Will Murray — novelist, journalist, and one of the pulp community’s foremost historians — died earlier this week. He was 73.
Matt Moring of Steeger Books announced Murray’s death Friday morning on Facebook.
Murray had been a staple of pulpdom since the early 1970s. He edited and largely wrote the fanzine Duende from 1975 to 1977, and The Duende History of The Shadow Magazine remains a cornerstone of The Shadow scholarship. In 1978, while visiting the La Plata, Mo., home of Lester Dent, he came across the outline for an unwritten Dent story. The novel he built from it, Python Isle, appeared in 1991 under the Kenneth Robeson house name and launched more than 20 new Doc Savage adventures. Murray served as literary agent for the Dent estate from 1979 onward, and went on to write authorized continuations of The Spider, Tarzan, King Kong, and other characters. He had recently completed an El Borak story for a collection inspired by Robert E. Howard’s characters.
He received Pulpcon’s Lamont Award in 1979, when he was 26.
Will Murray was a fixture at PulpFest and its predecessor, Pulpcon, for decades — as a dealer, as a panelist on numerous presentations, and in 2013 as a guest of honor. Among many appearances, he joined Ed Hulse for “Walter B. Gibson and His Shadows” in 2021, sat for “The Wild Adventures of Will Murray — A PulpFest Profile” that same year, and talked about “Doc Savage and the Bantam Revival” with artist and filmmaker Ron Hill in 2025. His last PulpFest appearance came on Aug. 1, 2026, on the writers’ panel “Working With Licensed Characters.”
He was also a regular contributor to The Pulpster from its first issue, published for Pulpcon 20 in 1991, through number 35 released at PulpFest 2026.
PulpFest extends its condolences to Murray’s family and to the many friends he made in this community.
