Newspapers in the Fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs I

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Edgar Rice Burroughs lived through the golden age of American newspapers. Like most Americans in the mid 20^th century, his adult life, both private and professional, was attuned to the rhythms of the daily print media. An entire volume could be written describing the various ways the author’s life was intertwined with newspapers. Just a few examples follow.

When, as a young man, Burroughs was living in Idaho, his brother Harry backed him in opening a stationary store in Pocatello. It included a large newsstand. “I had a newspaper route and I delivered newspapers myself on horseback,” Burroughs recalled in a 1929 Los Angeles Times article.

In another 1929 article, “How I Wrote the Tarzan Books,” published in The New York World newspaper’s Sunday supplement, Burroughs credited that newspaper for the book publication of Tarzan of the Apes.

“It’s popularity and its final appearance as a book was due to the vision of J. H. Tennant, editor of The New York Evening World. He saw its possibilities as a newspaper serial and ran it in The Evening World, with the result that other papers followed suit. This made the story widely known and resulted in a demand from readers for the story in book form, which was so insistent that A. C. McClurg & Co. finally came to me after they had rejected it, and asked to be allowed to publish it.”

Four other Burroughs serials appeared in The Evening World before McClurg finally published Tarzan of the Apes in June 1914. They were The Cave Girl, The Return of Tarzan, The Eternal Lover, and At the Earth’s Core. Burroughs also profited from the sale of newspaper serial rights for other stories he wrote, especially in the early years of his career.

Burroughs wrote many other articles for newspapers. Most notable were a couple of serial columns. Starting on January 26, 1928, he wrote 11 columns for the Los Angeles Examiner about daily developments in the sanity hearing of William Hickman, the confessed killer of a 12-year-old girl. Years later, while living in Honolulu during World War II, Burroughs wrote a series of “Laugh It Off!” articles, which appeared in the city’s two newspapers, the Star-Bulletin and the Advertiser. He also penned a number of news dispatches during his travels around the Pacific theater as a war correspondent.

Burroughs described his relationship with the press through the years in a 1930 article in Writer’s Digest. “I have had close personal and business relations with newspapermen all over the United States, both publishers and editors, numbering among them many good friends. Yet I have never directly or indirectly, asked or expect any personal publicity from them; nor have I ever paid for any publicity.”

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Given the importance of newspapers in his life, then, it’s not surprising to find so many references to them in his fiction. Newspapers are mention in over 30 of Burroughs’ stories. Some are mere remarks made in passing, while a few others are so extensive as to make a newspaper a de facto character in the story.

The use of newspapers in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fiction is summarized below by story in chronological order of its writing. Presenting them so provides some insight into the evolution of Burroughs’ attitude toward newspapers over the years.

The Avenger was one of Burroughs’ first works of fiction. The short story, written in early 1912, first appeared in Forgotten Tales of Love and Murder, published by John Guidry and Pat Adkins in 2001. It chronicles a fateful day in the life of Joseph Stone, who, while on a business trip in Pittsburgh, received a cryptic note, which he interpreted as a warning that his pregnant wife was entertaining a lover at their home in an unnamed city. Stone hurried home in time to discover a strange man descending the stairs in his home. Enraged, Stone attacked and killed his wife’s suspected lover. To complete his revenge, Stone disfigured the victim’s face and changed clothes with him, leaving his wife to think her lover had killed her husband. Stone then fled the scene to spend the night in small hotel in a city a hundred miles away.

 The text below the headline is a classic example of a “straight news story,” presenting the known facts of the case in descending order of importance. The story’s “lead” contains the required “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” “why” (unknown as of then), and “how.”

  The body of the article reveals that the police believed Stone’s deception that he was the murder victim. However, the article then explained that the man whom Stone killed was not his wife’s lover, but instead a doctor who was in the home attending to the delivery of Mrs. Stone’s baby. It was the doctor’s nurse who sent the note to Stone in Pittsburgh summoning him home for the birth.

Both the news article and the story end with the following sentence about the weakened condition of Mrs. Stone. “Otherwise, she is doing well, as is the little son who was born to her last night.” Burroughs then left it up to the reader to predict John Stone’s reaction to what he read in the newspaper that morning.

