Dr Hermes Reviews - TARZAN Back to our Contents Page

TARZAN AND THE LEOPARD MEN (Sep 13, 2005) First published in BLUE BOOK from August 1932 to January 1933. This one was a real chore to slog through. If you are a pulp or adventure fan who had never read a Tarzan book before and happened upon TARZAN AND THE LEOPARD MEN, you might think, "Hey, that's not bad. Wonder if there's any more in this series?" But if you had enjoyed the earlier books (some of which are just excellent in the genre, like TARZAN THE TERRIBLE or TARZAN AND THE JEWELS OF OPAR), by the time you got to this eighteenth episode, serious deja vu will have swamped you. Actually, it has a fine premise to base an adventure on. Instead of finding another pair of warring cities originally founded in Africa somehow by Olmecs or Picts, Tarzan tackles the cult of Leopard Men. So much could be done with this. A dreaded secret society of African tribesmen (living unsuspected in their various villages) who don leopard robes and steel claws to carry out missions of murder and cannibalism... how could you ask for better villains? And the actual plot of the book uses this idea (in a lukewarm way), as the Apeman joins forces with Orando of the Utengi, the only chief brave enugh to stand up to the cult.   There could be savage battles with the killers, our heroes trying to find out which tribesmen are loyal and which belong the cult, having a young native forced into the society and struggling between his loyalty to his family or to the cult. And at the end, one hundred Waziri led by Muviro would come charging down for a big slaughter. It could have been a great yarn. But no. By this time, Burroughs was grudgingly cranking out stories about a character he had long since grown tired of. I personally felt the series peaked around TARZAN AND THE ANT MEN and then twisted its ankle and tumbled downhill fast (with an occasional flash of the old spark here and there.) There are large stretches in this book that I half suspect were pasted out of earlier epics with new names pencilled in. At the very beginning, Tarzan is in a tree in a storm, when a tornado (a TORNADO? In the jungle?) sends him crashing down and leaves him pinned helplessly under a huge branch. Once again, a concussion has left him able to speak and reason but has wiped away all memory of his identity. (Just once, I would like to see a head injury leave Tarzan talking like a duck or seeing everything upside down for a while, instead of just this selective amnesia.) Or course, later on, a second sharp smack to the cranium instantly restores all his memories and he's not any worse for all the head trauma. I really don't see the narrative purpose of this particular session of "Who am I?" Tarzan is taken to be a spirit by Orando and is renamed Muzimo (and little N'Kima the kvetching monkey is now believed to be the ghost of the slain warrior Nyamwegi). What's the point of all this? If I didn't know better, I'd suspect Burroughs was trying to fill up page after page with Tarzan trying half-heartedly to remember his real name and Orando speculating on muzimo theology. And frankly, it would be a lot more exciting if Tarzan found evidence that the Leopard Men were active again, that they were terrorizing tribes who were under his protection and were defying his law. Imagine the Apeman standing up after searching for life in the victims of a massacred village, growling "Leopard Men....again!" and then hurtling up into the trees to begin his war. It would have made him seem genuinely heroic, Lord of the Jungle in more than nickname. The other half of the story involves three white Americans who keep running into each other, being captured and rescued, escaping one pickle after another and in general carrying on like the exact same characters in half a dozen earlier books. There's the Playboy centerfold candidate called Kali Bwana, who is looking for her lost brother; there are two ivory hunters, Old Timer and the Kid. (Wait, wait... don't tell me who the kid really is, I think I can guess.) Almost inevitably, Old Timer and Kali Bwana get off on the wrong foot, hold unreasonable grudges against each other throughout all their adventures together and stubbornly resist the instant True Love that boings up between them like a stepped-on rake. Huh, did I doze off? Is it 11:45 already... what page was I on? Anyway, there are a few moments where we get a glimpse of the old magic that made Edgar Rice Burroughs in his prime such a major pulp writer. The scenes in the Leopard Man temple hidden on an island guarded by crocodiles are lurid and ominous enough (a hand falls out of the merrily bubbling stew pot). And there is a moment when Kali Bwana lies trembling as a leopard crouches and is ready to spring at her... and hurtling up silently behind the cat silently a huge bronzed giant. This was one of the few scenes where I got a clear visual snapshot. Some of the racial snarks are a bit more blatant than usual ("He saw that religious and alcoholic drunknness were rapidly robbing them of what few brains and little self-control Nature had vouchsafed them") and we don't see enough of the noble Utengi tribe to