Ed launched a 1939 project, described as the
"New Tarzan Series." He quickly wrote the 16,000-word "Murder
in the Jungle," January 10 to 18, 1939, and followed with "Tarzan
and the Champion," July 17 to mid-August, 1939. Abandoning his plan
to produce four stories, he finished the series at Honolulu with the 37,000-word
"Tarzan and the Castaways," November 26 to December 13, 1940. Apparently,
with this last novel he also turned away from his concept of an under-20,000-word
series.
"Murder in the Jungle" did feature Tarzan acting
as a detective. The story centers about his evaluation of various clues,
first when an Italian aviator is found dead in his plane and the wound
in his throat indicates that the bullet came from above, or, as Tarzan
concludes, from another plane. One of Tarzan's assets as a sleuth is his
sense of smell, and when the wind carries the strange odor of gasoline
to him, he discovers a second wrecked plane, but in this case the pilot
had bailed out.
Toward the end of the story Tarzan sniffs the breeze to
detect the odor of a dead man, which is coming from a camp, and with the
discovery of the body of Lieutenant Cecil Giles-Burton, the murdered British
pilot, he proceeds to interpret the clues that lead to the killer. The
detective story, with its requirement for an original plot, subtle devices,
and a surprising denouement was not Burroughs' forte. His problem was compounded
by the fact that the jungle offered too limited a setting for a murder
mystery, and Tarzan, because of his typical, restricted associations, had
little opportunity to do any real detecting.
In marketing "Murder in the Jungle," Ed's first
submissions, as in the past, were to the high-paying magazines, Liberty,
Collier's, and the Saturday Evening Post. The successive rejections came
in February and June, 1939. When Munsey also returned the manuscript in
August, the only remaining outlet was Margulies' Popular Library. After
holding the story for several months, Margulies, on October 25, gave an
evaluation and a conditional acceptance. He had hoped that the first Tarzan
story to appear in Thrilling Adventures would be "full of Tarzan." Instead,
as his letter revealed, in Ed's original manuscript Tarzan entered the
story late and was referred to as "The Stranger," apparently a misdirected
attempt to make a "mystery" out of the easily identifiable Tarzan. Noting
the story was unacceptable "in its present shape," Margulies wrote:
. . . I took the liberty of turning it over
to one of our editors for a revision job. It was revised according to what
we think a Tarzan story — and this particular story — should be like. .
. . Naturally, I cannot take the liberty of using our version unless it
receives your okay . . . most of the changes have been made in rearranging
the story, and making Tarzan a much stronger and more prominent character...
.
Margulies also "rearranged" the title to "Tarzan and the
Jungle Murders."
Ed promptly accepted the Margulies version, except for
some corrections of errors in the names of animals. The payment of
$300 was only two cents a word. The story appeared in Thrilling Adventures
in June 1940.
In the second of the series, "Tarzan and the Champion,"
the main character, One-Punch Mullargan, heavyweight champion of the world,
chooses to take his vacation in Africa and hunt big game. Mullargan, "a
notoriously dirty fighter," is an ignorant, stereotyped New York pug who
communicates in broken English or "Brooklynese." He carries his indifference
to sportsmanship to the jungle where his idea of hunting is to pursue zebras
and elephants in an automobile and blast them with a machine gun. Naturally
he runs afoul of Tarzan; in the fight that ensues, the world champion finds
he is no match for the ape-man.
Later, when the two men have been captured by the Babango
cannibals, Tarzan is outraged by Mullargan's statement about the suffering,
wounded beasts: ". . . they're only animals. We're human bein's."
In answer, Tarzan presents Burroughs' familiar philosophy:
" . You are worse than the Babangos. You had
no reason for hunting the zebra and the elephant. You could not possibly
have eaten all that you killed. The Babangos kill only for food, and they
kill only as much as they can eat. They are better people than you, who
will find pleasure in killing."