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Once all the principal characters arrived in Paris, Rokoff and Paulvitch hatched a new plot, which again involved the Paris press. For days the Russians watched the papers. “At length they were rewarded,” Burroughs noted. “A morning paper made brief mention of a smoker that was to be given on the following evening by the German minister.” That evening the conspirators lured Tarzan to Olga’s boudoir, hoping to tempt the two into a romantic encounter that they could use to pressure Olga for information. “What shall we do, Jean?” she asked Tarzan. “Tomorrow all Paris will read of it. He (Rokoff) will see to that.”

Meanwhile, Rokoff and Paulvitch had returned to their rooms. “They had telephoned to the offices of two of the morning papers from which they momentarily expected representatives to hear the first report of the scandal that was to stir social Paris on the morrow.” Tarzan arrived before the newspapermen, however, and forced the Russians to promise, “upon pain of death, that you will permit no word of this affair to get into the newspapers.” A young man from the Martin soon arrived. When he said, “I understand that Monsieur Rokoff has a story for me,” Tarzan responded, “You are mistaken, monsieur. You have no story for publication, have you, my dear Nikolas?” Noticing the “nasty light” in the ape-man’s eye, Rokoff sent the reporter away. It was not the last time the two scoundrels would conspire against Tarzan, but none of their future plots involved spreading false rumors through newspapers.

Begun by ERB in late 1913 and finished in early 1914, The Cave Girl chronicles the transformation of Back Bay aristocrat Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones into a cave man following being castaway on a South Seas island. Two months after Waldo set out on a long sea voyage, the following short article appeared in a Boston newspaper.

“The captain reports that the great wave swept entirely over the steamer, momentarily submerging her. Two members of the crew, the officer upon the bridge, and one passenger were washed away. The latter was an American traveling for his health, Waldo E. Smith-Jones, son of John Allen Smith-Jones of Boston. The steamer came about, cruising back and forth for some time, but as the wave had washed her perilously close to a dangerous shore, it seemed unsafe to remain longer in the vicinity, for fear of a recurrence of the tidal wave which would have meant the utter annihilation of the vessel upon the nearby beach. No sign of any of the poor unfortunates was seen. Mrs. Smith-Jones is prostrated.”

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Written in the same 1913-14 period, The Girl From Farris’s was ERB’s first attempt at exposing corruption in his hometown of Chicago. In the story, Burroughs used sarcasm to censure the city’s newspapers for helping spread phony religion-based progressive principles. The prime purveyor of those theories in the story is the Rev. Theodore Pursen, who is first seen at his breakfast table reading his preferred daily newspaper, the Monarch of the Morning. Pursen commented on the paper’s content to his assistant.

r of a column devoted to an interview with me on the result of my investigation of conditions in supposedly respectable residence districts. The article has been given much greater prominence than that accorded to the misleading statements of the assistant State attorney. I am sure that thousands of people in this great city are even this minute reading this noticeable heading—let us hope that it will bear fruit, however much one may decry the unpleasant notoriety entailed.”

The headline over the article read, in large letters, “PURSEN PILLORIES POLICE.” With this opening view of Pursen, Burroughs implied that, on the contrary, the good reverend very much enjoyed seeing his name in print, no matter how much he claimed to decry it.

After learning of Maggie Lynch’s arrest in the red light district, Pursen, with three men in tow, went to the city jail to talk with her. “I come as a friend,” he announced. “Tell me your story, and we’ll see what can be done.” Maggie eyed the other three young men. “Representatives of the three largest papers,” Pursen confirmed. “You will be quite famous by tomorrow morning.” Pegging Pursen as a publicity seeker, she invited him to get lost.

Pursen didn’t forget the humiliation the woman had heaped on him in front of the three reporters. “He flushed at the memory of the keen shafts of ridicule that had resulted,” Burroughs stated, “and which had made the papers of the following day such frightful nightmares to him.”