counter-balance that impression. Also, it's disquieting to see Burroughs ragging on Pygmies the way he does. I read a couple of books years ago by a man named Jean-Pierre Hallet (CONGO KITABU and PYGMY KITABU*) who lived among these people for years (and in fact grew up with them until he was six). He never mentioned that they were cannibals, filed their yellow teeth to points or beat their captives, and other reference or travel books also gave a different impression than Burroughs did. Maybe Kali Bwana just fell in with a particularly riff-raff Pygmy (more correctly called Khoi-San?) tribe, I guess. Finally, a couple of Mangani make a belated appearance and it's worth noting that they are definitely a unique species. "It was evident that they were not gorillas, and that they were more man-like than any apes he had seen." I'd like to see the next Tarzan movie or TV show dwell on this and show the Mangani as sort of Bigfoot or hominid creatures, contrasting them with a actual live gorillas to make the point. __________ *Here :http://www.pygmyfund.org/eulogy.html is a eulogy page for Hallet. As you can tell, he was an interesting guy who led a more exciting life than most of us. Hallet had good observational skills and a clear writing style, but he also had a strong political bias and some of his speculation about African anthropology was, well, imaginative. (As I recall, he thought all the world's religions had their source in Pygmy beliefs.) Great material for thrillers, though -- it's too bad Robert E Howard couldn't somehow have been sent back copies of Hallet's books... think of the plots he might have spun from some of those incidents!

TARZAN'S QUEST (Jan 18, 2004) From the October 1935 to March 1936 issues of BLUE BOOK, where it appeared as "Tarzan and the Immortal Men", this is surprisingly lively and enjoyable. The Tarzan series peaked about halfway through; after TARZAN AND THE ANT MEN, Burroughs dropped our hero`s family as though they had never existed and grudgingly cranked out a repetitive number of books where the Apeman stumbled upon paired warring cities of lost civilizations. None of these books are completely hopeless or unreadable*, but compared to, say, TARZAN THE TERRIBLE or TARZAN AND THE JEWELS OF OPAR, they are limp and unexciting. The best thing about TARZAN`S QUEST is the unexpected return of Jane, Lady Greystoke. We haven`t seen her since TARZAN AND THE GOLDEN LION and she hasn`t even been mentioned for the past ten years. For all a new reader would know, the Apeman is a solitary creature meandering through Africa with only a monkey and a lion as companions. Not only does Jane turn up on the very first page, she actually gets more time onstage than Lord Greystoke himself. Jane is a delight, as always. She is so resourceful, competent, thoughtful and good-natured that she could carry the book by herself. Stranded in the jungle with a motley crew of people totally unsuited for survival there, she takes charge as well as Tarzan himself might and with much more patience. Jane can fashion a bow and arrows, leap lightly up into the trees and come back with game for everyone. At one point, she stubbornly refuses to give up her kill to a challenging leopard and promptly sends three arrows into the big cat`s heart. We are told early on that Jane has chartered a plane to go see what mischief her old man is getting into. ("You see, Lord Greystoke spends a great deal of time in Africa. I am planning on joining him there.") So evidently the previous eight books have been misleading, only showing us Tarzan when he`s on vacation and lumbering around the jungle. The rest of the time, he`s still taking care of his huge estate and spending time with his wife. (Still no sign of Korak, Miriem or little Jackie, though.) Now, this is an obvious observation but it seems significant that, while Burroughs` marriage to Emma was going sour, his alter-ego`s wife and family vanished from the stories. When he wrote this book, Burroughs was getting his divorce and solidifying a new relationship. In TARZAN`S QUEST, the crash survivors are burdened by the totally useless and whiny Princess Sborov. An old friend of Jane`s, this woman is a wealthy widow who remarried a much younger social climber with a title (much is made of this royalty scam). It`s just conjecture, but it seems likely that Burroughs was acting out his conflicts on the page with Jane representing his new love and the princess standing in for the wife he wishes to be rid of. (The fact that the princess abruptly ends up with a hatchet in her head might be a slight case of wish fulfilment.) Half the book follows the troubles of Jane`s party as they deal with the situation by the usual bickering and sniping we can expect in stories about survivors of shipwrecks or plane crashes. Buroughs lays it on pretty thick with the characterization, but then this IS pulp adventure where we want broad strokes and bright colors; we`re not dealing with Arthur Miller here. The stoic English butler Tibbs and the rough street-jive American pilot Brown are exaggerated stereoypes but at least they are distinct. One thing that I don`t like about Burroughs` villains