Review: Swords of the Crags - Fred Blosser

After reading Fred Blosser’s sword and sorcery novella SWORDS OF PLUNDER recently, I was in the mood to dive back into more of his work. I picked his collection SWORDS OF THE CRAGS.

This volume collects six stories that might have been the sort of thing Robert E. Howard wrote for the Spicy pulps in the mid-Thirties. The title story, “Swords of the Crags”, is set in Peshawar, India, and in the Khyber Hills. The protagonist is Pike Braxton, an American adventurer and former gunfighter from Texas who functions as a sort of unofficial secret agent for the British. When a beautiful young American heiress gets caught up in the schemes of a sinister Russian agent, Pike has to rescue her and recover some vital information. Seems fairly straightforward, if dangerous, but then Pike and the beautiful blonde find themselves confronting an otherworldly menace. This fast-moving tale is like placing Howard’s El Borak in a SPICY ADVENTURE STORIES plot, with a dash of Lovecraft thrown in. It’s well-written, works very well, and races along to a satisfactory conclusion. I really enjoyed it. (And it puts me in mind of Howard’s comments in a letter to Lovecraft where he suggested that Lovecraft should try to crack the Spicy market. He could use a pseudonym, Howard says, and just write up a fictionalization of one of his own “sex adventures”. Just the thought of Lovecraft’s reaction when he read that suggestion always makes me chuckle.)

In “Alleys of Terror”, the scene shifts to Shanghai and the protagonist is Ridge Braxton, Pike’s younger brother who’s just as fast with his guns and fists. The beautiful Eurasian pirate and smuggler Olga Zukor is framed for murder. The victim held the key to a deadly conspiracy Ridge is investigating, so he and Olga have to team up to untangle the mess even though they dislike and distrust each other at first.

Ridge Braxton returns to his West Texas stomping grounds in “Witch of Snakebit Creek”, a creepy contemporary Western that reminds me a bit of Howard’s “Old Garfield’s Heart” and “For the Love of Barbara Allen” although it turns out to be a very different kind of story. This is actually more of a mystery yarn with a nice late twist.

“The Girl From Hell’s Half Acre” finds another two-fisted, fast-shooting Texan adventurer, Esau Reynolds (a very Howardian name) turning detective as he tries to find a wealthy man’s missing daughter, who’s a beautiful blonde, of course. The trail leads Reynolds to the waterfront area of an unnamed city, where he clashes with—and beds—the beautiful queenpin of the area’s criminal underworld. This story, reminiscent of some of Howard’s Steve Harrison yarns, moves like the proverbial wind and is very entertaining.

“Sin’s Sanctuary” is another El Borak-like tale, with a heaping helping of Talbot Mundy influence, as an American adventurer infiltrates a hidden monastery in Tibet in search of a missing Englishman. He’s helped by a beautiful woman, of course, and they encounter unexpected danger inside the walls of the monastery. This is a really well-written and exciting story.

“Scarlet Lust” is a direct sequel to SWORDS OF PLUNDER and finds Cronn, the northern barbarian, out to steal a fabulous gem which he hopes will help him win the throne of one of the countries in his world. He gets some help, of course, from a beautiful woman. These are Conan pastiches, in a way, there’s no denying that, and they’re also better than most of the official Conan pastiches that have been published in the past few years. Like John C. Hocking, Scott Oden, and Chuck Dixon, Blosser understands the character and the setting. I don’t know if there are more of these Cronn stories, but if there are, I definitely want to read them. And if there aren’t, well, maybe Blosser will write some.

Blosser rounds out this collection with five articles about Howard’s efforts to crack the Spicy and Weird Menace markets, the spicier Conan yarns, and the influence of Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy on Howard’s work. As always with Blosser’s work, these essays are informative, entertaining, and well worth a Howard fan’s time.

Overall, SWORDS OF THE CRAGS is an excellent volume and a lot of fun to read. While it’s true that the main influence on these stories is Robert E.Howard, I found them reminiscent of E. Hoffmann Price, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Talbot Mundy, as well. Also, in Blosser’s stories the spicy bits are considerably spicier than what authors could get away with in the Thirties. They’re not overly graphic, but those scenes don’t fade out as quickly as the ones in the pulps did. So while they’re definitely Howardian, don’t mistake these tales for pale imitations. They stand on their own, and they’re well worth reading. SWORDS OF THE CRAGS is available on Amazon in a paperback edition, and an e-book edition containing the first three stories and the first two articles is available as well.