Early in the story, businessman Ogden Secor (later to be Maggie’s benefactor, and she his) voiced his opinion of Reverend Pursen. “I’ve met him here perhaps a half dozen times— here, and in the newspapers. About all I’ve noticed about him is the poor, weak way he has of getting into print.”

Although charges against Maggie Lynch’s involvement in the murder of a man were dropped, for some unknown reason they were later reinstated after she had regained a respectful reputation under the name June Lathrop. Burroughs implied it was an unsavory Chicago newspaper that gave the story new life.

“A scarehead morning newspaper had used it as an example of the immunity from punishment enjoyed by the powers of the underworld—showing how murder, even, might be perpetrated with perfect safety to the murderer. It hinted at police indifference—even at police complicity.”

Fortunately, in this instance, the case was not tried in the press, and June was found innocent.

Near the end of part one of The Mucker, written in 1913, protagonist Billy Byrne made a name for himself in the New York City boxing scene. When he knocked out the reigning “white hope,” he caught the attention of the city’s sports scribes.

“The following morning the sporting sheets hailed, ‘Sailor’ Byrne as the great ‘white hope’ of them all. Flashlights of him filled a quarter of a page. There were interviews with him. Interviews with the man he defeated … All were agreed that he was the most likely heavy since Jeffries. Corbett admitted that, while in his prime he could doubtless have bested the new wonder, he would have found him a tough customer.”

After reading and rereading his press clippings, Billy spotted a familiar name in another section of the paper—Harding. “Persistent rumor has it that the engagement of the beautiful Miss Harding to Wm. J. Mallory has been broken,” the social notice read. “Miss Harding could not be seen at her father’s home up to a late hour last night. Mr. Mallory refused to discuss the matter, but would not deny the rumor.”

                                

Meanwhile, far uptown Barbara Harding was scanning the same newspaper sports section for the scores of yesterday’s women’s golf scores, when her eyes suddenly riveted on a picture of a giant boxer. Searching the headlines and text, she finally came upon his name—“Sailor Byrne.” She knew it must be the man she had fallen in love with during a South Seas adventure. Billy then called on Barbara and urged her to marry Mallory. A few weeks later, a lonesome and friendless Billy read the following newspaper item in his Chicago jail cell. “The marriage of Barbara, daughter of Anthony Harding, the multimillionaire, to William Mallory will take place on the twenty-fifth of June.”

Confident in his innocence, Billy had gone to Chicago in part two of The Mucker, written in 1916, to turn himself in on a murder warrant. Now he found himself again in the newspapers, this time the victim of over-zealous crime reporting, which had put heat on the police.

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At her Riverside Drive home in New York City, Barbara Harding spotted a headline in her morning newspaper. “CHICAGO MURDERER GIVEN LIFE SENTENCE.” The lead-in read, “Murderer of harmless old saloon keeper is finally brought to justice. The notorious West Side rowdy, ‘Billy’ Byrne, apprehended after more than a year as a fugitive from justice, is sent to Joliet for life.” (She didn’t know that by that time Billy had jumped from the prison train and escaped.)

While on the lam, Billy partnered-up and bummed across the mid-West with Bridge. A few miles out of Kansas City, Billy earned a handout by doing odd jobs for a restaurant owner in a small town. The food he gave Billy was wrapped in a copy of the Kansas City Star. When Bridge unwrapped the food, an article in the newspaper caught his attention. “Hastily Bridge tore from the paper the article that had attracted his interest, folded it, and stuffed it into one of his pockets.” Later Billy found the article on a washroom floor and read it.

“Billy Byrne, sentenced to life imprisonment in Joliet penitentiary for the murder of Schneider, the old West Side saloon keeper, hurled himself from the train that was bearing him to Joliet yesterday, dragging with him the deputy sheriff to whom he was handcuffed. The deputy was found a few hours later bound and gagged, lying in the woods along the Santa Fe not far from Lemont. He was uninjured. He says that Byrne got a good start, and doubtless took advantage of it to return to Chicago, where a man of his stamp could find more numerous and safer retreats than elsewhere.”