is that he gives them such a comprehensive range of vileness. They are not men with a weakness for the flesh or uncontrolled greed or a violent temper. No, ever since Rokoff way back in RETURN OF TARZAN, the typical bad guy contains every possible evil trait you can name. The prince is this story shifts from cowardice to greed to lust to homicide at the blink of an eye. He`s so thoroughly despicable that it`s hard to give him any credence. Even one redeeming trait or a hint of remorse would have made him come to life on the page; as it is, he might as well have little horns and a barbed tail. The other half of the storyline follows Tarzan leading a squad of his intrepid Waziri to rescue Muviro`s kidnapped young daughter. There are these guys called the Kavuru living out there in the wilderness, and for hundreds of years they have been abducting nubile wenches for some mysterious purpose. It turns out the Kavuru are a sect of white barbarians who have discovered a longevity serum. They can stay young and robust indefinitely but, since the serum requires the glands and blood of young women..... well, (ahem) there are no Kavuru women left by this point and the Immortal Men must obtain the needed ingredients any way they can. The high priest of this cult is a buff blond guy named Kavandavanda, one of the better supervillains in Burroughs. Although he looks like a Malibu surfer, the necklace made of human teeth is a good clue to his real nature. He has lost track of exactly how old he is (maybe a thousand years old, maybe more), he heads a murderous cult that has killed who knows how many women to stay young (the last neophyte joined the order a hundred years earlier) and he has started developing psychic powers (the Kavuru put their victims in a compliant trance with a weird whistling call). Kavandavanda also has serious gender issues ("Man may only attain godliness alone. Woman weakens and destroys him.... How have we attained this deathlessness? Through women. We are all celibate. Our vows of celibacy were sealed in the blood of women....") Well, it`s true a vow of celibacy will make your life SEEM much longer. Despite all this rhetoric, Kavandavanda is (like just about every man in the books) immediately smitten with Jane Clayton and lusts for her bod. ("I`ll keep you; I`ll tame you - and I`ll start now.") Jane must be quite the babe. Everyone from shieks to aristocrats to gorillas gets one look at her and starts to pant and stamp one foot on the ground. The moment I read about the Kavuru, I would have bet money that Jane would end up their defiant prisoner, trading sassy remarks with the cult leader. Much has been made by Philip Jose Farmer and fans of the Kavuru pills. True, Tarzan divides a large supply of the longevity pills among the surviving members of the party. (Typically, Burroughs has a character remark the monkey Nkima deserves a share since "He`s sure a lot more use in the world than most people". Nice attitude. How about a few pills for good old Muviro, the lifelong friend who has come to Tarzan`s rescue so often? Or maybe Korak, his wife or their child. It`s hard to respect a man who would give extended life to his pet monkey rather than his own grandson.) Where was I? Oh, yes. Since a main ingredient of the Kavuru pills are the body parts of murdered young women, you might expect Jane and her friends to have a little misgiving about taking them. True, if you just had to swallow a single pill to get extended life, most people would be tempted enough to pop one. But it`s clearly stated that the pills have to be taken regularly to work, so this means once a month ("...each time that the moon comes full...") ingesting something made out of slaughtered human beings. Also, since the pills have only a temporary effect, and there is a large but finite supply divvied up here among five people (six, if they really give a share to Nkima), the pills are going to run out at some point. It has been a long time since 1934, and I think it`s safe to say the last Kavuru pill went down the hatch some time ago. If Tarzan is still running around looking like a thirty young old, it must be due to something else. (That witch doctor potion, maybe?) TARZAN`S QUEST has a lot going for it, especially when compared to the slack entries preceding and followng it. The two storylines move along fairly briskly and connect naturally. There is a great sinister menace in the Kavuru cult, Muviro and the Waziri are as bold and noble as you could ask. Even Nkima, whose antics can get tiresome quickly, has some nice episodes. It`s interesting to see Burroughs mention several times how uncomfortable the jungle is at best, with the insects and mud and steamy heat alternating with chilling thunderstorms. Even Tarzan, who has grown up here and who loves the place, isn`t comfortable in the jungle, he`s just hardened to it. Mostly, it`s great to see Jane onstage again, and although after this she again drops out of sight, we can assume she`s alive, healthy and still married to her bronzed giant of the forest. ______________ *Although I have been warned not to expect much reward in reading TARZAN AND THE LEOPARD MEN.