Review: Tam, Son of the Tiger - Otis Adelbert Kline

Many, many years ago I read one or two novels by Otis Adelbert Kline and remember enjoying them, but I couldn’t tell you exactly which books I read. I do know, however, that TAM, SON OF THE TIGER wasn’t one of them, because I just read it and I'm certain I’d never read it before.

This adventure yarn was serialized in the June/July through December 1931 issues of WEIRD TALES, all with covers by C.C. Senf, by the way. It was reprinted in hardback by Avalon Books in 1962, probably in an abridged edition because most of Avalon’s editions were abridged. The pulp version was reprinted in 2010 by Pulpville Press in trade paperback and hardcover editions that are still available from the publisher. The pulp version can also be found on-line.

Kline is remembered primarily as a literary agent for some of the best-known authors of science fiction and fantasy from the pulp era, but he wrote several novels himself. They were heavily influenced by the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs and others. TAM, SON OF THE TIGER definitely shows that ERB influence as Tam Evans, the two-year-old son of an American soldier and adventurer in Burma, is carried off by a rare white tigress. She raises Tam to be a tiger (just like the apes raised Tarzan to be an ape), but eventually he meets an aged lama who befriended the tigress many years earlier, and this man educates Tam and teaches him how to use various weapons. Combined with his own strength and agility, these attributes make 20-year-old Tam a deadly and intelligent fighting man. So naturally, he soon runs into a beautiful princess wearing golden armor who is fighting some four-armed warriors. All of them come from a vast underground world populated by various races that gave rise to the legends of the Hindu gods, and when Tam ventures into this subterranean world to help the princess, he’s drawn into a war between those semi-deities just as you’d expect. Oh, and his father, who is still an adventurer and has believed for many years that Tam is dead, shows up, too, along with a scientist friend of his.

As you can tell from that description, TAM, SON OF THE TIGER is a real kitchen sink book. Kline keeps throwing in complication after complication, peril after peril, and in true Burroughs fashion splits his characters up and lets them have separate but interweaving storylines. Coincidences abound. While ERB is the most obvious influence in this novel (both Tarzan and Mars series), I also detected echoes of A. Merritt and Ray Cummings. Some of the vivid, bizarre descriptions of the underground world really reminded me of Merritt’s work, and I couldn’t help but think of Cummings’ THE GIRL IN THE GOLDEN ATOM, too.

If I had read this when I was twelve years old, sitting on my parents’ front porch on a lazy summer day, I would have thought it was one of the best books I’d ever read. No doubt about that. Reading it now when I’m much older, I still had a pretty darned good time racing through it. Derivative or not, Kline was a good storyteller and knew how to keep the reader turning the pages. I think I’m going to have to read more by him. These days, pure entertainment is what I want most of the time, and TAM, SON OF THE TIGER definitely provided that.

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.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Amazing Stories, October 1941

The unmistakable artwork of J. Allen St. John graces the cover of this issue of AMAZING STORIES, and with a St. John cover, it's no surprise that there's an Edgar Rice Burroughs story inside. In this case, it's "Invisible Men of Mars", the fourth and final novella that was fixed up into the John Carter novel LLANA OF GATHOL. I read that book many, many years ago in the Ballantine edition with an explosive Robert Abbett cover that you can see at the bottom of this post, but I don't remember a thing about it except that I liked it, because I liked all the John Carter books. I ought to read it again one of these days. Unlikely, but you never know. Anyway, before I wander too far off into the weeds . . . this issue of AMAZING STORIES also features stories by William P. McGivern (under the house-name P.F. Costello), David Wright O'Brien (under his pseudonym John York Cabot), editor Raymond A. Palmer (under the house-name A.R. Steber and in collaboration with Thornton Ayre, who was really John Russell Fearn), and Festus Pragnell (as himself). I sure loved those Mars books when I was a kid. I'll bet many of you reading this did, as well.

Tarzan: Back to Mars - Will Murray

Mars Attacks! Invaders From Mars! The War of the Worlds! All of those would be appropriate titles for the latest novel from Will Murray and the latest installment of The Wild Adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The actual title is BACK TO MARS, and it’s a wonderful book, a front porch yarn if ever there was one.

To elaborate . . . This novel opens shortly after World War II when Tarzan returns from his military service and flies over the African landscape in a P-40B Tomahawk fighter plane. This is a wonderful scene that really captures Tarzan’s personality. However, his happy reunion with Jane and the Waziri doesn’t last long. Invaders from Mars have arrived in Africa and intend to set up a colony there. Tarzan puts the kibosh on that idea, of course, but after learning that this was only first foray in a much larger invasion, he realizes that to put a stop to it, he’ll have to travel back to Mars, or Barsoom as its inhabitants call it, and team up with John Carter, Warlord of Mars, to end the threat once and for all. Using the method of astral projection he learned in the previous novel, TARZAN, CONQUEROR OF MARS, he heads off to Barsoom and adventure after adventure.