There was much more information in the article. It detailed the crime of which Billy had been convicted, summarized his long criminal record, and mentioned a $500 reward being offered for information leading to his arrest. At first suspicious of Bridge’s motive for keeping the clipping, Billy soon became convinced he could trust his friend not to turn him in.

Chicago police officer Flannagan had been trailing the escapee for some time. When he finally caught up to Billy, though, he told him that another man had confessed to Schneider’s murder and that the Illinois governor had pardoned Billy 10 days ago. Billy didn’t believe it, until Flannagan showed him an article from the “Trib” (presumably the Chicago Tribune) that confirmed it.

 By the end of the story, Billy Byrne had been the subject of more newspaper articles than any other Burroughs character.

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In part one of The Mad King, written in 1913, American Barney Custer unintentionally gets involved in the political machinations of the mythical Balkan kingdom of Lutha. At end of part one, he is forced to flee that country. As part two opens, various forces cause him to return to Lutha. Having left an outlaw, however, he needed a legal way of getting into the country. Leaving his Nebraska home, Barney went to New York City to seek a “commission as correspondent” from an old classmate who owned the New York Evening National newspaper. After agreeing to pay all his expenses and to forward to the paper “anything he found time to write,” Barney received the credential he sought.

His press papers earned him passage through Italy and Austria-Hungary into Lutha. Evidently, Barney’s adventures while there never allowed time for him to write press reports for the newspaper in New York.

 

Originally written by Burroughs in 1914, The Lad and the Lion was expanded by the author in 1937 for book publication. Its setting is a mythical kingdom in Northern Africa. In the story, Burroughs used newspapers as a conduit for information flowing in and out of the politically volatile principality.

For example, in the following passage, Hans de Groot, son of the royal gardener, learns of the death of a conspirator. “‘Your friend, Carlyn, was killed last night,’ said one of (the officers). ‘Here it is in the morning paper. He was shot by a woman in her room in a hotel on the frontier.’ Hans took the paper and read the brief article.”

In the story’s final chapter, Burroughs pulled all elements of the story’s intrigue together and summarized them for the reader in a periodical news story.

 

“Magazines from civilization seep into many far corners of the world. One such, an illustrated weekly of international renown, found its way into the douar of an Arab sheik. The son-in-law of Ali-Es-Hadji was reading therein an account of the strange happenings in a far-off kingdom. He read of the assassination of King Ferdinand and Hilda de Groot, and he examined with interest their pictures and pictures of the palace and the palace gardens. There was a full page picture of General Count Sarnya, the new Dictator. There was also a picture of an elderly, scholarly looking man, named Andresy, who had been shot with many others by order of Sarnya, because they had attempted to launch a counter-revolution.”

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Meanwhile, out of French colonial North Africa came a brief newspaper article about the kidnapping of a French officer’s seven-year-old daughter. That obscure article would run like a thread through the story of Tarzan’s lost son, until a decade later it would bring Lord Greystoke and Captain Armand Jacot together with their lost children.

Shiek ben Khatour, the kidnapper of Jeanne Jacot, renamed her “Meriem” and claimed she was his daughter. He kept her captive as his Arab band wandered in sub-Saharan Africa. About a year after her kidnapping, the curious Meriem found a box while secretly looking through the possessions of a Swede visiting the Shiek’s camp. She found the following items in the box.

“There were letters and papers and cuttings from old newspapers, and among other things the photograph of a little girl upon the back of which was pasted a cutting from a Paris daily—a cutting that she could not read, yellowed and dimmed by age and handling—but something about the photograph of the little girl which was also reproduced in the newspaper cutting held her attention. Where had she seen that picture before? And then, quite suddenly, it came to her that this was a picture of herself as she had been years and years before. Where had it been taken? How had it come into the possession of this man? Why had it been reproduced in a newspaper?”

Before creeping away, Meriem stuck the picture and newspaper article in her waist belt. Over the next few years, she showed the clipping to several people, and each time, unknown to her, it brought her closer to a reunion with her father. After she took the clipping, the first to see it was Abdul Kamak, a young Arab in the Shiek’s band.

“She drew the photograph from its hiding place and handed it to him. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is you, but where was it taken? How does it happen that The Sheik’s daughter is clothed in the garments of the unbeliever?’

