< style="font-weight: bold;">

<>

<>

As fascinated as Edgar Rice Burroughs was with automobiles throughout his adult life, it’s not surprising to find them scattered throughout the fiction that he produced during his adult life. He even designed some interesting extra-terrestrial vehicles for use by alien races in his Mars and Venus tales, but let’s put them aside for now, and examine the motor vehicles he used in his stories set on Earth.

First, a vocabulary lesson on the terminology that ERB utilized. He often used “automobile” and “car,” terms commonly in use today. However, he also used another term, outdated now, to refer to all cars, particularly in his early stories. At one point in the second part of The Mad King, written in 1914, Barney Custer revealed what he found in a nearby building. “It’s a machine,” he whispered to his companion, who then understood that Barney had found an automobile.

ERB identified that specific car as a roadster, another term seldom used today. Initially it was an American term for a two-seat car with no weather protection. The model evolved over the years to included two-seat convertibles. Another early car model Burroughs mentioned was a phaeton. Like a roadster, a phaeton lacked any fixed weather protection, but had a back seat to carry passengers. In Marcia of the Doorstep, written in 1924, family patriarch Marcus Aurelius purchased a new car. Its initial outing with the family aboard ended sadly.

“There was a crash, a volley of profanity, a couple of screams from the back seat and Marcus Aurelius’ new sport model phaeton was merged with a yellow taxi.”

A vehicle model mentioned more often by ERB is the touring car. It was a popular American family style of open car seating four or more people. It was popular in the early 1900s and 1920s. In ERB’s story The Rider, the Bass family packed into a “large touring car” for a planned European tour.

Keeping those terms in mind, let’s look at some of the ways ERB utilized cars in some of his earliest stories. Since Burroughs first novel was set on Mars and his second was about events that took place on earth in the Middle Ages, it wasn’t until his third, and most famous novel, that automobiles first played a part in his fiction. (The period during which Burroughs wrote each story is listed below the story’s title.)

Tarzan of the Apes

Dec. 1911 – May 1912

In the final two chapters of Tarzan of the Apes, the notable characters shuttle around in three different automobiles. To keep them straight, let’s call them the “Clayton Car,” the “Canler Car,” and the “Tarzan Car.” The first to appear is the “Clayton Car,” which, with its owner, William Clayton and family friend Mr. Philander, was waiting at the train station in Wisconsin when Jane, her father, and Esmeralda arrived. They all piled into the “Clayton Car,” which then “quickly whirled away through the dense northern woods toward the little farm” that Jane had inherited from her mother.

A week later, the “Canler Car,” “a purring six cylinder,” pulled up to the farmhouse. The driver, Robert Canler, had come to demand that Jane marry him as promised. After she finally gave in, Canler drove away the next morning to get a marriage license and a minister.

While Canler was gone, a fourth automobile, a great black car, came careening down the road and stopped with a jolt at the cottage. It was Tarzan, of course, come to rescue the whole crowd from an approaching forest fire. When he learned Jane was off walking in the woods, he ordered Clayton to put everybody else in his car and drive them to safety by the north road. “Leave my car here,” Tarzan directed. “If I find Miss Porter we shall need it.” The rest of the party then climbed in the “Clayton Car” and he drove them off to safety. Meanwhile, with the ape-man at the wheel, the “Tarzan Car” drove toward the fire to find and rescue Jane. With her in the car, Tarzan sped toward safety. “The car was plunging along the uneven road at a reckless pace,” Burroughs noted. When the danger had passed, Tarzan slowed the car down. It was in that vehicle at that time that Tarzan offered Jane his love and asked for hers.

Before she could answer definitely, they arrived at a little hamlet where they found Clayton and his passengers standing around the “Clayton Car.” They were all sitting in the parlor of a little hostelry, when “the distant chugging of an approaching automobile caught their attention.” It was the “Canler Car” returning with a minister to solemnize the driver’s marriage to Jane. Canler was only in the hostelry for a few moments before Tarzan “convinced” him to drive away in his car.