If you’re an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, as seems likely if you’re reading this, you probably have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen. Strange creatures, bizarre situations, captures and escapes, swashbuckling swordfights, and a pace that barely slows down to take a breath now and then. Will Murray captures Burroughs’ style in fine fashion and spins a yarn packed with dramatic scenes. The sections of the book that are told in John Carter’s first-person point of view are also very well done and bring back vivid memories of racing through those Barsoom novels as fast as I could lay my hands on them when I was a kid. Murray includes plenty of characters from those books and references to their plots, as well as tying everything in with Burroughs’ other major series, Pellucidar.

BACK TO MARS is just pure fun to read, and boy, did I need that right now. I give it a very high recommendation. It’s only available in a trade paperback edition at the moment, but I believe hardback and e-book editions may be in the works. I also have a sneaking suspicion that Murray plants some seeds in this book that may well pay off in future novels. I hope so, because I’m already looking forward to reading them.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy Allstory Weekly, June 16, 1928

We haven't had a pith helmet cover in a while. The one on this issue of ARGOSY ALLSTORY WEEKLY comes to us courtesy of Edgar Franklin Wittmack. As usual, there are some fine writers inside: Edgar Rice Burroughs (with an installment of the serial version of APACHE DEVIL), George F. Worts (with an installment of a Gillian Hazeltine serial), John Wilstach, Edgar Franklin, Charles L. Hall (his only credit in the Fictionmags Index), and the long-forgotten Robert Beith, Charles Divine, Carolyn MacDonald, and Douglas H. Woodworth. As usual with ARGOSY, the serials are the bane of a collector's/reader's existence, but if you were there to pick up the issues every week off the newsstand, I suppose it's a format that worked well at the time.

The Man-Eater - Edgar Rice Burroughs

THE MAN-EATER is a short novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs that was serialized in the newspaper The New York Evening World in November 1915. Based on an unsold movie treatment, it never appeared in book form during Burroughs’ lifetime but eventually was reprinted in a double volume with another short novel, BEYOND THIRTY. Since then it’s appeared in numerous e-book versions, one of which I just read.

As you might guess from the title, THE MAN-EATER features a lion as one of the central characters. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the lion is one of the co-protagonists in this book, along with Richard Gordon, a bored, wealthy young playboy (but a good, decent, courageous sort, for all that) who travels to Africa on an impulsive quest to help a beautiful young woman he’s never met recover a missing will that’s the key to a fortune she stands to inherit. Opposing Gordon is the young woman’s cousin, one of the most dastardly villains you’ll ever hope to encounter. The fast-paced action shifts from Africa to Virginia, back to Africa, and then finally concludes with an exciting return to Virginia.

Burroughs’ tendency toward coincidence-driven fiction rises to a whole new level in this volume. One tiny chink in the vast wall of coincidence probably would bring the whole plot crashing down. And to this I say a resounding “Who cares?” I raced through the story with great enjoyment. The hero and the heroine are both stalwart, the villain and his henchmen are thoroughly despicable, and the vengeance-seeking lion is a great character.

As I’ve probably mentioned before, Burroughs is one of those writers I loved as a kid whose work doesn’t always hold up great when I read it now. THE MAN-EATER is a little creaky, but I had a lot of fun reading it. I can understand why some contemporary readers wouldn’t care for it, but while reading it I was fourteen years old again . . . and that’s one of the main reasons I read old books, and new ones that make me feel the same way.

Tarzan and the Forest of Stone - Jeffrey J. Mariotte

I always enjoy Jeff Mariotte’s work, and of course I’ve been a Tarzan fan for more than sixty years, so it’s not at all surprising that I had a fine time reading Mariotte’s new novel TARZAN AND THE FOREST OF STONE. This is part of a series authorized by the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate, which means the books are set in the continuity and canon established by Burroughs in the original novels.

In this case, that’s important because TARZAN AND THE FOREST OF STONE is a direct sequel to TARZAN AND THE LION MAN, which is my favorite book of the entire series despite the fact that some ERB fans don’t care for it. The action in FOREST OF STONE picks up very shortly after LION MAN ends and includes John Clayton paying a visit to Edgar Rice Burroughs himself. This is a charming scene. After that, however, it’s almost non-stop adventure, including a train derailed and wrecked, big city gangsters dressed as cowboys, a ruthless professional hitman, murder, kidnapping, an ancient artifact, a mysterious Indian, a magnificent stallion, a little mysticism, and Tarzan going after the bad guys in the Petrified Forest, a very different kind of jungle that what he’s used to back in Africa.