“‘I do not know,’ replied Meriem … He turned the picture over and as his eyes fell upon the old newspaper cutting they went wide. He could read French, with difficulty, it is true; but he could read it … Slowly, laboriously he read the yellowed cutting. His eyes were no longer wide. Instead they narrowed to two slits of cunning. When he was done he looked at the girl. ‘You have read this?’ he asked. ‘It is French,’ she replied, ‘and I do not read French.’”

Ten years after his daughter’s disappearance, Captain Jacot, who had still not given up searching for his lost Jeanne, came to London to seek the help of Lord Greystoke. As he explained, it was the newspaper clipping that Meriem took in the Swede’s tent years before that led him to Tarzan.

“‘Her picture was published in the leading papers of every large city in the world, yet never did we find a man or woman who ever had seen her since the day she mysteriously disappeared. A week since there came to me in Paris a swarthy Arab, who called himself Abdul Kamak. He said that he had found my daughter and could lead me to her. I took him at once to Admiral d’Arnot, whom I knew had traveled some in Central Africa. The man’s story led the Admiral to believe that the place where the white girl the Arab supposed to be my daughter was held in captivity was not far from your African estates, and he advised that I come at once and call upon you—that you would know if such a girl were in your neighborhood … The fellow had only an old photograph of her on the back of which was pasted a newspaper cutting describing her and offering a reward.’

“The General drew an envelope from his pocket, took a yellowed photograph from it and handed it to the Englishman. Tears dimmed the old warrior’s eyes as they fell again upon the pictured features of his lost daughter. Lord Greystoke examined the photograph for a moment. A queer expression entered his eyes. He touched a bell at his elbow, and an instant later a footman entered. ‘Ask my son’s wife if she will be so good as to come to the library,’ he directed.”

Thus, a ten-year old, yellowed photo, with a short article from a Paris newspaper on the back, finally reunited Captain Jacot with his lost daughter.

Hemmington Main, a star reporter on a “great metropolitan daily” newspaper, wanted to marry Gwendolyn Bass, daughter of New York millionaire Abner J. Bass in ERB’s 1915 novelette. Gwendolyn was willing, but her social-climbing mother took her to Europe hoping to find a royal match for her there. Hemmington followed, looking for an opportunity to press his suit with Gwendolyn. There Main became involved in switching identities and other intrigue involving the royal houses of the tiny nation states of Karlova and Margoth. Burroughs used newspapers to keep Main—and the reader—informed about his plan’s unintended complications. The first indication Main had that his tactics had misfired was when he read a newspaper in his hotel lobby.

“Vying with one another for importance were two news items upon the front page. One reported the abduction of Princess Mary of Margoth by the notorious Rider, and her subsequent rescue by the royal troops. Main whistled as he read of the capture of the famous bandit and the probable fate which was in store for him. Further along in the account of the occurrence was another item which brought a second whistle to the lips of the American. ‘Princess Mary,’ it read, ‘insists that The Rider did not know her true identity until after the royal troops had rescued her and captured the brigand … the names of Mrs. Bass and her daughter also appear, as well as that of Hemmington Main, an American newspaper man.’”          

When Hemmington read the next sentence, he knew he, Gwendolyn, and her mother were in big trouble. “Margoth is anxious to demonstrate her friendship and sympathy for Karlova,” it read, “by cooperating with her in every way in the apprehension and arrest of the conspirators.” All three of the Americans were soon arrested. The whole cast eventually escaped punishment, and though all the characters ended up marrying the right people, the local newspaper reporters never seemed to figure out what really happened.

 “The Oakdale Affair,” written by Burroughs in 1917, was an offshoot of “The Mucker,” finished the year before. In the short story, Burroughs showed how a small-town newspaper could fire up its readers with sensational reporting about a series of major crimes.

Writers for the Oakdale Tribune must have been ecstatic when the story of a lifetime surfaced in their sleepy mid-West community in the spring of 1916. Burroughs recounted how the Tribune reported four mysterious crimes, all of which were committed the day before in their community.

