TARZAN of the Apes ~ John Clayton, Lord Greystoke
Pelham Dutton ~ American hunter
Bill Gantry ~ his guide and fellow hunter
Tom Crump ~ notorious ivory poacher
Ivan Minsky ~ his companion
Sandra Pickerall ~ heiress to Thos. Pickerall's Ale, Endinburgh
"Tarzan" ~ Tarzan to himself, God to Almetejos
Cristoforo da Gama ~ King of Alemtejos
Pedro Ruiz ~ High Priest of Alemtejos
Mutimbwa ~ Chief of the Waruturi
Ga-un & Zu-tho ~ great apes
Ungo ~ king of great ape tribe
Sacho ~ ape helper of "Tarzan"
Kyomya ~ lad of Almetejos, servant of Sandra (Goddess)
Francis Bolton-Chilton ~ English prisoners of Almetejos
Osorio da Serra ~ Captain-General of the Almetejos warriors
Mal-Gash ~ Rival to Ungo, king of the apes of  Ho-den
Ali ~ the Sultan
Quesceda ~ Ali's priest
Rateng  ~ Galla hunter-warrior
Colin T. Randolph, Jr. ~ West Virginian pilot, earlier in Spain with Chilton

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Book Blurb Summary
from Ballantine Books

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The drums boomed forth the incredible message from tribe to tribe—Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, had become an enemy to all, stealing and enslaving their women...even the daughter of an English millionaire, who offered a princely reward for her recapture and Tarzan's death. Certainly her captor told Sandra Pickerall that he was Tarzan...but he also told her he was God... Tarzan followed their trail with one thought in mind—to pursue and destroy utterly the man who had stolen his name and made it  infamous in the jungle world he loved.

Burroughs wrote "Tarzan and the Madman," January 16 to March 22, 1940, producing a loose collection of incidents and devices that were too stale for further repetition. Again, there was a Tarzan, a temporary "madman" named Rand, who loses his memory and identity after a plane accident and assumes he is Tarzan. There is the familiar lost and decadent civilization, the founder, on this occasion, being Cristoforo da Gama, a brother of the famous Portuguese explorer. Christoforo and a group of his musketeers, pursued by a horde of Moslems, had found sanctuary in an African valley, where they built a castle and established a kingdom named Alentejo, after a province in Portugal. Hundreds of years later, the kingdom, with its "chocolate-colored" descendants — resulting from the intermarriage of Portuguese and native — still survived and was ruled by another monarch who called himself Christoforo da Gama.

Tarzan continues his latter-day role as an off-stage rescuer, and other characters include Sandra Pickerall, an English girl, who naturally is made a goddess in the savage kingdom; and a customary high priest, Ruiz, who indulges in human sacrifice; a communist named Minsky who spouts nonsensical anti- impersonator capitalist jargon; and an Englishman, Francis Bolton Chilton. Indispensable to all Tarzan novels is the conflict between opposing kingdoms or races, and in this case Alentejo is constantly at war with the black descendants of the original Moslems; named the Gallos, these Negroes are ruled by a sultan.

An unusual circumstance relating to "Tarzan and the Madman" concerns the existence of a Burroughs Dictaphone wax cylinder, the only remaining one, saved by son Jack for possible historic significance. On the cylinder, rerecorded by RCA, Ed's voice can be heard dictating a brief section of the novel, about 1,500 words. At the start, after announcing "Cylinder Sixteen," apparently his standard procedure, he proceeded to dictate at a fairly fast rate. Although he was improvising the story, he had sources, brief notes or references, prepared in advance. In his notebook, for example, the story appears in a condensed form of about fifty handwritten pages. This served to fix the structure and characters in Burroughs' mind. The notes were intended mainly as reminders, especially to provide the continuity, to make certain he was following the incidents he had already planned. Evidently, in most of his dictation, he had the story elements well arranged in his mind and he could dictate or improvise for long periods without glancing at any notes. On occasion he glanced down at the papers on his desk, which might be mere glossaries of characters and their roles. 

"Tarzan and the Madman," covering fifty source pages in Ed's notebook, seemed to be a rough draft longer than he usually prepared. The first three pages are identical with the printed version, indicating that he wanted a carefully polished opening and chose to write it out exactly rather than improvise it. The notebook reveals that from a summary of one or two sentences he might improvise a long section as he dictated. For example, in the notebook Burroughs wrote, "Next morning Gantry, Crump and Minsky discuss the voice in the night. Gantry is afraid. He decides to turn back." From this short statement Burroughs created and dictated more than a page, some 350 words, mainly dialogue between the men.

Burroughs' confidence in Mill, who had really become his agent, was again demonstrated when, on March 28, the manuscript was forwarded to him. Mill submitted it to six of the top magazines, but it was returned by all. Later, when the Burroughs office sent it to Munsey, editor Post, on November 26, 1940, analyzed the obvious defects: "Tarzan doesn't seem to be Tarzan anymore. The present manuscript seems almost completely to lack the motivation and excitement of the earlier Tarzan pieces. Its plot, though it does contain large helpings of action, is pretty repetitious with its constant capture, escape, recapture pattern." A more serious fault, according to Post, was Tarzan's limited role; "under fifty percent of the wordage" centered about his actions. He became a "safety net" in the rescue of others, his own problems or perils being of little significance. Other rejections came from Blue Book and Ziff-Davis in 1940 and from Standard Magazines and Street & Smith in 1941. Never appearing in a magazine, it was finally published as a hardcover book by Canaveral Press in 1964.