Mariotte makes excellent use of Burroughs’ parallel storylines technique, which keeps the novel moving along at a very satisfying pace. The young woman he introduces as the heroine of this tale is a good character, given more to action than weeping and wailing. The remorseless hitman is downright chilling. Most importantly, Mariotte’s Tarzan acts and talks like Tarzan should. I never had any trouble accepting that this was the same character as the one Burroughs created.

One piece of the storyline is left unresolved, and I can’t help but think that an old pro like Mariotte did that to indicate that he still has more Tarzan stories to tell. I hope so, because I really enjoyed reading this one. It’s definitely a Front Porch Book, and it's available in hardback, paperback, and e-book editions.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, March 26, 1938

That's a nice circus cover by Emmett Watson on this issue of ARGOSY. The story it illustrates is a serial called "You're in the Circus Now" by Richard Wormser, a fine author who also wrote at least one serial for ARGOSY about a traveling carnival. The Tarzan story mentioned on the cover is a serial installment of "The Red Star of Tarzan", published in book form as TARZAN AND THE FORBIDDEN CITY. There's also an installment of a Horatio Hornblower novel by C.S. Forester, "Ship of the Line", and that didn't even make the cover. Plus stories by Frank Richardson Pierce and Bennett Foster. I know the serials make ARGOSY daunting for collectors, but man, there was a lot of great fiction published in its pages!

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, February 13, 1937

Since it's August and hot, how about a nice snowy Mountie cover? Here's one on this issue of ARGOSY, courtesy of artist V.E. Pyles. Inside is the usual all-star lineup of authors often found in ARGOSY: H. Bedford-Jones, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Theodore Roscoe, Donald Barr Chidsey, Bennett Foster, and Frank Richardson Pierce. That featured serial, "The Redcoat Renegade" (good title), is by an author I'm not familiar with, Patrick Lee. The Fictionmags Index credits him with only five stories and doesn't mention the name being a pseudonym. If anyone has any further information about him, I'd be glad to see it.

Forgotten Books: The Monster Men - Edgar Rice Burroughs

This is another of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels I never got around to reading back in the days when I was a big Burroughs fan. THE MONSTER MEN is one of his earlier efforts, his sixth novel, published complete under the title “A Man Without a Soul”, in the November 1913 issue of the pulp THE ALL-STORY.

It’s a Mad Scientist yarn, as eccentric Professor Arthur Maxon seeks to discover the secret of life and create it in a laboratory. After several failures, he gives up the effort, only to find himself drawn irresistably back to it. For his new experiments, he travels to an isolated island off the coast of Borneo, along with his beautiful daughter Virginia and his sinister, ambitious assistant, Dr. von Horn. The professor is successful, but only to a certain extent. He’s able to create living, human-like creatures in his lab, but they turn out to be misshapen monsters almost incapable of human thought. After a dozen of these misbegotten failures—which, still living, he keeps penned up in a compound—he has high hopes for Number Thirteen (that being the original title of this novel when Burroughs wrote it, I believe). Number Thirteen is going to be different.

And so he is, not only a magnificent physical specimen but also capable of learning at a rapid rate, so that within weeks he’s almost as well educated as a normal man. But then trouble erupts due to the scheming of the evil Dr. von Horn, as well as a Malay pirate with a yen for the professor’s beautiful daughter and various ne’er-do-wells who have their eye on a mysterious chest they believe to be full of gold. Before you know it, everybody is galloping around the island fighting each other, and the pirate kidnaps Virginia and takes off for the jungles of Borneo with her. However, Number Thirteen, now calling himself Bulan, goes after them, aided by a bizarre little army of his own. Bulan, you see, has also fallen in love with Virginia . . .

THE MONSTER MEN certainly isn’t lacking for action. I’ve seen it described as “Tarzan Meets Dr. Moreau”, and while that’s not exactly accurate, it does somewhat capture the feel of this novel. One of Burroughs’ trademarks is having a lot of characters doing different things at once, in a relatively small area and period of time, and at this stage of his career, I don’t think he was as in control of the technique as he was later on. As a result, the plot is a little hard to follow at times and is overloaded with coincidences. That’s forgivable, though, because THE MONSTER MEN has such a great feeling of fun and enthusiasm about it. The big twist at the end is blatantly telegraphed early on, but again, it doesn’t really matter. The appeal of this book is that it’s an action-packed romp with some nice, eerie scenes to break up the running around and fighting.

