferred fielding questions to running the shebang, so more often than not I acted as moderator.

Will almost never displayed visible signs of excitement at the cons; now and then he even gave off a vibe suggesting he was bored. But I knew he enjoyed them just as much as I did—even more so, because in our small community he was regarded as a celebrity and approached enthusiastically by newcomers delighted to get his John Hancock on recent publications.

Will was forced for various reasons to skip a pulp convention here and there, but his friends always counted on seeing him at the next one. It makes me unutterably sad to realize that we’ll never greet him again at PulpFest or the Windy.

Rest in peace, old friend.