Review: The Lost Continent - Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels fall into three categories for me: Books I Know I’ve Read, Books I Know I Haven’t Read, and Books I May Have Read 50 or 60 Years Ago But Don’t Remember For Sure. THE LOST CONTINENT falls into that third category. I was in the mood for some ERB, and I had a hunch I hadn’t read it before, so I decided to give it a try. Besides, who can resist one of those short Ace editions with a Frank Frazetta cover?

This novel takes place in the 22^nd Century. All communication between Western and Eastern Hemispheres has been cut off for more than two hundred years, following a catastrophic war that seemed on the verge of consuming Europe and threatened the Western Hemisphere as well. No one from the West is allowed to venture past “Thirty” or “One Seventy-Five”, the dividing lines between the hemispheres. (Hence the story’s original title, “Beyond Thirty”.) Our narrator and protagonist is young naval officer Jefferson Turck, commander of the Pan-American aero-submarine Coldwater. That’s right, it’s an aero-submarine, meaning it can fly and travel underwater. How cool is that? But not surprisingly, while the Coldwater is patrolling the Atlantic, it develops engine trouble and has to ditch in the ocean. Turck can’t submerge the craft because it wouldn’t be able to resurface. Turck also has to deal with treachery among his own crew, and eventually that puts him at sea in a small boat with three companions, being washed toward what once was Europe. After two centuries, what will these stalwart Pan-Americans find?

Not surprisingly, one of the first people Turck runs into is a beautiful young woman who needs rescuing. He and his companions go on to find that England has regressed to a primitive level with rival tribes of barbarians fighting each other and zoo animals having proliferated after the fall of civilization (as you can see in that great cover). Along with the girl, they move on across the English Channel to what used to be France. Once there, they discover that civilizations do still exist in the Eastern Hemisphere, in the form of warring empires from China and Africa that are battling to take over what used to be Europe.

This is a flawed but enjoyable novel. The first half, set mostly in what used to be England, is full of intriguing concepts but bogs down a little in travelogue mode, where the characters go here and look at this thing and go there and look at this other thing. Once the scene shifts to the continent and the characters find themselves embroiled in an epic war, Burroughs once again packs the story with interesting ideas, but the whole thing feels rushed considering how broad the scope of the tale is. There’s enough meat in THE LOST CONTINENT that today’s authors probably would get a trilogy of doorstop novels out of the same plot. If I had to choose, I much prefer Burroughs’ leaner, faster-paced treatment of the story, but I still wish he’d done a little more with it. The ending is a rather abrupt deus ex machina.

Don’t get me wrong. All quibbling aside, I liked THE LOST CONTINENT. Now that I’ve read it, I’m certain it wasn’t one of the Burroughs books I read back in junior high and high school, so I’m very glad I picked it up now. Burroughs could always spin a yarn, and sometimes that’s exactly what I’m looking for. THE LOST CONTINENT is an early novel by Burroughs, published as “Beyond Thirty” in the February 1916 issue of the pulp ALL AROUND MAGAZINE, reprinted numerous times starting in the Fifties, and currently available on Amazon in various e-book, paperback, and hardcover editions. If you're a Burroughs fan and haven't read it, it's well worth your time.

Review: The Pirate and the Lady - Leslie Turner White

Sometimes I’m in the mood for a good, old-fashioned, swashbuckling historical adventure novel. THE PIRATE AND THE LADY by Leslie Turner White, published as a paperback original by Ace Books in 1961, seemed like it might be just what I was looking for. That’s my copy in the scan. The cover is by an artist named Chuck Smith, whose work I’m not familiar with.

The book opens in Cornwall, where the protagonist, a ship’s captain known as Black Anthony Bartholomew, works for the local magistrate, who also happens to be the kingpin of the smuggling ring that’s operating in the area. Tony is also the lover of the magistrate’s insatiable young wife, and that’s what ultimately leads to him being charged unjustly with murder and forced to flee to the colonies. During that voyage, he meets and falls in love with the daughter of an English nobleman who’s being sent to the Caribbean to put a stop to the piracy plaguing the area. The nobleman’s plan includes issuing letters of marque to British sailors so they can hunt down the French and Spanish pirates. This seems like a perfect job for Tony.

Unfortunately, he gets sidetracked to a plantation in Virginia owned by the brother of his former lover back in England. She’s there, too, and expects that she and Tony will take up right where they left off. Tony wants to get to the Caribbean, though, and be reunited with the fair Kathleen, and this leads to no end of trouble.

All this set-up actually takes up too much space in the book, but once Tony finally makes it to the Spanish Main, there’s buccaneering action a-plenty. Capture, escape, sea battles, daring plans, swordfights, even a great sidekick named Half-Arsed Jones. White, whose writing career started in the pulps, seems torn between spinning a breakneck yarn and writing a more sedate, respectable historical novel, albeit one with some spicy plot twists. It’s a combination that works more often than it doesn’t, thankfully.

