No. 37, a landmark issue. For the first thirty-four issues of this title, and the three preceding Ranger issues of Four Color Comics, our hero wore his uniform of red shirt, white hat, blue pants and yellow scarf. With this issue, he finally changed his shirt and got a new scarf, conforming to his TV image.
In blabbing about the third Tarzan novel, The Beasts of Tarzan, last week, I noted the similar pattern Edgar Rice Burroughs followed with his Mars and Tarzan series. Each cycle started with a close-knit trilogy featuring the main player, followed by a fourth book starring the hero’s son.
I can only guess that ERB feared his readers were tiring of John Carter and Tarzan, and figured fresh blood would bring new life. Well, it wasn’t a bad idea, but it was wrong, at least in the case of Tarzan. He went on put the ape man through his paces in more than three dozen stories and novels over the next thirty-odd years.
The Son of Tarzan began as a pulp serial in 1915 and was published in hardcover two years later. As a novel, it's an odd duck, for reasons I’ll explain. This one begins ten years after the end of Beasts, and finds Lord Greystoke, now a perfectly respectable Englishman, living the high-life in London with his Lady Jane and son Jack. At Jane’s insistence, the boy knows absolutely nothing of his father’s colorful past, and she wants to keep it that way.
Alas, that’s not to be, because Akut, the bull-ape Tarzan befriended in Beasts, has recently become a hit on the London stage, and young Jack, oddly fascinated with all things African, sneaks off to see him. When Tarzan goes to haul him home, Akut and the ape-man have a rather public reunion, and the beans are spilled.
As a result, Jack sneaks off with Akut and winds up stranded in the jungle, where he spends the next who-knows-how-many years growing into the spitting image of his old man. I enjoyed his adventures roaming the wilds with Akut and seeing him change from a civilized kid to a wild beast.
Somewhere in the middle, though, the story shifts focus, and the rest of the book is more about a girl called Meriem. She's the daughter of a French nobleman who’s kidnapped and abused by an evil Sheik until Jack, now known by his ape name of Korak the Killer, takes her under his wing. We then meet whole lot of people, good and bad, who are hunting or chasing or trying to hold onto Meriem for their own purposes, good and bad.
Once the Meriem plot takes over, she’s menaced with a fate worse than death no fewer than three times, and plain old grisly and violent death several times more. Most of the characters are carrying huge misapprehensions on their shoulders, some are thick as bricks, and some are smart except where a coming plot twist requires them to be monumentally stupid. (If, like me, you watched all ten seasons of Smallville, you know exactly what I’m talking about.) Point of view bounces dizzily between a dozen or more characters, including an ape, a lion and an elephant.
As in most Burroughs books, the characters are either utterly pure of heart, or thoroughly evil bastards. They're sometimes capable of change, though. In this case, the hardship of the jungle converts a bastard into a pureheart, which is a bit hard to swallow.
All is not lost, though, because we’re treated to some fine savagery. A couple of evil Englishmen die with Akut’s fangs in their throats. A village of misguided natives is overrun by three thousand blood-hungry baboons. And a particularly evil villain gets himself squashed by an elephant.
Where this story fits into the overall life of Tarzan is anybody’s guess. Philip Jose Farmer attempted to explain it in Tarzan Alive, but his timeline leaves me even more bewildered. Following the events of the first three books, Tarzan seems to have retired from adventuring and spent the next ten years (at minimum) in civilization. At some point in The Son of Tarzan he and Jane journey to their African plantation, bringing much of their civilization with them. There’s no internal evidence that he dons a loincloth and returns to the trees until the end of this book, when his son appears to be about eighteen. So it would seem that Tarzan ceases to be the ape man for those eighteen years, donning the loincloth only when necessary to save the day.
My guess? I think Burroughs planned to put old Tarzan out to pasture after the first three books, much as he did to John Carter. Anybody know if that’s so?