The remaining group went outside and got into the two cars — Clayton, Jane, her father, and Esmeralda in the “Clayton Car” and Mr. Philander with the ape-man in the “Tarzan Car.” Mr. Philander spoke to the silent driver. “Bless me,” he said, “Who would ever have thought it possible! The last time I saw you you were a veritable wild man, skipping about among the branches of a tropical African forest, and now you are driving me along a Wisconsin road in a French automobile.”

Meanwhile, ahead in the “Clayton Car,” a confused Jane Porter made a fateful mistake. She convinced herself that life with Clayton would be preferable to life with a wild man. In the train station waiting room, she told Tarzan she had agreed to marry Clayton. Later, on the station platform, Tarzan renounced his birthright. Unable to face Clayton, Tarzan decided at the last minute to drive his car back to New York. Jane told Clayton it was because Tarzan was anxious to see more of America than is possible from a car window.

The Return of Tarzan

Two automobiles play roles during the two months Tarzan lived in Paris at the beginning of The Return of Tarzan. While out for a walk one night, Tarzan stood on the sidewalk of a well-lighted boulevard waiting for traffic to clear before crossing the street. Burroughs recounted the communication between him and a passenger in a passing vehicle.

Tarzan and Olga had met on the ocean liner that brought both of them back to France from America. Their passing encounter on a street in Paris that evening set in motion events that a month later led Tarzan to a potentially fatal ride in another automobile. On the morning of November 26, 1909, Tarzan climbed into Paul D’Arnot’s “great car” for a short drive to a field outside Paris. Tarzan went there to answer the challenge of Count de Coude for an incident that occurred in the boudoir of the count’s wife a few days before. Although wounded twice, Tarzan survived the duel, and after some discussion, the opponents “rode back to Paris together in D’Arnot’s car, the best of friends.”

Jan.-Feb., 1914

Nearly three years and many adventures passed before another automobile played a role in Tarzan’s life. In September 1912, Lord Greystoke was in Paris visiting D’Arnot, when he received a telegram informing him that his infant son had been kidnapped in London earlier that day. Hurrying home, Tarzan was met by a “roadster” at the station and driven to his family’s London townhouse. There he learned the kidnapping details from his distraught wife. While the baby’s nurse was wheeling him along the sidewalk outside the Greystoke residence, a taxicab drew up at the corner ahead. Carl, new houseman, then lured the nurse back toward the house. When the nurse reached the townhouse door, she turned to see the man wheeling the buggy toward the corner.

“Leaping to the running board, she had attempted to snatch the baby from the arms of the stranger, and here, screaming and fighting, she had clung to her position after the taxicab had got underway; nor was it until the machine had passed the Greystoke residence at a good speed that Carl, with a heavy blow to her face, had succeeded in knocking her to the pavement.”

After Lady Greystoke witnessed the nurse’s brave attempt, she also tried in vain to reach the passing vehicle. After Tarzan arrived home, a conspirator’s phone call lured him to Dover to retrieve his son. Lord Greystoke told his wife to stay home, but her fear for her son overcame his directive, and she had her chauffeur drive her to the station to catch the late train to Dover. There both Tarzan and Jane were shanghaied. No automobiles existed where they spent the next four months. They would not return to their London home until January 1913.

The Girl From Farris’s

July 1913 – March 1914

After establishing himself as a successful writer of imaginative fiction, ERB made his first attempt at contemporary social fiction with The Girl From Farris’s. Since the setting is Burroughs’ hometown of Chicago, automobiles play a part in the storyline. The reader learns at the end of the story that, prior to the beginning of the story, the car of Chicago businessman John Secor stalled in front of the countryside homestead of the Lathrop family. While the chauffeur tinkered with the motor, Secor knocked on the Lathrops’ door and asked for a glass of water. Infatuated immediately with the widowed Mrs. Lathrop’s daughter June, Secor returned many times in his chauffeured automobile to visit her. After being convinced to marry Secor, June was driven into town in her new husband’s car and installed in a room at Farris’s, a Chicago brothel.