I had a fine time reading THE MONSTER MEN. I’m glad that proved to be the case, because I found the last two Burroughs stories I read a little disappointing and had begun to wonder if he was one of those authors from my early years whose work wasn’t going to hold up for me. Now I know that’s not the case, so I’m glad I have quite a few unread ERB novels to get to. Some of them, I may not like, but I’ll bet many of them are going to be enjoyable. THE MONSTER MEN certainly was.

Tarzan: Untamed Frontiers - Gary A. Buckingham

Tarzan wasn't my introduction to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, at least not if you're talking about the novels and not the movies based on them. That was the novel A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, which I've written about here before. But very early on, I bought a copy of the Whitman edition of TARZAN OF THE APES (the one with the Official Ape-English Dictionary; I'd bet a hat some of you have a copy of that very edition still on your shelves) and was hooked on the series. I think I've read all the Tarzan novels, some more than once, and also read Fritz Leiber's TARZAN AND THE VALLEY OF GOLD and Will Murray's two Wild Adventures of Tarzan novels. The character is one of my all-time favorites. I even wrote a Tarzan fanfiction novel when I was in junior high. I'm talking probably 30,000 to 40,000 words. The handwritten manuscript is long gone, of course.

So when I heard about a volume called TARZAN: UNTAMED FRONTIERS, collecting a novella and a novelette about Tarzan by Burroughs scholar Gary A. Buckingham, I had to have a copy. I'm glad I was able to get my hands on one, because these two yarns are thoroughly entertaining. The title novella is a prequel to one of the best novels in the series, TARZAN THE UNTAMED, and concerns the Waziri tribe's move across Africa to make their home in the area where Tarzan establishes his own headquarters. There are some excellent action scenes in this one. The novelette, "Tarzan and the Secret of Katanga" (first published in the hardback edition of Will Murray's novel TARZAN: RETURN TO PAL-UL-DON) is even better. This is a sequel to TARZAN THE UNTAMED and is set in the days leading up to World War II. The story finds Tarzan battling Nazi agents trying to take over a uranium mine, which is good enough by itself, but that mine holds a dangerous secret that makes the story even better. Great battles against man and beast abound.

Probably the best thing about these stories is that Buckingham really captures Tarzan's personality, both as the King of the Jungle and as John Clayton, Lord Greystoke. There's more Tarzan by Buckingham in the pipeline, and I'm looking forward to it.

The present volume is a limited edition and is available direct from the author. You can find information on how to get a copy here. I should also mention that it has a spectacular wraparound cover by Dan Parsons, as well as interior illustrations by Parsons, Neal Adams, Joe DeVito, Chris Adams, and Peggy Adler. Beautiful work, all the way around.

Classic Adventure Pulp: The Resurrection of Jimber Jaw - Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs was one of my favorite authors when I was a kid, but there was plenty of his work I never got around to, and I've read him only sporadically since then. I want to go back and catch up on some of that unread stuff, and I've started with "The Resurrection of Jimber Jaw" (great title!), a novelette that was published originally in the February 20, 1937 issue of ARGOSY, the lead story with a good cover by Emmett Watson.

This story involves a couple of American scientists who are flying over the wastes of Siberia for reasons that are convoluted and, frankly, not all that convincing. When they're forced to land by an engine malfunction, they find a prehistoric man frozen in a chunk of ice. Since one of the scientists just happens to specialize in freezing living things and bringing them back to life, they decide to thaw out the guy they find, who they nickname Jimber Jaw because he resembles a grizzly bear of that name one of the fellows once saw.

Now, there are usually only two ways a set-up like this can go: comedy or bloody horror. Burroughs opts for comedy, and there's plenty of the dry wit that crops up so often in his later work. It's pretty funny, too, and the story is well-written overall.

The problem with "The Resurrection of Jimber Jaw" is that the plot is rather thin, and Burroughs merely summarizes much of the action, so that some of it reads more like an outline than a story. This is a yarn that's really crying out for more length and a better developed plot.

As it is, the humor and the fast pace kept me reading effortlessly, and overall, I enjoyed it. I can't help but feel, though, that it could have been much better. That won't stop me from reading more of those Burroughs stories I haven't gotten to yet.

Tarzan, Conqueror of Mars - Will Murray

As I’ve mentioned here before, my introduction to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs was the 1963 Ace paperback reprint of A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, loaned to me by my sister’s boyfriend. Shortly after that, I bought the Whitman edition of TARZAN OF THE APES, and by the time I was finished with those two, I was a Burroughs fan for life. If I had to choose between his two best-known series, I’d have to say that I prefer the Mars books to the Tarzan novels, but only by a whisker.