Although THE PIRATE AND THE LADY looks almost like a romance, there’s actually not much domestic drama in it, mostly in the opening and then very late in the book. I enjoyed this novel quite a bit. It’s short, colorful, and reads quickly. The author, as Leslie T. White, wrote quite a few detective and adventure stories for the pulps before becoming a bestselling novelist as Leslie Turner White. The line “First Book Publication” on the cover of this one might be an indication that it’s an expanded serial or novella from the pulps, but if that’s the case, I couldn’t pin down the source. I think it’s just as likely that White wrote it as an original and then maybe sold it to Ace when it failed to sell to a hardback publisher. Either way, it’s a good yarn and well worth reading if you enjoy vintage historical adventures.

The Steel Noose - Arnold Drake

I’ve been aware of Arnold Drake’s work as a comic book writer for a long, long time, having been a fan of one of his best-known creations, the Doom Patrol, ever since those stories began appearing in DC’s MY GREATEST ADVENTURE comic more than half a century ago. In the Seventies, I was also a regular reader of his GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY series for Marvel. But I had no idea he was also a novelist until Black Gat Books reprinted THE STEEL NOOSE, originally published by Ace Books in 1954. It’s an Ace that I just never came across over the years.

THE STEEL NOOSE is narrated by fast-talking, wise-cracking New York gossip columnist Boyd McGee, who moves in a world of cabbies, tycoons, gamblers, chorus girls, gangsters, and cops. An item he includes in his column inadvertently gets him mixed up in multiple murders and the hunt for half a million dollars in blackmail loot. Boyd gets beaten up more than once but dishes out some punishment, too. And of course, there are also several beautiful women involved in the convoluted plot.

Drake could have played this pretty straight, and in some stretches he does, but for a lot of the novel, the genuinely funny banter dished out by Boyd as he navigates this labyrinth of crime puts me in mind of something else. It’s like reading the novelization of a Bob Hope movie that was never made. Boyd McGree isn’t exactly cowardly like the characters Hope usually played, but every quip he made, I heard it in Hope’s voice. To a Bob Hope fan like me, reading THE STEEL NOOSE was a hugely entertaining experience. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Drake had Hope in mind while he was writing this. And it’s fitting, at least to me, that a decade later, Drake was writing DC’s THE ADVENTURES OF BOB HOPE comic book, which I read occasionally in those days, although not as much as I should have because I tended not to pick up anything except superhero, Western, and war comics. I’m sure I missed some good stuff.

As far as I know, THE STEEL NOOSE is Arnold Drake’s only novel. That’s kind of a shame because it’s really good and he might have given us more like it. On the other hand, if he’d been a successful novelist, we might never have had the Doom Patrol and the Guardians of the Galaxy. I’m not sure I’d make that trade, but I’m very glad Black Gat Books decided to reprint this one. You can pre-order it on Amazon, and I give it a high recommendation.

The Maverick Star - L.P. Holmes

I usually read several L.P. Holmes novels every year. As I’ve mentioned before, he’s become one of my favorite Western authors, and since I came to his work fairly late in my life, there are still a bunch of his novels that I haven’t read yet. I won’t get to all of them, but he’s always reliable when I need an entertaining Western yarn.

The most recent one I’ve read by him is THE MAVERICK STAR, published as a paperback original by Ace Books in 1969. I’m pretty sure this isn’t a reprint of one of Holmes’ stories from the Western pulps, where he was very prolific in the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties. It begins with the funeral of a veteran lawman who, as sheriff, has kept the peace between two feuding cattle barons whose ranches are the biggest in the area. Each of those cattle barons has a hand-picked man he wants to replace the sheriff, but instead the job goes to the town marshal . . . who only packs the star for half an hour before he’s gunned down, shot in the back.

The county commissioners still don’t want to give the job to one of the other candidates, so they turn to Logan Keogh, the foreman of the other big ranch in the area. With considerable reluctance, Keogh accepts, knowing that he’ll probably have a target on his back, too. And sure enough, there are attempts on his life as he tries to keep the feuding cattle barons from going to war against each other and find out who killed the previous sheriff before the shadowy murderer succeeds again.

THE MAVERICK STAR is a well-paced traditional Western yarn with a little more of a mystery angle than some, and I don’t mind admitting that I didn’t figure out who the killer was ahead of time. The solution actually took me a little by surprise. The action scenes are excellent, although the book probably could have used a few more of them. By the time this book came out, Holmes had been a professional writer for more than forty years, and it’s not uncommon for an author’s work not to have quite as much fire and passion after they’ve been in the game for that long.

But like a good wide receiver in football who may have lost a step in speed, Holmes can still get by on savvy and experience. He knows what he’s doing, and THE MAVERICK STAR is a solid, entertaining tale that kept me turning the pages. I enjoyed it and think it’s worth reading if you’re a fan of traditional Westerns. That’s my beat-up copy in the scan, by the way.