I did read some of the Mars stuff, but I remember Tarzan the Terrible as being the best of him I ever read.
Ah, so long since I've read the
Tarzan books I'm not sure I can place that one, either.
(I'm going to have to go to the library and pick some of these up, because I doubt I still have any of the moldy paperbacks lying around here amid the thousands of volumes in bookcases, on closet shelves and stacked up on every horizontal not devoted to something else.
)
Tarzan at the Earth's Core was definitely fun, if you haven't read that one. A rare cross-over between Burrough's series, it combines his prehistoric inner world of Pelucidar and with the Ape Man and would also make a really terrific movie. For that matter, so would the original
Tarzan of the Apes, which has
never had a proper film adaptation.
I think both the novel and the character would be better thought of today if Burroughs had stopped with the first book and if there had never been any films. And Burroughs was, in may ways, a better writer than he gets credit for. His real problem is that he became enormously successful at the lowest end of the writing business - the penny-a-word world of the pulps - where he could sell consistently and keep his familiy in food and clothing, but only by churning out a huge volume of work. If he been in a position to write and rewrite and polish and get published between hard covers, his sheer talent as a story-teller and the energy he poured into his work might (with a good editor) have become a
respectable popular novelist in the mold of Robert Louis Stevenson.
I forgot who it was who wrote the comparison, but someone charted Burrough's growth as a wiriter by comparing the opening lines of the first story he sold (
A Princess of Mars, which launched one successful series) and the second (
Tarzan of the Apes, the greatest literary franchise in between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond.)
Princess is the first-person narrative of John Carter, but it opens with an "editor's note" that explains how the story came to be written and published. (A literary device similar to Dr. Watson publishing the cases of Sherlock Holmes. Burroughs originally published the story under a pseudonym, Norman Bean [a play on "Normal Bean" - "Not Crazy".] But the editor's note is signed "Edgar Rice Burroughs", who is presented as the nephew of John Carter, and was therefore seen by the original readers as just another fictional character.)
This is the opening of that note:
"To the reader of this work: In submitting Captain Carter's manuscript to the world, I believe that a few words relative to this remarkable personality will be in order."
Boring, right?
Here's the opening of
Tarzan:
"I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other"
Now that's a
hook.
Burroughs learned the difference between the first and the second in the space of less than a year, and the magazine the carried
Tarzan sold many times the number of copies as
Princess. BTW, the actual opening line of Carter's first person narrative is much better than Burrough's editor's note:
"I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood"
Regards,
Joe