TARZAN AND THE FORBIDDEN CITY (June 20, 2004) I got up and walked across the room to retrieve the book. Halfway through, I realized that Tarzan was rescuing the members of a safari trapped in the ongoing war between two more lost cities of white people deep in Africa, that a young couple were starting to fall in love in the background and that the Apeman was about to be sent to still another arena to face a gladiator and to kill a lion* (the second which he knifes to death in this book). By this time, I had marked in the margins four separate times Tarzan had seized an opponent, raised him overhead and then thrown him to the ground; and the young debutante has twice been carried off by evildoers, once by a Great Ape and once an African warrior. (She would later be dragged off once more, this time underwater by a giant sea serpent...)       There were still ninety pages to go. The book blurred through the air and smacked hard against a closet door and I grumbled as I went to bring it back. TARZAN AND THE FORBIDDEN CITY isn`t unbearably awful in itself, it`s just leftover turkey warmed up the third day after Thanksgiving.         This book really had its origin in a 1934 radio serial written by Rob Thompson, "Tarzan and the Diamond of Asher". Evidently, someone stood behind Edgar Rice Burroughs with a gun to his head and forced him to rework the radio show into a magazine story, which then appeared in ARGOSY WEEKLY in March and April 1938 under the title "The Red Star of Tarzan", before eventually being further revised into the book we have today, TARZAN AND THE FORBIDDEN CITY. (I didn`t see the slightest reference to a Red Star anywhere in this story; maybe the original magazine version had a Communist villain?)       Well, the final result is pretty lame. There is not much of Burroughs' distinctive style in the writing, and almost no bitter sermons about how awful human beings are. On the other hand, there are none of those unexpected moments of great inventiveness that marked his work, either. There is a large unwieldy cast, about half of which get killed off without really contributing much.         Basically, the cause of all the commotion is something called the Father of Diamonds, a treasure held in a remote valley named Tuen-Baka. As seems inevitable, there are two cities here, Ashair and Thobos, which have been at war with each other for generations (something about Africa forces people to establish pairs of feuding settlements, I guess). We never find out where these people came from, but the mention of Isis and Horus probably means they were an Egyptian colony. At some point, Africa must have been filled with different expeditions from Greece, Israel, Egypt, the Crusaders, Atlantis, Crete, Phoenicia... all busily setting up pairs of cities to fight with each other. I`m surprised there wasn`t a Viking settlement in a Tarzan story.         A young man named Brian Gregory has disappeared into the wilderness, looking for the fabled Father of Diamonds; his father and sister want to go rescue him, and they can only enlist Tarzan`s help because they know Captain Paul D`Arnot of the French navy. (D`Arnot is smitten with Helen Gregory, who at nineteen has got to be less than half his age, but oh well....) D`Arnot is one of the few humans Tarzan likes (a holdover from his origin story), so he agrees to lead the expedition. At the same time, some vile scoundrels are also heading out after the big old diamond, and the hunter hired to guide the Gregorys´ safari is a murderous crook who hates "that monkey-man". The hunter is lustful for a beautiful femme fatale who fancies Tarzan, so you can see how there is likely to be plenty of trouble before they even get anywhere near the Forbidden City.         I`m a little surprised to see that the Great Apes are out looking for a victim to sacrifice in their ceremonial Dum-dum. They grab poor Helen (born to be abducted, that`s her) specifically for the purpose of later tearing her to bits after the dance. Say, Edgar, what was all the stuff you said about men being the only creatures who killed except for food or self-defense? Mention it to these apes.       Yet, despite all the slaughter and arguing and people chasing each other back and forth, the story never comes to life on the page. Burroughs obviously didn`t want to write this book and put little energy into it. Paul D`Arnot, the man who was Tarzan`s first human friend way back in TARZAN OF THE APES and who set him up in Paris for some interesting times, just idles through the story. He sweet-talks Helen Gregory, remarks every few pages how wonderful Tarzan is, and that`s about it. Some conversation between the two old chums, a little character development, would have given this story some heart it badly needs.           