So beyond any shadow of a doubt, I am, through and through, the target audience for the new novel by Will Murray, TARZAN, CONQUEROR OF MARS. And just as I would have expected, this crossover between the two series is great.

This is the third of Murray’s novels authorized by the Burroughs estate to feature Tarzan and his first crack at John Carter. He captures both characters just about perfectly, and the sections of the book narrated by John Carter are so good I want to see a solo novel starring the Warlord of Mars. The plot finds Tarzan transported to Mars in the same mysterious fashion that John Carter was in A PRINCESS OF MARS, the first book in that series. The first half of this book is a travelogue of sorts, a staple of early science fiction, as Tarzan encounters first the great white apes of Barsoom (as its inhabitants call Mars) and then the fierce, four-armed green men, while exploring the planet and searching for some way to get back to Earth. Then this storyline intersects one featuring John Carter . . . and things do not go well.

Murray makes great use of the concepts created by Burroughs and adds some of his own, coming up with new threats to menace our heroes and expanding the geography of Barsoom. The real virtues of this novel, however, are the great action scenes and the way Murray so vividly recreates Burroughs’ style and voice. TARZAN, CONQUEROR OF MARS really does read as if ERB himself wrote it. Reading it transported me back to those great days when I was first discovering so many authors who became life-long favorites. Simply put, this is great stuff, and I’m grateful to Will Murray for writing it and Altus Press for publishing it.  

The Wrap Up

READING

I read 127 books this year, a small increase from last year's 116. 77 of them were e-books, so while that makes up the majority of my reading, I still read quite a few print books, too, and I expect that rough split to continue. 33 of the 127 were review copies. I wasn't able to review all the books that were sent to me, but I read and blogged about as many of them as I could and I'm sure some of the others will show up on the blog in the future. 21 of the 127 were books that I edited and published. In looking through the list, I noticed that I didn't read any books published in 2015 by the so-called Big Five. The only new books I read from traditional publishers came from Kensington and Baen, companies that have distribution deals with the Big Five but are independently owned, and there were only a few of those. Everything else I read was either small press, self-published, or decades old. This wasn't intentional. I'm certainly not boycotting the Big Five. But it's an unavoidable fact that they're publishing less and less that I want to take the time to read these days, while there's so much good stuff coming out from those other sources that I couldn't even hope to keep up with it. The important thing to me is that I don't think I'll ever run out of good books to read.

Which brings us to my top ten favorites of the books I read this year, in alphabetical order by author:

LIE CATCHERS, Paul Bishop

THE CRIME OF OUR LIVES, Lawrence Block

THE SHOTGUN RIDER, Peter Brandvold

TARZAN THE TERRIBLE, Edgar Rice Burroughs

THE BIG DRIFT, Patrick Dearen

101 ESSENTIAL TEXAS BOOKS, Glenn Dromgoole and Carlton Stowers

FIRE WITH FIRE, Charles E. Gannon

TURN ON THE HEAT, A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)

RIVER RANGE, L.P. Holmes

WAITING FOR A COMET, Richard Prosch

My short list had 17 books on it, and I could have added another dozen or more that were pretty close. So it wasn't easy getting this list down to 10, but there they are, for what it's worth.

WRITING

As those of you who have read yesterday's post are aware, I wrote just over a million words this year, the 11^th consecutive year I've reached that mark. That breaks down to 12 novels and 7 shorter pieces of fiction, most of them novelette or novella length. Right now my plan is write at least that much in 2016. I'll need to if I'm going to keep up with the projects I've committed to do. It's a lot of hard work, but I'm still having fun so I don't see any reason to stop now.

PUBLISHING

Rough Edges Press continues to occupy a significant portion of my time. With plenty of invaluable technical help from Livia, along with some great covers, REP brought out 9 books in the Blaze! Adult Western series, along with a number of reprints and originals from Stephen Mertz, Ed Gorman, John Hegenberger, James J. Griffin, and David Hardy. We published three original anthologies, the two WEIRD MENACE volumes and the Alternate History anthology TALES FROM THE OTHERVERSE. The Blaze! series will continue in 2016, along with a full slate of original and reprint novels and collections, and we'll also have a big science fiction anthology next summer, if all goes according to plan. More details on that later. UPDATE: I added a picture of all the books REP published in 2015 to the top of the post.

So you can see there's plenty going on to keep me busy. I guess I stay out of trouble that way. Many thanks to those of you who have stuck with the blog for another year. I'll be around.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, October 3, 1936

So, this issue of ARGOSY only has stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard ("A Gent from the Pecos", one of the Pike Bearfield stories), H. Bedford-Jones, L. Ron Hubbard, Theodore Roscoe, Anthony M. Rud, and Lawrence G. Blochman. That's all. Just another week at the newsstand in 1936.

Tarzan: Return to Pal-ul-don - Will Murray

Tarzan returns in the first novel authorized by Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. in quite a while, and Will Murray, who has done such a good job continuing the Doc Savage series, is a more than logical choice to carry on with ERB's legacy as well. The title of RETURN TO PAL-UL-DON sums up the plot: John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, has become an RAF aviator during World War II, and he's assigned to locate a British Intelligence agent code-named Ilex who has gone missing in Africa. By this time, Tarzan and the rest of his immediate family have taken the elixir that keeps them from aging and makes them practically immortal, so he's basically the same Lord of the Jungle who participated in the previous World War in Burroughs' novels TARZAN THE UNTAMED and TARZAN THE TERRIBLE (which I've written about as Friday's Forgotten Books in recent weeks).

The trail of the missing spy leads Tarzan to the lost land of Pal-ul-don, where most of TARZAN THE TERRIBLE took place. He's in a region he hasn't visited before, however, so he encounters several species of prehistoric beasts he didn't come across on his previous trip. He also runs into some of the creepiest and most formidable enemies he's ever battled, but he has help from a great new character, the elephant Tarzan dubs Torn Ear, who turns out to be one of the Ape-man's best sidekicks ever.

Everything good you're read about this novel is true: Murray does a great job of capturing Burroughs' style and pacing, the characters are interesting, the setting is vividly rendered, and the action is almost non-stop. Reading it really took me back to those long-ago days when I was eagerly grabbing every Ace and Ballantine edition of Burroughs' work I could find on the spinner racks. If you remember that time, or even if you discovered Burroughs more recently, you need to check out RETURN TO PAL-UL-DON. It gets a very high recommendation from me and makes me wonder...is there a chance we'll get a new John Carter novel one of these days?

Forgotten Books: Tarzan the Terrible - Edgar Rice Burroughs

I read TARZAN THE UNTAMED when I was in the sixth grade, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, and I soon followed it up with the sequel, TARZAN THE TERRIBLE, which I'd never reread until now. This one starts out with Tarzan continuing the search for Jane, who's been kidnapped by German soldiers during World War I. He soon discovers that she's escaped from her captors and set off on her own, and in trailing her Tarzan finds himself in another of Edgar Rice Burroughs' vividly created lost civilizations, this one the land of Pal-ul-don, enclosed by an almost impenetrable swamp. This isolation has allowed prehistoric species to survive, such as the triceratops, known to the inhabitants of Pal-ul-don as a gryf. Humanity has evolved differently in Pal-ul-don, too, and the people there have tails, among other oddities.

It's a great setting for a Tarzan adventure, and Burroughs has a lot of fun with it, plunging Tarzan and ultimately Jane as well into wars, political and religious intrigue (with some distinctly satirical overtones about our own world), and jungle derring-do. Tarzan learns how to tame the gryfs, sort of, and winds up riding around on one. If the mental image of Tarzan and Jane riding around on the back of a triceratops doesn't set your pulse to racing, well, then, you're not a twelve-year-old boy at heart like I am.

All the quibbles I had about TARZAN THE UNTAMED don't really apply to this novel. Yes, there's a lot of capture/escape/pursuit and cutting back and forth between the various storylines, but it's much more focused in TARZAN THE UNTAMED, which isn't nearly as episodic as the previous book. The land of Pal-ul-don is a well-developed setting, and it's not surprising that Will Murray made use of it in his new novel TARZAN: RETURN TO PAL-UL-DON (my review of which will be coming up soon). It bothered me a little that Tarzan gets captured as easily as he does a couple of times, but hey, not even an Ape Man is infallible. And the ending, honestly, is a bit of a deus ex machina. But all in all, this adventure roars right along quite nicely from start to finish and is well deserving of its place in the upper rank of Tarzan novels.

It's strange, looking back on that time more than fifty years ago, and remembering that when I first read them, TARZAN THE UNTAMED was my favorite of this linked pair, although I liked TARZAN THE TERRIBLE just fine. My opinion has turned around with this recent rereading. I think TARZAN THE TERRIBLE is a much better book. Still, I liked them both and am happy to have revisited them five decades later. (The scan at the top is from the Ballantine edition, with cover artwork by Richard Powers. That's the edition I read there at the Rock School when I probably should have been doing actual schoolwork. But hey, in reality I was studying for my career, I just didn't know it at the time.) 

Forgotten Books: Tarzan the Untamed - Edgar Rice Burroughs

I have a copy of Will Murray's new Tarzan novel, RETURN TO PAL-UL-DON, but I thought before I read it that I would reread the two original Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs most closely associated with it, TARZAN THE UNTAMED and TARZAN THE TERRIBLE. RETURN TO PAL-UL-DON is a sequal to TARZAN THE TERRIBLE, and since TARZAN THE UNTAMED leads directly into that book, it seemed like the place to start. Besides, I vividly recall reading TARZAN THE UNTAMED during study hall in sixth grade (at the Rock School in Azle, for those of you familiar with it) more than fifty years ago and thinking it was great.

Well, this is one of those cases where the reality doesn't quite match the memory, but I'm still glad I read the book. For those of you who haven't, it's divided roughly into thirds. In the first third, German troops raid Lord Greystoke's farm in British East Africa during World War I and murder Tarzan's wife Jane. Tarzan isn't there at the time, of course, but when he finds out about Jane's death, he sets off to wipe out the entire German army in Africa and darned near succeeds. This is the most famous and controversial section of the book, which not surprisingly angered a lot of German readers when it was published there. It's also pretty good, with lots of fast-moving action.

Then in the second section of the novel, Tarzan meets a beautiful blond German spy and a stranded British aviator, and the three of them have a bunch of adventures both together and separately, mostly involving a tribe of cannibals and some native troops who have deserted from the German army. In the first section Burroughs stuck to one storyline, Tarzan's vengeance quest, but in the middle third his trademark parallel plotting pops up, and the structure emphasizes that the only purpose of this seemingly endless round of capture/escape, capture/escape, capture/escape is to fill up pages. It gets tiresome in a hurry.

But then things pick up again in the third and final section of the book when our three protagonists find themselves in one of the many lost cities that are scattered across Burroughs' version of Africa. It's not nearly as inventive as some of the other lost cities Burroughs came up with, but it's colorfully described and the story perks along at a much better clip before coming to a rousing finale. Burroughs saves two big plot twists for the very end, but I suspect most readers saw them coming a long way off, even in 1917 when this yarn first appeared in serial form under the title "Tarzan and the Valley of Luna" in the pulp magazine ALL-STORY WEEKLY.

So TARZAN THE UNTAMED doesn't hold up quite as well as I might have hoped, considering how much I liked it all those years ago, but there's enough good stuff in it that I certainly enjoyed reading it. If that middle section had been tightened up a lot it would have landed in the top five or six books in the series as far as I'm concerned. But the real reason I read it was because it lays the groundwork for TARZAN THE TERRIBLE, and I'll be getting to that one soon.

(The cover scan at the top of this post is the edition I read all those years ago, with art by Robert Abbett, who did the covers for most, if not all, of the mid-Sixties Ballantine editions of Burroughs' novels, I believe. I bought every one of them I found on the paperback spinner racks back in those days. I thought about buying a copy of that same edition on-line so I could reread it that way, but I wound up reading an e-book version instead.)

The Ape Man's Brother - Joe R. Lansdale

Who better to tell the true, previously-untold tale of a certain Ape Man and his adopted brother among the great apes than Joe R. Lansdale? Nobody, that's who, and so that's what Joe does in THE APE MAN'S BROTHER, an excellent novella published by Subterranean Press.

Joe makes it plain early on that this isn't exactly the same Ape Man those of us of a certain age grew up reading about, and watching movies about on Saturday morning TV. There's more sex and violence, for one thing, and a lot of deadpan humor, not to mention some alternate history that ties this novel in with other books and stories Lansdale has written. The story takes the two protagonists through their adventures in a lost land, their first encounter with civilization, trips to New York and Hollywood, and a dangerous mix of love, lust, jealousy, and greed that culminates in a great adventure involving a zeppelin.

Edgar Rice Burroughs purists may not care for some of this, but I'm an ERB fan from 'way back (50 years, at least) and while I can't speak for Joe, I sense a genuine affection for Burroughs and his work in THE APE MAN'S BROTHER. There are plenty of subtle hints that he's very familiar with Burroughs' novels, not only the Tarzan series but others as well. (And he should be, considering that he completed the unfinished Tarzan novel Burroughs left behind.) I'm not big on deconstructing myths, but when it's done in a good-hearted way I don't mind.

That's the case with THE APE MAN'S BROTHER, which I found to be compelling, entertaining reading. Highly recommended. (And thanks to Scott Cupp for recommending it to me.)