Will Murray obit

Will Murray: 1953-2026

 He was not on the list.

Matt Moring of Steeger Books posted on Facebook this morning that Will Murray died Aug. 25, 2026. Will was 73.

I’m in shock. Will had been a staple of pulpdom since at least the early 1970s. His was one of the first names I saw among those writing about the pulps and pulp characters at the time, along with Robert Sampson, Tony Goodstone, Jim Steranko, Philip José Farmer, and Ron Goulart.

For the past 35 years, Will had been writing authorized continuations of Doc Savage, The Shadow, Tarzan, and other pulp characters, in addition to his articles on the pulps and their characters. He had also served as literary agent for Lester Dent’s estate since 1979. He had recently written an El Borak story for a collection inspired by Robert E. Howard’s characters.

He wrote articles on Ghost Stories magazine and his search for an obscure pulp story in this year’s issue of The Pulpster. And, we’d chatted at PulpFest earlier this month about what he’d like to write about for next year’s issue.

His obituary is available on the Keohane Funeral & Cremation website.

I’m shocked and saddened. What a loss to the pulp community.

William Patrick Murray was born on April 28, 1953. He grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and graduated North Quincy High school in June 1971, subsequently graduating summa cum laude from the University of Massachusetts at Boston. After becoming a fan of the pulp fiction hero Doc Savage, he began collecting pulp magazines and wrote two psychological profiles of the character in The Doc Savage Reader. He went on to write for fanzines and edit the fanzines Duende and Skullduggery before joining the pulp-reprint publisher Odyssey Publications. He also co-authored the study The Duende History of The Shadow Magazine. Circa 1978, "I discovered the outline to [Doc Savage creator] Lester Dent's unwritten Python Isle and decided to take a shot at writing it. Bantam [Books] passed on it initially, and by the time they came back and asked for it and two more Docs, I was busily ghosting [the adventure paperback series] The Destroyer for [series co-creator] Warren Murphy."

The Destroyer assignment had come about when Murray, editing Skullduggery, sought out Murphy and The Destroyer co-creator Richard Sapir for an interview, and later did freelance research for Sapir. This led to his editing a Destroyer sourcebook, The Assassin's Handbook (1982), and eventually ghostwriting the series, beginning with the 56th book, Encounter Group (1984). He began writing the series regularly with the 69th book, Blood Ties, altogether ghosting book #69 through book #107, Feast or Famine. Murray has also written Cthulhu Mythos stories, including a pair of stories about Nug and Yeb, the Twin Blasphemies, and contributed single novels in The Executioner and Mars Attacks series. He wrote the retro-pulp collection Spicy Zeppelin Stories under various pen names.

Murray is also an author of nonfiction articles about pulp magazine writers such as Doc Savage creator Lester Dent and the Shadow creator Walter B. Gibson; starting in 1979, he was the literary executor for the estate of Dent, and published twenty-one Doc Savage novels from Dent's outlines under Dent's pseudonym, Kenneth Robeson. His 2013 The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage novel, Doc Savage: Skull Island, teams him up with King Kong.

In June 2015, Altus Press inaugurated the series The Wild Adventures of Tarzan in the novel Tarzan: Return to Pal-ul-don, an authorized sequel to Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1921 novel, Tarzan the Terrible. Late in 2016, Altus released a follow-up novel, King Kong Vs. Tarzan. Early in 2020, "Tarzan, Conqueror of Mars" was released, in which John Carter of Mars was revived. In 2023, Tarzan: Back to Mars was released.

He was an American novelist, journalist, short story, and comic book writer. Much of his fiction was published under pseudonyms. With artist Steve Ditko, he co-created the superhero Squirrel Girl.