In the previous book, Jane made a much welcome comeback, bringing a spark of vitality and genuine emotion to the action. (This was TARZAN`S QUEST, which ended with those longevity pills being distributed to everyone.) Not only is Jane completely absent again (as is N`Kima), Tarzan is not once referred to as John Clayton or Lord Greystoke in this book. There is one brief explanation that he had been "raised by beasts among beasts" and that`s it. The Tarzan of this book is a simplified version with none of the inner conflicts which made him so interesting before. TARZAN AND THE FORBIDDEN CITY is filled with missed opportunities and plot points that are simply abandoned. At the start of the story, it seem Tarzan looks so much like the missing Paul Gregory that people refuse to believe he`s not. This is either the third or the fourth man in the series who is completely identical to Tarzan, so much like twins that they can`t be told apart. (Ladies, honestly, don`t you wish there were a lot of guys walking around who looked like Tarzan?) At one point, the Apeman rescues a warrior from a rather small Tyrannaosaur (about the size of a bull) but no more dinosaurs appear and the incident is not thought worth discussing later. Then, while wearing diving suits, our hero and his friends are attacked by (wait for it) vicious giant sea horses which have horns on their snouts. (?!) Sea unicorns, maybe?           And the final punchline, where the much coveted Father of Diamonds turns out to be a chunk of coal, wins the "Oh, Come ON!" for the year. Yes, we know today diamonds are made from coal deep inside the Earth, and yes, it`s so terribly ironic. But how did the people of Ashair know this? It`s like having Plato remark how interesting the Red Spot on Jupiter is... the information just wasn`t available. ______________ *Actually, it has become so monotonous having Tarzan kill a lion with a knife that this time he must face TWO of them at once to make it interesting. His elegant solution is to simply haul one lion up overhead (that`s about four hundred pounds of wriggling big cat there) and throw it at the other one. After the two beasts fight, the Apeman can simply stab the survivor, which at this point seems about as risky for him as shooing a cat off the couch. In addition to the three lions he dispatches, Tarzan also stabs to death a shark and a sea serpent, never getting a single bruise or scratch from these tangles. At some point, I almost expect him to start carrying on a conversation while wrestling with a lion.

TARZAN THE MAGNIFICENT [This is actually two novellas which have been slightly cut and revised to form a single book which is pretty enjoyable. After some of the dreary entries in the second half of the series, TARZAN THE MAGNIFICENT is a nice surprise, particularly the first half.]

"Tarzan and the Magic Men" (Sep 9, 2004) From the September and October 1936 issues of ARGOSY (later revised to form the first half of the book TARZAN THE MAGNIFICENT), this is a pleasant change of pace for our Apeman, as he tackles a pair of wizened old twin sorcerers who actually possess magic powers (well, a strong telepathic mind control, at any rate - they don't turn people into toads or shoot lightning bolts from their palms). The story is brisk and upbeat, with little of those sour sermons about how vile human beings are and how idyllic life in a jungle would be. In fact, the tone of the story is almost cheerful; maybe Edgar Rice Burroughs was going through a good phase of his life. Tarzan himself is much more likeable and heroic here than he was often presented in the later books. In the second half of the series, he was shown as sometimes indifferently watching an innocent person being stalked by a lion and not particularly caring what happens. Now, actually there is no reason why the Apeman couldn't be characterized as an unsympathetic anti-hero who would only help you if there was something in it for him. Such a characterization could work and might be considered more realistic. But frankly, I much prefer it when he's shown as genuinely noble and idealistic, the Lord of the Jungle in truth as well as in name, who has tried to stamp out slavery and cannibalism in the territory he has staked out for his own. In fact, the story opens with the Apeman prowling through Abyssinia (now called Ethiopia), far from his usual turf, on a fact-finding mission. ("He has come north at the behest of an emperor to investigate a rumor that a European power is attempting to cause the defection of a native chief by means of bribery.") In 1936, this would likely be Italian spies working for Mussolini. Come to think of it, this means Tarzan personally knows Haile Selassie, the genuine Ras Tafari himself... good conversation opener if he ever goes to Jamaica! As seems inevitable in the series, our hero finds two colonies of white people isolated deep within Africa, carrying on a perpetual feud. There are several aspects here that are quite different from the usual. For one thing, the Kaji are warrior women with an unlikely cultural program of racial manipulation. For centuries, they have been capturing stray white men who wander past and forcing them to take as many wives as the captured men can service (no! what a terrible fate, heh heh) with the goal of breeding for whiteness. Don't ask me where the Kaji got this notion, but by now (although they started as sub-Saharan African natives) they apparently look mostly like the Swedish Bikini Team. Now, what is interesting is that the characters wandering into this situation (an American travel writer named Stanley Wood and his two guides, Spike and Troll) are concerned that these stunning goddesses at one point originally came from black African tribespeople. Wood promptly begins a love at first sight tumble with their erratic Queen Gonfala. Never mind that she resembles Michelle Pfeiffer in her prime, Gonfala's ancestry would make her marriage to Wood unworkable ("I`m thinking of the Hell on earth that would be your lot - hers and yours. You know as well as I what one drop of colored blood does for a man or woman in the great democracy of the U.S.A. You'd both be ostracisized by the blacks as well as the whites. I`m not speaking from any personal prejudice; I`m just stating a fact. It`s hard and cruel and terrible, but it still remains a fact.") Apparently this theme upset quite a few readers back then, but to give Stanley Wood credit, he`s in Luv and intends to take Gonfala to the States no matter what anyone says. ("She must have Negro blood in her - they all have; but it doesn`t seem to make any difference to me - I'm just plain crazy about her...") As it happens, Burroughs cops out at the end with a foreseeable plot twist that makes the romance acceptable. There`s also a pair of great villains in this yarn, weathered old twins named Mafka and Woora. Mafka rules the Kaji with the help of his giant diamond talisman, the Konfal; the equally unappealing Woora leads his split-off faction the Zuli with HIS emerald. These are genuine magic stones with real powers of mind control and long-range hypnotism. As soon as Tarzan snatches up the Gonfal, he feels "a strange, uncanny power that had never before been his" and he finds he can mentally dominate everyone around him. Jeez, it`s Sauron`s One Ring all over again! But, being the sort of guy he is, the Apeman finds the power useful but he`s not particularly attached to it and he arranges for one stone to be given away, while he casually buries the other one deep in the forest in case he ever needs it. Tarzan himself hardly even can feel the hypnotic power of the great jewels that others find so overwhelming. ("Like the beasts of the jungle, he was immune [to witch-doctors and magic]. For what reason he did not know. Perhaps it was because he was without fear; perhaps his psychology was more that of the beast than of man.") After Jane's much needed return in the previous book TARZAN'S QUEST, it's good to see that she hasn`t been immediately forgotten again. Although she doesn`t actually appear on stage, Tarzabn does takes his female guest to stay at "his home - to the commodious bungalow where his wife welcomed and comforted her." Notice, too, the "sprawling" building is constructed centering around a large patio, where the guest can relax on "a reed chaise lounge, a copy of THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS in her hand." I like Tarzan`s duality most about the character. The same man who drops down from a tree to kill a wild pig and then eat the raw flesh, is the same person who taught himself Latin so he could read the classics in their original language. The too simplistic manbeast of some of the middle books, who was either eating or dozing in the trees with nothing much on his mind, doesn`t appeal to me as much as this strange complex character who is part of two different worlds. There is one aspect of this story that is puzzling and intriguing, and I still can`t figure out what Burroughs was trying to accomplish with it. For the entire length of the tale, the three white men keep wondering who this unusual guy who is helping them could be. He introduces himself just as "Clayton" because he thinks remaining anonymous will help him gather information (?), and although he is a nearly naked white man living in the jungle, killing lions with a knife and screaming out the victory cry of the great bull ape, the outsiders can`t quite figure out his identiity until the final page when Muviro enlightens them. What makes things puzzling is that they keep comparing him to Tarzan ("If there were such a bird as Tarzan of the Apes, I`d say this was he", one says, and "Say, that bird Tarzan has nothing on you.") In fact, the Apeman seems to be teasing them with hints about his identity; he says the names he calls the hyena and jackal are from a language not spoken by men. For some reason, I liked this odd business. In several stories, it`s stated that there are popular books and movies about Tarzan, and by this point, he is so widely known by them that the general public thinks he`s entirely fictional. When people do meet the Apeman, the idea that he really IS Tarzan doesn`t occur to them. You can see where Philip Jose Farmer got some of his ideas for TARZAN ALIVE.

