Review: Guns of Mars - Chuck Dixon

If you don’t count all the Tarzan movies I watched on TV as a kid, my introduction to the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs was the novel A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS. My sister’s boyfriend loaned me the Ace shorty edition of that book sometime in the early Sixties. I loved it and became a lifelong Burroughs fan, especially the Mars series. Or Barsoom, to use the proper Martian name.

I haven’t been a fan of Chuck Dixon’s work for quite that long, but he’s still one of my favorite authors. So when I heard that Dixon was writing a novel set on Burroughs’ Mars, I was thrilled and looked forward to reading it.

GUNS OF MARS did not disappoint me. In the least.

This novel is set on Barsoom approximately a thousand years after the era of Burroughs’ hero John Carter. Mars, already a dying planet in Carter’s day, has become even more inhospitable. Water is scarce and the most valuable commodity on the planet. As the novel opens, Kal Keddaq, a fugitive Thark (the four-armed warrior race created by Burroughs), is trying to reach the northern pole where the ice still provides a source of water. But a human bounty hunter is on his trail, and so is a mysterious figure whose identity and motivation Dixon plays close to the vest for a while.

The bounty hunter captures Kal, who escapes but then is captured by the other member of our trio of main characters. In this back and forth, Kal and the bounty hunter discover a clue to the location of a hidden source of the best water on the planet, and that becomes the prize that everybody is after, including a number of other enemies and untrustworthy allies they encounter along the way.

If this is starting to sound familiar, it should, because GUNS OF MARS is very much a Spaghetti Western set on Burroughs’ Barsoom in its latter days. And it’s hugely entertaining, told in vivid, fast-paced prose that takes advantage of Burroughs’ creation while at the same time cleverly adding to it. The characters are all interesting, the action is plentiful and suitably gritty, and I just had a great time reading it. This is a Front Porch Book for sure, like so many of those other great adventure yarns I read back in those days.

GUNS OF MARS is available on Amazon in an e-book edition at the moment. I believe a print edition is in the works. I started my reading this year with Max Allan Collins’ RETURN OF THE MALTESE FALCON, a superb variation on another old favorite of mine, and now I’ve followed that up with Chuck Dixon’s visit to Barsoom. I don’t expect the rest of the year to live up to that, but it’s a spectacular beginning, for sure, with both books strong contenders to be on my Top Ten list at the end of the year.

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.

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.