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 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!

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.

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.  

King Kong vs. Tarzan - Will Murray

Okay, picture this: Tarzan . . . riding an elephant . . . leading a herd of elephants . . . fighting King Kong.

If that doesn't get your blood racing, you're probably not the target audience for Will Murray's excellent new novel, KING KONG VS. TARZAN. This top-notch adventure yarn fills in a gap in the original King Kong movie and tells the story of how Carl Denham, Jack Driscoll, Ann Darrow, Captain Englehorn, and the crew of the Wanderer get the captured King Kong from Skull Island back to New York. Turns out they have to stop in Africa along the way to take on supplies, and Kong escapes, and Tarzan shows up to help corral the big ape.

This is a great idea, and Murray tells the story in his usual fast-paced, exciting prose. There are some spectacular scenes in this one. Murray does a fine job of capturing the characters. I really hope there are more Tarzan novels to come from him. For me, a book like this really makes me feel like I'm back on my parents' front porch on a warm summer day with nothing to do but read. Well, maybe a break to play baseball later, but most of the day I'd spend happily lost in Africa with the Lord of the Jungle and the King of Skull Island. Highly recommended.

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.)

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: The New Adventures of Tarzan

When I was a kid, one of the local TV stations showed Tarzan movies every Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon. I was a faithful viewer and watched many of them over and over again, especially the Johnny Weissmuller movies. One Tarzan film that I didn’t like at all was TARZAN AND THE GREEN GODDESS, starring somebody called Bruce Bennett as the Ape Man. To a Weissmuller fan who had never read any of Burroughs’ novels, almost everything about TARZAN AND THE GREEN GODDESS was wrong. Bennett’s Tarzan wore clothes, spoke perfect English, and hung around with a chimpanzee called Nkima. Where was Cheetah? And the story took place in Guatemala, for goodness sake, instead of Africa. What were they thinking when they made this one?


Well, now I know, of course, that TARZAN AND THE GREEN GODDESS was the edited-down, feature version of the serial THE NEW ADVENTURES OF TARZAN, starring Herman Brix, who later went by the screen name Bruce Bennett. And the things I hated as a kid about Brix’s portrayal of Tarzan now don’t bother me at all, since I know that was the way Burroughs actually wrote the character.


To get the serial’s weaknesses out of the way first: the pace is glacial, the acting is uniformly bad, the script includes chapter after chapter of mostly pointless running around the Guatemalan jungle, and the production values are cheap even by the standards of the day. The lack of a musical score except over the opening and closing credits also hurts the film.


Now for the things I liked about it. Herman Brix is no great shakes as an actor at this stage of his career (he improved some in later years) but he looks just fine in the part, as both the civilized Lord Greystoke and the Ape Man. The only thing I didn’t like about his performance is the awful yell he does. He’s supposed to be yelling “Mangani”, which is reasonable since that was Burroughs’ name for the race of great apes that raised Tarzan, but it just doesn’t sound right to me. Some of the action scenes are fairly well done, and there’s some unintentional humor when Tarzan battles a group of Guatemalan ninjas, for want of a better word, who wear outfits that bear a marked resemblance to KKK robes, only made from black cloth instead of white. The filmmakers save the best stuff almost for last, in the penultimate chapter that takes place mostly on a sailing ship caught at sea in a bad storm. There are some really nice back-lit shots of Tarzan battling the villainous ship’s captain in the pouring rain. The final chapter itself is bizarrely anti-climactic, as the scene shifts to Greystoke Manor in England, where there’s a party going on and for some reason Tarzan and everyone else are dressed in gypsy outfits. Several flashbacks recap the high points of the story (it doesn’t take long), and then it all wraps up without any further action.


This probably makes the serial sound a little worse than it really is. I enjoyed it and am glad to have seen the whole thing after watching the shorter version as a kid.

Forgotten Books: Tarzan and the Lion Man - Edgar Rice Burroughs

As with so many of these books, I can tell you where and at least roughly when I bought my original copy of this novel. I picked it up used at Thompson’s Bookstore in downtown Fort Worth during one of those long-ago, seemingly-endless-at-the-time junior high summers I spent watching old movies on TV, playing sandlot baseball, kissing a girl who was spending the summer with her cousin who lived down the street from me (I wish I could remember her name!), and reading mass quantities of comic books, digest magazines, and paperbacks. I probably read most of it on my parents’ front porch stretched out on one of those folding lounge chairs made from interwoven strips of green and white plastic that left a crosshatch pattern on any bare skin that came in contact with them for very long.


But what about the book, you say, or am I going to spend this entire post waxing nostalgic? Well, I can tell you that I remembered it as one of my favorites from the Tarzan series and one of my favorite Burroughs novels, period, because it was so goofy and over-the-top. When I recently came across a copy of that same Ace edition with the Frazetta cover, I decided it was time to reread it and see how it holds up after all those years.


I’m happy to report that I enjoyed it just as much, if not more, this time around. It’s certainly the funniest Burroughs novel I’ve ever read.


Tarzan himself barely appears in the first half of this book. It’s the story of a group of filmmakers who go to Africa to make a picture about a “lion man”, a boy who is raised by lions and becomes, well, the king of the jungle. This allows Burroughs to make considerable fun of Hollywood, including the casting of a novice actor and champion marathon runner as the Tarzan-like Lion Man. Any resemblance to champion swimmer Johnny Weissmuller I’m sure was completely intended. By this time in his career, Burroughs had already gone through the experience of producing his own Tarzan movie, the serial THE NEW ADVENTURES OF TARZAN, starring Herman Brix (later known as Bruce Bennett), so he’s able to paint a satirical picture of Hollywood executives, directors, and writers, along with the other members of a motion picture company on location.


Not surprisingly, the movie safari runs into a lot of trouble. They’re attacked by hostile natives, betrayed by some of their own, and split up to endure some assorted adventures, as Burroughs employs his usual technique of cutting back and forth between parallel storylines. So far, so good, although other than the humor there’s really not much to distinguish TARZAN AND THE LION MAN from most of the other books in the generally lackluster second half of the Tarzan series.


But then, halfway through, Burroughs comes up with a twist so bizarre that I remembered it vividly more than four decades later, and that plot element, which I can’t even describe without ruining it for any potential readers, dominates the rest of the book. Reading it now, it made slightly more sense to me than it did the first time around, but it still requires a considerable suspension of disbelief. Burroughs makes it work, though, and he’s not content to leave things that way, either, but instead piles on more and more goofiness, throwing in plot twists almost all the way to the end.


And what an ending. The final chapter serves as an epilogue to the book and is one of the best things Burroughs ever wrote. Which is why I issue this warning: if you happen to read the Ace edition of this book, don’t read the foreword by Camille Cazedessus, Jr., which gives away ’way too much of what happens, especially in the end.


I’ll be honest with you. You might find this book stupid, silly, and ridiculous and think that I’m crazy for recommending it. What can I say? It worked for me, otherwise I wouldn’t have remembered it so well and enjoyed it so much 45 years later. It’s really not representative of the Tarzan series, other than TARZAN AND THE FOREIGN LEGION, which has some of the same sort of humor although it’s played much more straight for the most part. But if you want to read a book that’s almost a MAD Magazine version of Tarzan, written by the character’s creator himself, look no further than TARZAN AND THE LION MAN.