“The following morning all Oakdale was thrilled as its fascinated eyes devoured the front page of Oakdale’s ordinarily dull daily. Never had Oakdale experienced a plethora of home-grown thrills; but it came as near to it that morning, doubtless, as it ever had or ever will.

“There was, first, the mysterious disappearance of Abigail Prim, the only daughter of Oakdale’s wealthiest citizen; there was the equally mysterious robbery of the Prim home. Either one of these would have been sufficient to have set Oakdale’s multitudinous tongues wagging for days; but they were not all. Old John Baggs, the city’s best-known miser, had suffered a murderous assault in his little cottage upon the outskirts of town and was even now lying at the point of death in The Samaritan Hospital.

“Yet even this atrocious deed had been capped by one yet more hideous. Reginald Paynter had for years been looked upon half askance and yet with a certain secret pride by Oakdale. He was her sole bon vivant in the true sense of the word, whatever that may be. He was always spoken of in the columns of the Oakdale Tribune as ‘that well known man-about-town,’ or ‘one of Oakdale’s most prominent clubmen.’ Reginal Paynter was dead. His body had been found beside the road just outside the city limits at mid-night.”

The work of the Oakdale Tribune, according to Burroughs, was far from done that day. The bit was in the editor’s mouth, and he responded by charging forward with innuendo and speculation.

“The Oakdale Tribune got out an extra that afternoon giving a resumé of such evidence as had appeared in the regular edition and hinting at all the numerous possibilities suggested by such matter as had come to hand since. Even fear of old Jonas Prim and his millions had not been enough to entirely squelch the newspaper instinct of the Tribune’s editor. Never before had he had such an opportunity and he made the best of it, even repeating the vague surmises which had linked the name of Abigail to the murder of Reginald Paynter.”

Willie, an imaginative local boy, overheard Bridge, ERB’s poet-vagabond, and a youngster going by the name of “The Oskaloosa Kid” discussing the crimes. “He saw not only one reward but several and a glorious publicity which far transcended the most sanguine of his former dreams. He saw his picture not only in the Oakdale Tribune but in the newspapers of every city of the country.” After hearing Willie’s story, the police arrested Bridge and the Kid for the crimes. Sitting in the Oakdale jail, they could hear a sullen crowd outside working itself into a lynch mob.

It was a newspaper that Bridge found in their jail cell that suddenly made him realize how he could save both of them.

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When Bridge saw a picture of Abigail Prim in the paper, he suddenly realized that “The Oskaloosa Kid” was really the supposed kidnap victim. Since it was no crime for Abigail to take her own jewels, the Oakdale Tribune and the community’s disappointed citizens returned to their dull small-town ways. Still, it was an exciting three days of Oakdale, thanks the town newspaper.

Burroughs mentioned newspapers directly in part one (1917) of The Moon Maid (and indirectly in part two (1919). In his tale of future interplanetary contact, narrator Julian 3^rd told of the great excitement caused on Earth when contact with inhabitants on Mars was first made in the year 1967. It was not until the year 2015, however, that the first manned ship between the planets was launched. During the period (1967-2015) of wireless-only contact between the two planets, “Knowledge was freely exchanged to the advantage of both worlds,” Julian 3^rd explained. “Martian news held always a prominent place in our daily papers from the first.”

Following the Moon Men’s invasion and conquering of the Earth, beginning in 2050, newspapers ceased to exist on Earth because the technology to create them disappeared. The despotic hand of the Moon Men and their descendants instituted a crushing campaign of thought control. Not only newspapers, but also all other forms of printed matter were banned. Julian 9^th described the result of that austere policy by the time he turned 20 in 2120. “Printing was a lost art and the last of the public libraries had been destroyed almost a hundred years before I reached maturity, so there was little or nothing to read.”

Written in 1919, The Efficiency Expert has parallels to ERB’s struggles in Chicago just a few years earlier. Before he turned to writing fiction, Burroughs, in search of work to support his young family, had answered many “help wanted” newspaper ads with no results. In The Efficiency Expert, lead character Jimmy Torrance comes to Chicago searching for work in the same way, with the same results.