“I know a gink right now that’ll pass me out five hundred bones any time for a squab like you. Say the word and I’ll split with you … He’d set you up in a swell apartment, plaster sparklers all over you, and give you a year-after-next model eight-lunger and a shuffer. You’d be the only chesse on Mich. Boul.”

After June declined the officer, Eddie gave her money to buy new clothes so that she could get a respectable job. Meanwhile, Ogden Secor, son of John, the bigamist who duped June, was engaged to Sophia Welles, a Chicago socialite, whose father had made “several fortunes in the automobile industry.”

The Mucker

Aug. 1913 – March 1916

Edgar Rice Burroughs may have loved automobiles, but Billy Byrne, the protagonist in The Mucker, decidedly did not. As a young man growing up on Chicago’s East Side, Billy hated everything that was respectable. An expensive car was one of those things. “He had writhed in torture at sight of every shiny, purring automobile that had ever passed him with its load of well-groomed men and women.”

Years later, after escaping from police following a murder conviction, Billy had another reason for disliking automobiles. The Kansas City police received a tip that Billy was at a farmhouse outside the city. ERB noted, “It was but a little past one o’clock that a touring car rolled south out of Kansas City with Detective Sergeant Flannagan in the front seat with the driver and two burly representatives of Missouri law in the back.” Billy and Bridge were saying good-bye to the woman at the farmhouse, when “the dust of a fast-moving automobile appeared about a bend in the road a half-mile from the house.” Fortunately for Billy, the farmer’s wife hid the two hobos in her attic before the police car arrived.

Although Billy achieves respectability at the end of the story, he is never seen driving a car, a machine he had hated and feared all his life.

The Mad King

Oct.-Nov. 1913 / Sept.-Nov. 1914

Of the hundreds of characters Edgar Rice Burroughs created, Barney Custer of Beatrice, Nebraska, drove the most cars. In The Mad King, he appears behind the wheel of four automobiles, two that he owned and two that he stole. Barney is first seen paying a storekeeper for gasoline he had just purchased for his gray roadster. It was the fall of 1912, and Barney was visiting for the first time his mother’s native land, the small Balkan kingdom of Lutha. After leaving the hamlet of Tafelberg, he drove through the picturesque countryside. Burroughs then described the incident that his life changed forever.

“Just before him was a long, heavy grade, and as he took it with open muffler the chugging of his motor drowned the sound of hoof beats rapidly approaching behind him. It was not until he topped the grade that he heard anything unusual, and at the same instant a girl on horseback tore past him.”

Noticing the girl’s horse was out of control, Barney pressed the accelerator, and, “Like a frightened deer the gray roadster sprang forward in pursuit.” As the road was narrow, Barney drove up the outside to prevent the horse from plunging into the ravine below. He was able to pull her off the horse and onto the car’s running board, but the roadster skidded though a tight turn in the road and toppled over into the ravine. Barney shoved the girl off the running board, but he went over the embankment with his car. Fortunately, he was thrown from the vehicle and landed unharmed in a bush. Much later in the story, the reader learns that Barney’s car actually landed on Leopold, the heir to the throne of Lutha, pinning him go the ground temporarily. He escaped before the car burst into flames.

The girl Barney sacrificed his car to save was Emma Von der Tann, who later became his love interest in the story. After a series of typical Burroughsian adventures, Barney left Lutha a month later and returned to his home in Nebraska at the conclusion of part one of The Mad King.

Nine months passed before Barney’s second car appeared at the beginning of part two. After an agent by an enemy in Lutha failed in an attempt to kill Barney in Beatrice, Barney decided he must return to Lutha. While his new roadster, which Burroughs described as “a later model of the one he had lost in Lutha,” was in a Beatrice repair shop, Barney learned the assassin has fled to Lincoln, Nebraska. