Jack Murphy interview in Huffpo

What first inspired you to write the character of Deckard? What kinds of fiction influences did you have, or favorite authors who might have inspired you to write this kind of fiction?

I have to say that I am one of those people who started writing because I thought I could do the military fiction genre better than most of the stuff I was reading. Military fiction was a popular genre back in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s and a lot of Vietnam veterans came home and took up the pen, but since that time I felt like the genre has stagnated and been over-saturated with authors who really didn’t understand combat because they had never seen it. When I got out of the Army in 2010, I saw the Amazon Kindle taking off and decided that this was the time to take a stab at writing my own military fiction as perhaps the first of my generation of post-9/11 Special Operations veterans to do so.

Growing up I read a ton of military fiction, such as the Mack Bolan series including the originals written by Don Pendleton, one of the all time greats right next to Robert E. Howard. I also grew up reading Punisher comic books, HP Lovecraft, Robert Heinlein, as well as watching science fiction like Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner, and Aeon Flux, all of which had some influence on me.