“In the lobby of the hotel he bought several of the daily papers, and after reaching his room he started perusing the ‘Help Wanted’ columns. Immediately he was impressed and elated by the discovery that there were plenty of jobs, and that a satisfactory percentage of them appeared to be big jobs … And so he decided the wisest play would be to insert an ad in the ‘Situations Wanted’ column, and then from the replies select those which most appealed to him.

“Writing out an ad, he reviewed it carefully, compared it with others that he saw upon the printed page, made a few changes, rewrote it, and then descended to the lobby, where he called a cab and was driven to the office of one of the great metropolitan morning newspapers. Jimmy felt very important as he passed through the massive doorway into the great general offices of the newspaper … he was very sorry for the publishers of the newspaper that they did not know who it was who was inserting an ad in their Situations Wanted column.”

Jimmy expected a hundred replies on the first day his ad ran, but four days later, after having received nary a single response, he was forced to start answering ads in the “Help Wanted” columns.

“What leisure time he had he devoted to what he now had come to consider as his life work—the answering of blind ads in the Help Wanted columns of one morning and one evening paper—the two mediums which seemed to carry the bulk of such advertising … He soon discovered that nine-tenths of the positions were filled before he arrived.”

Finding even that job hunting strategy futile, Jimmy stopped looking for jobs through the “Help Wanted” ads, and began taking a series of low paying jobs just to survive in Chicago. He eventually made friends with a street hoodlum known as “The Lizard.” When Jimmy turned down a handout from him, “The Lizard” explained, “I’m taking it from an old crab who has more than he can use, and all of it he got by robbing people that didn’t have any to spare. He’s a big guy here. When anything big is doing the newspaper guys interview him, and his name is in all the lists of subscriptions to charity—when they’re going to be published in the papers.”

“Everything was to be done to carry the impression to the public through the newspapers, who were usually well represented at the training quarters, that Brophy was in the pink of condition; that he was training hard; that it was impossible to find men who could stand up to him on account of the terrific punishment he inflicted upon his sparring partners; and that the result of the fight was already a foregone conclusion; and then in the third round Young Brophy was to lie down and by reclining peacefully on his stomach for ten seconds make more money than several years of hard and conscientious work earnestly performed could ever net him. It was all very, very simple; but how easily public opinion might be changed should one of the sparring partners really make a good stand against Brophy in the presence of members of the newspaper fraternity!”

Jimmy, however, grew tired of being Brophy’s punching bag. “And there before the eyes of half a dozen newspaper reporters, and before the eyes of his horrified manager and backer, Jimmy, at the end of ninety seconds, landed a punch that sent the flabby Mr. Brophy through the ropes and into dreamland.” Jimmy then endured another month of unemployment, during which he again tried answering “Help Wanted” ads. He came across one that read as follows:

“WANTED, an Efficiency Expert—Machine works wants man capable of thoroughly reorganizing large business along modern lines, stopping leaks and systematizing every activity. Call International Machine Company, West Superior Street. Ask for Mr. Compton.”

Jimmy answered the ad and got the position, although he had to lie about his past job experience to get it. Eventually, he was framed for the murder of his employer, but The Lizard’s testimony in court cleared Jimmy of the charge. It was another newspaper story that made The Lizard come out of the shadows and testify. He told the court, “I been watchin’ the papers close, and I seen yesterday that there wasn’t much chance (for Jimmy), so here I am.”

 

Burroughs used newspaper articles to supply information and character connections in The Girl From Hollywood, written in 1921-22. The author laid out the story’s contemporary plot in a newspaper being read by Colonel Pennington at his Ganado, California, ranch house.

“The colonel was glancing over the headlines of an afternoon paper that Eva had brought from the city. ‘What’s new?’ asked Custer. ‘Same old rot,’ replied his father. ‘Murders, divorces, kidnappers, bootleggers, and they haven’t even the originality to make them interesting by evolving new methods. Oh, hold on—this isn’t so bad! ‘Two hundred thousand dollars worth of stolen whisky landed on the coast,’ he read. ‘Prohibition enforcement agents, together with special agents from the Treasury Department, are working on a unique theory that may reveal the whereabouts of the fortune in bonded whisky stolen from a government warehouse in New York a year ago.’”

