Jongor of Lost Land/Robert Moore Williams

After a couple of weeks of doing a lot of research reading, I decided to take a break and read something just for fun. “Jongor of Lost Land” by Robert Moore Williams first appeared in the October 1940 issue of the pulp FANTASTIC ADVENTURES and then was reprinted in paperback in 1970 by Popular Library. That’s the edition I read.

I had heard of the Jongor series before but had never read any of the novels. The series is a Tarzan pastiche, and the plot of this first entry is passable imitation Burroughs. Beautiful Ann Hunter has come to Lost Land, an isolated, unexplored wilderness somewhere in the interior of Australia, to search for her missing brother who disappeared there during a previous expedition, the first to actually reach Lost Land. She is accompanied by a companion of her brother’s from the previous expedition as well as a vaguely sinister guide. When their aboriginal bearers turn on them and try to kill them, Ann and the two men are forced to flee deeper into Lost Land, which it turns out is populated by dinosaurs, pterodactyls, and other forms of prehistoric life. It’s also the home of the mighty warrior Jongor, who spends most of the book rescuing the explorers from various dangers, falling in love with the beautiful Ann, and fighting the evil Murians, survivors from a long-lost colony established by the ancient and long-since-vanished civilization of Mu.

As you can tell from even that short description, Williams had certainly read his Edgar Rice Burroughs. Unfortunately, he didn’t possess much of Burroughs’ storytelling talent. The dialogue is stilted even by pulp standards and the narrative is clumsy and repetitive. Another problem is that there’s not even a hint of mystery concerning Jongor’s origin and true identity. All the details are laid out for the reader in bland, boring fashion by Williams. (No, he’s not Ann’s missing brother. That’s established right away.) There are a few nice scenes here and there, such as the one where Jongor leads a herd of tame dinosaurs on a charge against the bad guys, but mostly this is a pretty bad book.

And yet it rated not only a paperback reprint in the Seventies but also a cover by the legendary Frank Frazetta. Not a particularly good Frazetta cover, in my opinion, but still . . . A lot of old science fiction and fantasy was reprinted in mass-market paperbacks during the Sixties and Seventies, and a lot of pulp fans, myself included, are bothered by the fact that most of the vintage stuff is no longer readily available except in small press editions. But a lot of it probably doesn’t deserve to be, and I’d have to put poor old Jongor in that category.

I still enjoyed the break from all the research, though.