At the story's end, when Joey Marks, Mullargan's manager,
offers Tarzan "one hundred G's" to return to New York and become a prizefighter,
Tarzan merely stalks away.
With the writing of this story Burroughs quite evidently
discarded his plan to create his jungle-sleuth series; in the brief, 10,000-word
story there is no murder and Tarzan does no detecting. The unsuccessful
"Jungle Murders" had taught Burroughs that the task was impossible. After
the expected rejection from Liberty, Collier's, and the Saturday Evening
Post, "Tarzan and the Champion" traveled to editor Post at Munsey's
where it received a criticism that had been offered before. The early tales
centered always around Tarzan: "He was menaced, he got in danger, and
while he frequently rescued others, his own perils were always the chief
attraction. . . ." Post complained that Tarzan now was being
"kept off the stage a good deal of the time," and when he did appear, he
was like a miraculous deity who saved others without very much effort;
as a result, suspense was lacking. Tarzan had become an "avenging angel,"
and this "super-heroic" role weakened the interest in him as a person.
Some dickering followed at Blue Book, the final
market. Kennicott, referring to the "scant 100,000 circulation," noted
he could not compete with the "slicks." His top offer of $250 was accepted
by Rothmund on November 16, 1939, and the story appeared in Blue Book in
April 1940.
The last of the series, "Tarzan and the Castaways,"
included a lengthy assortment of characters, and the action, first aboard
a ship for almost half the story, is followed by a setting on a South Pacific
island where Burroughs utilizes a favorite device — an anachronistic return
to a lost civilization. A group of Mayans migrated from Yucatan in 1452
and transferred their ancient society to the island of Uxmal where they
built the familiar walled city, called Chichen Itza.
The unusual opening of the novelette, in Mombasa, finds
Tarzan in a desperate situation: an injury, causing a brain lesion, has
left him speechless. He has been captured by Arabs, placed in a cage, and
delivered to the German Fritz Krause aboard the tramp steamer Saigon. Krause,
a dealer in wild animals, has a varied cargo for transport to New York,
including elephants, orangutans, tigers, and others. He plans to exhibit
Tarzan in the United States as a wild man.
All of the standard Burroughs plot elements are crowded
into the story. A mutiny, with the second mate Schmidt taking over the
ship, is soon followed by piracy, with the seizure of an English yacht.
Schmidt has a mania for putting everything behind bars, and the British
passengers are assigned to cages adjacent to Tarzan. Abruptly recovering
his health and his speech, Tarzan escapes from the cage and, with the aid
of first mate De Groote and others, recaptures the ship.
The sequence brings Burroughs' next device — the storm
and shipwreck and the landing on the island of Uxmal. Encounters with the
primitive Mayans ensue, which include the familiar highpriest-altar-beautiful-girl-sacrifice
scene with Tarzan coming to the rescue. Before the story ends the entire
foreign assemblage of villains is eliminated in a wild gun battle.
The Burroughs concern for animals is demonstrated in Tarzan's
actions when the Saigon is wrecked on the reefs of the island. Once all
the people are safe ashore, Tarzan sets about freeing the animals. To Colonel
Leigh's protest about the "dangerous beasts of prey," Tarzan replies, "Their
lives are as important to them as ours are to us, and I'm not going to
leave them here to die of starvation."
In the 1940 "Tarzan and the Castaways," with Germany
and England at war, Burroughs again lapses into his characterization of
Germans as a subhuman species. The story, forwarded to Rothmund from Hawaii,
was submitted by him to Munsey. An approval finally came on February
26, 1941, with Post offering only $450 for the novelette, and commenting,
"If this seems a rather startling figure to offer for a Burroughs story,
it is because we feel that a great deal of work would have to be done on
the manuscript here in the office, and while there are features in the
story that attract us, there are also a great many which will make it a
thorny manuscript to edit. . . ." Burroughs accepted the price, and
the story, retitled "The Quest of Tarzan," appeared as a three-part
serial in Argosy, August 23 to September 6, 1941.
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