The colonel went on to read aloud many other details in the article about the violation of the Volstead Act. The reader later learns that Guy Evans, engaged to the colonel’s daughter, was deeply involved in the sale of the stolen liquor. A separate story line brouight Shannon Burke into the mix. To get control of her, the dastardly director Wilson Crumb had furtively led the starry-eyed young woman into cocaine addiction in Hollywood. When her mother, a neighbor of the Penningtons, died, Shannon went to Ganado to take care of her mother’s affairs. Under the loving care of the Penningtons, Shannon beat her addiction and did not return to Crumb’s control. Back in Hollywood, the young woman Crumb found to take Shannon’s place just happened to be Grace Evans, the sister of Guy. Burroughs used another newspaper to explain how Crumb worked his evil on Grace.

“One evening, toward the middle of October, they were dining together at the Winter Garden. Crumb had bought an evening paper on the street, and was glancing through it as they sat waiting for their dinner to be served. Presently he looked up at the girl seated opposite him.

“‘Didn’t you come from a little jerk-water place up the line, called Ganado?’ he asked. She nodded affirmatively. “‘Here’s a guy from there been sent up for bootlegging—fellow by the name of Pennington.’ She half closed her eyes, as if in pain. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It has been in the newspapers for the last couple of weeks.’

“‘Did you know him?’

“‘Yes—he has been out to see me since his arrest, and he called up once.’ A sudden light came into Crumb’s eye.

“‘By God!’ he exclaimed, bringing his fist down upon the table. ‘This fellow Pennington may not be guilty, but I know who is. It isn’t Pennington who ought to be in jail,’ he said. ‘It’s your brother.’ And thus was fashioned the power he used to force her to his will.”

Wilson Crumb certainly needed killing for disturbing with the idyllic country life of the Penningtons, and he got it later when he brought his film crew to Ganado. Guy Evans did the good deed, but for a second time Custer Pennington took the rap. In a dual denunciation of the Los Angeles press and court system, Burroughs announced the results of Custer’s trial.

“And so there was no great surprise when, several hours later, the jury returned a verdict in accordance with the public opinion of Los Angeles—where, owing to the fact that murder juries are not isolated, such cases are tried largely by the newspapers and the public. They found Custer Pennington, Jr., guilty of murder in the first degree.”

There is no indication of how the LA newspapers responded when Custer was later exonerated.

The setting of ERB’s first Western novel, written in 1923, is the small cattle-town of Hendersville, Arizona, in 1886. Burroughs stocked the frontier community with simple needs, including a general store, a restaurant, a Chinese laundry, a blacksmith shop, a hotel, five saloons, and a newspaper office.

Rancher Elias Henders was visiting the editor of the Hendersville Tribune one evening, when they heard shouts and gunshots coming from the saloon across the street. “Boys will be boys,” the editor remarked. But when a bullet came through the office window, both men ducked behind the editor’s desk. The event led to Henders demoting Bull as ranch foreman and replacing him with the villainous Hal Colby.

Bull is portrayed as a standard model quiet cowboy, but he had a cursory habit involving newspapers that would prove handy later in the story.

“Bull sat in a corner of The Chicago Saloon watching the play at the faro table. It was too early to go to bed and he was not a man who read much, nor cared to read, even had there been anything to read, where there was not. He had skimmed the latest Eastern papers that had come in on the stage and his reading was over until the next shipment of gold from the mine brought him again into contact with a newspaper. Then he would read the live stock market reports, glance over the headlines and throw the paper aside, satisfied. His literary requirements were few.”

It was Bull’s knowledge of the current live stock market reports that allowed him to counsel Diana Henders when Maurice B. Corson, a shifty Eastern lawyer, tried to talk her into selling her ranch. “Mr. Corson is always telling me that the bottom has fallen out of the live stock business and that the new vein in the mine doesn’t exist,” the unsure Diana told Bull. He responded, “The live stock business is all right, Miss. It wasn’t never better, an’ as fer the new vein that’s all right too.”

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