Will Murray was born on April 23, 1953 in Boston, Massachusetts. He spent his early years in the Jamaica Plain neighbourhood and spent the rest of his formative years in Quincy, Massachusetts. He became a Doc Savage fan while very young, and began collecting pulp magazines. He was twenty years old when his article "Reflections in a Flake-Gold Eye" was published in The Doc Savage Club Reader no. 2/3 in 1973. He wrote articles on the pulps for such fanzines as Xenophile, Duende, and Skullduggery. His first full-length non-fiction book was The Duende History of The Shadow Magazine, published by Odyssey Publications in 1980.
Of course, as mentioned above, Will Murray also wrote fiction, starting with ghost writing Destroyer novels. Will Murray approached the creators of The Destroyer, Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir, for interview for Skullduggery. He later did research for Richard Sapir. This eventually led to Will Murray writing the Destroyer sourcebook The Assassin's Handbook. He began ghost writing The Destroyer with the 56th book, Encounter Group, in 1984. He began regularly ghost writing The Destroyer with the 69th book, Blood Ties, and continued writing it until the 107th book, Feast or Famine. He wrote the first of many Doc Savage novels, Python Isle, in 1991 under the pseudonym Kenneth Robeson (the house pseudonym used by Street & Smith Publications for all the writers on Doc Savage). He would go onto write works of fiction featuring Tarzan, The Spider, Secret Agent X, and Sherlock Holmes. He also wrote works of fiction using H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
As I mentioned above, Will Murray was the foremost expert on Doc Savage and the heroic pulps in general. He wrote a good deal of non-fiction on the pulps, including such books as Writings in Bronze, Master of Mystery: The Rise of The Shadow, and Knight of Darkness: The Legend of The Shadow. Over the years he wrote several articles for magazines and fanzines, not only on Doc Savage and The Shadow, but on topics ranging from Captain Future to DC Comics to Honey West to The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Will also adapted the 1934 Doc Savage novel The Thousand-Headed Man as a six-part radio serial for NPR Playhouse. He produced a line of audio books for Radio Archives featuring such characters as The Spider and G-8.
As mentioned above, Will Murray created Squirrel Girl with Steve Ditko for Marvel Comics. He also contributed to prose anthologies featuring such heroes as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, The Hulk, and others. He also wrote introductions to several comic book anthologies.
I am not sure when I first read Will Murray's work or what it was. In all likelihood, it may have been one of The Destroyer novels, which I read voraciously in the 1980s. Of course, it could have also been one of his articles on Doc Savage. Even by the Eighties, Will Murray as a titan in pulp fandom. There were few, if any, people who knew as much as he did about Doc Savage, The Shadow, and the Street & Smith characters in general. As both a fiction writer and a non-fiction writer, his work was easy to read and always filled with detail. Indeed, his Doc Savage novels were so well-done and so loyal to the source material that one could believe they were written by Lester Dent himself.
Will was very private, but he was also a very nice guy. I first encountered him on MySpace where there was a thriving pulp community. Will was an enormous help when it came to my blog posts on Doc Savage, The Spider, and other pulp characters, pointing any errors and praising me for my work. No one could have been more supportive than Will was. Everyone who corresponded with Will or met him person all agree that he was not only knowledgeable, but one of the kindest people one could meet. With Will's death, the pulp fan community has lost one of its giants, and one of the nicest people around as well.
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