The Red Letter Day/Destroyer Connection

I mentioned here the other day that my latest Red Menace novel  began as a Destroyer. A bunch of years ago, back when we had to start thinking about a fifth Tor Remo, I came up with the idea to introduce a new Destroyer supervillain in a novella in an Assassin's Handbook 3. It was a flashback story that took place immediately after the events of one of the 1970s Destroyers, and the supervillain wasn't really in it...he had his hand in the events of the story, but only appeared at the very end. My plan was that Warren could release AH3 as an ebook at the same time the fifth Tor Destroyer was released, and that the supervillain only hinted at in AH3 would be featured prominently in the Tor book. None of that happened, obviously. It was too good an idea to let die, so I dusted it off when it came time to do The Red Menace #4. I had to toss out pretty much everything except the skeleton of the original Destroyer story; I hadn't realized how different The Red Menace was from The Destroyer until I tried banging the square peg into the round hole. Many of the same original story beats are still there, but I think only two or three scenes survived, and those were heavily rewritten. But I was able to take the idea of the supervillain who was to appear in the fifth Tor Destroyer, who never existed as more than a kernel of an idea in my head, and include him.

And now, as Paul Harvey said, you know -- more or less -- the rest of the story.