"Tarzan and the Elephant Men" From BLUE BOOK, where it appeared in three installments from November 1937 through January 1938, this follow-up to "Tarzan and the Magic Men" doesn't really match the fresh touches of telepathic mind control and controversial miscegenation issues that made the earlier tale interesting. Although it continues the stories of the characters Gonfala, Stanley Wood, Spike and Troll, mostly it goes back to the familiar territory of the opposed twin cities of Athne and Cathne which our boy visited in TARZAN AND THE CITY OF GOLD a few books earlier. Even here, since the ferocious Queen Nemone is slightly dead, she can't bring any of that strong sexual tension between the Apeman and herself that gave CITY OF GOLD its strange oppressive atmosphere. Instead, we get a lot more of the same old running back and forth, being thrown in the dungeon and sentenced to the arena, counterplots and scheming, checking back on the Waziri racing to the rescue... nothing we haven't seen before, although it's presented in a solid workmanlike way. There are some very effective moments that just jump out at you. This second half of wha became the book TARZAN THE MAGNIFICENT is written with more energy and craftsmanship than some of the slack books in the later part of the series. In one sequence, Tarzan is running for his life from a squad of five trained Cathnean hunting lions and even the cocky Apeman is not sure he's going to make it to the safety of the trees when he abruptly sees a stray wild lion right in his way. By now, we have come to accept that Tarzan can blithely knife a lion to death without getting a scratch on him, but five thoroughbred hunting lions is a bit much, and this situation really looks desperate. For those few pages, the story crackles with the old vitality and tension that made the early books so great and which started the legend. There is also the impressive battle between the armies of the two cities. The warriors of Athne attack riding in howdahs on the backs of bull elephants, while the Cathnean s rely on their trained lions. You might think, well heck, the elephants will just stomp on those cats but instead "....a moment later, the war lions of Cathne were among them. They did not attack the elephants, but leaped to the howdahs and mauled the warriors. Two or three lions would attack a single elephant at a time, and at least two of them succeeding in reaching the howdah." Quite an image! Just imagine seeing this brought to the movies like that scene with the Oliphants in RETURN OF THE KING. Even late in his career, Edgar Rice Burroughs would usually pull one more trick to remind me how imaginative and powerful a writer he could be. This battle could have benefiited from being expanded by a few more pages; the ending does seem rushed, and some of the forgettable Athnean stiffs could be edited out with little loss. Burroughs is still happily slapping on coincidence in great big slabs. Despite all those speeches about admiring animals, Tarzan doesn't actually socialize with them except when he's trying to eat one or one is trying to eat him. Except for elephants, with whom he has always had a steadfast friendship. At one point, he pauses to laboriously rescue a huge bull elephant from a pit. The mighty beast has one dark tusk and later on in the story, the Apeman is sentenced to be trampled in the arena by a rogue elephant the Athneans have captured. Wait a minute... you don't think... what are the odds that this rogue will have a dark tusk?! Although Jane doesn't appear on stage, she is mentioned obliquely (better than nothing). Expecting to be killed in the arena, Stanley Wood asks Tarzan if there is no message he would like to send home and the Apeman sakes his head, "Thank you, no. She will know, as she always has." It's also comforting to know that noble old Muviro is still on hand, with his Waziris, still as stoic and bushido-like as ever (six of the Waziri are ready to storm the city of Athne, even though Wood prudently points out they couldn't possibly win. "We could try," Waranji says, "we are not afraid." One exchange I enjoyed is that for once someone actually dares to contradict Tarzan's (and the author's) one-sided speeches about how awful civilization and how wonderful living naked in the woods would be. The Apeman refers to "the perfect peace and security of automobile accidents, railroad wrecks, areoplane crashes, robbers, kidnapers, war and pestilence." With a laugh, Woods replies, "But no lions, leopards, buffaloes, wild elephants, snakes, nor tsetse flies, not to mention shiftas and cannibals." It's about time someone spoke up in counterpoint, and Tarzan does not blow up but just lets it pass good-naturedly.