You E.C. Fan-Addicts already know this, but for the rest . . . Before the appearance of such classic titles as Tales from The Crypt, Weird Science and The Vault of Horror, E.C. comics creators William M. Gaines, Al Feldstein, Graham Ingels and Johnny Craig were churning out books like Saddle Justice, Gunfighter, Crime Patrol, War Against Crime and the two sappy titles featured here. These days, copies of these romance books command between a hundred and a thousand bucks, depending on condition.
The Old West of Holt County, Nebraska, is flowing strong through the veins of Mr. Richard Prosch, and he’s pouring it out onto the (virtual) page.
The title tale of the new two-story collection Buffalo Wolves introduces two young ladies who find themselves parent-free on the ragged edge of civilization. It ain’t long before human predators start circling, and the girls face a hard choice: flee, lay down and die, or find the grit to fight back.
There’s some fine writing here, as these unlikely heroines suck it up and make their stand. There’s even a guest appearance by Holt County Deputy Whit Branham, star of Branham’s Due and Holt County Law.
Next up is something completely different. “A Gift at Bitter Creek” is a tall tale/ghost story told by Pap McGee, proprietor of the general store. Pap (being a figment of Mr. Prosch’s fertile imagination) is a gifted storyteller, and like “Buffalo Wolves,” this one comes to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion.
What’s next from Holt County? Don’t have a clue, but I look forward to reading it.
The esteemed Mr. Richard Robinson, aka The Broken Bullhorn, has been reading Perry Mason lately, and that reminded me I had four old Mason movies waiting to be re-screened.
First up is The Case of the Howling Dog (1934), Perry’s screen debut, and the first of three films starring Warner Brothers stalwart Warren William. That same year, William also appeared as Philo Vance and Julius Caesar, and later starred as “Ted Shane” (a Sam Spade stand-in in Satan Met a Lady) and the dashing d’Artagnan. William’s portrayal of Mason is a far cry from the character in the Gardner novels, and an even farther cry from the Raymond Burr version, but mighty watchable just the same.
At the time this film was made, Perry’s character was only a year old, so moviegoers’ image of him was likely not too well-formed. The first two Mason books, The Case of the Velvet Claws and The Case of the Sulky Girl, were published in 1933, followed by TCOT Lucky Legs and TCOT Howling Dog in 1934. That’s when the Warner Brothers movie machine sprang into action, releasing this film before year’s end.
It starts off with some surprises. Perry, we learn, is the head of a large law firm bearing his name, so successful that he has numerous other lawyers handling most of the cases. He also has an in-house Investigation Bureau (with no Paul Drake in sight) and a bevy of beautiful secretaries. His personal secretary, though is Della Street, so all has not changed.
The Della-Perry relationship is a bit uneven, and I suspect the filmmakers were making it up as they went along. Though she always addresses him as “Mr. Mason” or “sir,” she sometimes seems like a slightly privileged employee, sometimes like an investigative partner, and sometimes almost a love interest. But come to think of it, that’s sort of the way she comes across in the books, too.
In the female arena, Della, (Helen Trenholme, left) wins hands down.
The female lead in this one is actually Mary Astor (destined for immortality seven years later in The Maltese Falcon), so I expected she’d be the love interest. Nope. She’s merely a client, and much less interesting, both visually and character-wise, than Della. Her best line, a foreshadowing of the Falcon, is “Please don’t ask me that.”
Being 1934, this one is without a soundtrack, but with the swift action and snappy dialogue, it’s hardly missed. When music is actually needed, someone conveniently turns on a radio.
Here's William/Mason with Sergeant Holcomb (Allen Jenkins, center) and Mary Astor.
D.A. Claude Drumm (Grant Mitchell) looks on from background, right.
The plot is a good ‘un, involving two millionaires squabbling over two wives and the issue of whether a German Shepherd does or does not howl in the nighttime. It builds to a murder, of course, and a courtroom scene, where Perry pulls a particularly satisfying rabbit out of his hat.
“You’re a cross between a saint and a devil,” Della tells him at the end. And that sums up William’s portrayal of our hero pretty dang well.