~ Reference: Porges Pages 998 and 999

TARZAN AND THE MADMAN
Review contributed by Doc Hermes ERB Reviews

Written in 1940 but not published until 1965, this late entry in the Tarzan series never appeared in magazine form and Burroughs apparently shelved it for good. (The later TARZAN AND THE "FOREIGN LEGION" also had no success in finding a magazine sale and eventually was published by Burroughs himself, three years after it was written.) As for TARZAN AND THE MADMAN, it was eventually brought out of limbo into hardcover in 1964 by Canaveral Press and then issued as a paperback the following year.

The book starts off strongly with the mystery of why local friendly African tribes think the Apeman has been abducting women and children (who are never seen again). Tarzan is puzzled and grimly determined to find out the imposter who has been undermining his reputation (he states bluntly that he will find the man and kill him, simple as that). There is also an impressive moment when a crook takes a shot at the peacefully approaching Apeman, but even as his bullet misses, an arrow thumps into the gunman`s shoulder and Tarzan is already vanishing up into the trees. Every now and then, we get a glimpse of just how quick and dangrous the Apeman is, and this is one of those instances.

Unfortunately, the story quickly gets bogged down in the confused situation involving a mysterious lunatic who thinks he IS Tarzan* but who is believed to be God by the descendants of still another lost city founded by Europeans long ago. This time, it`s a castle populated by  "chocolate-colored" people who are the result of Portugese colonists who have intermixed with the native Africans, and of course they are in a state of perpetual war with an opposing city populated by descendants of the Moors who had been chasing the Portugese. Haven`t we seen this setup all before? By this time, Burroughs had settled down to mixing five or six familiar ingredients in different combinations for each Tarzan book, and the result usually fell flat with a dull thud. Alemtejos,this particular lost civilization, is mostly there to make some heavy handed satire about organized religion, and since Tarzan doesn`t care particularly about the society, neither does the reader.

The story lacks any of the supporting cast. Jane, Korak, the Waziris are not even mentioned. For all we know, Tarzan is a solitary creature with no family and only a casually friendly footing with some of the native tribes. He seems oddly distracted and disinterested in the whole proceedings, as if he is bored by the whole business and would welcome a bash on the head so he can have amnesia again and nol have to think about anything other than eating and sleeping. (It`s also ironic that Tarzan scoffs at the idea of his desiring some of the treasure. "What would I do with gold?" he asks, conveniently forgetting all the time and work he made his Waziri tribesmen put in to looting Opar.)

Burroughs is still putting humans down and attributing imaginary virtues to animals. He writes that animals are not avaricious or greedy; of COURSE they are, almost every species from hummingbirds to deer spend much of their time defending their territory or trying to extend it, just like humans. And he repeats that animals do not lie. (Duh! If you can`t use language, you can`t lie. And don`t you think that if your pets could talk, that the cat would constantly be trying to blame everything on the dog? Or that the dog would be saying some burglar must have gotten in and eaten the steak on the dinner table?)

It`s also worth noting that while the great apes (the word "gorilla" is never used here, as by this time the mangani were seen as a seperate species) are happy to eat "plaintains, bananas, tender shoots and occasionally a juicy caterpillar", they don`t mind a bit of meat now and then. This matches what modern observors have reported and it seems odd that Tarzan (who was raised by them) is so completely carniverous. In every book, he pounces on a pig or deer and devours some of it before taking off again. Seldom if ever is it mentioned that he eats fruit or nuts. Why he doesn`t have scurvy or other nutritional deficiencies is puzzling, unless he makes a point to eat the contents of his prey`s stomachs and upper intestines. It would be easier to pick some fruit or shoots, but maybe it wouldn`t be as colorful.

TARZAN AND THE MADMAN is not so much an awful book as it is uninspired. There are some good parts, as when two treasure hunters lugging heavy gold are dying of thirst and exhaustion but refuse to abandon the treasure. But in general, there`s very little here we haven`t seen before, little of the creative energy and enthusiasm that made the early books in this series so compelling and so rewarding to read again. If there had been a monthly Tarzan pulp magazine in the 1930s, this would probably be regarded as an average issue; but considered as an independent book, for which expectations would be higher, it`s disappointing. I would not recommend it to someone wanting to try a book in the series... TARZAN THE TERRIBLE or JUNGLE TALES OF TARZAN have much more energy and creativity, and would give a better feel to a new reader.

*At least this guy doesn`t look like the genuine Apeman, although they are about the same size. After Esteban Miranda and Stanley Obroski, it would be too much to have another dude showing up who just happens to look enough like Tarzan to fool even his wife. And the convoluted explanation of how a man obssessed with Tarzan ends up impersonating the real Apeman stretches your suspension of disbelief to the point where it has trouble snapping back after the book is over.

Doc Hermes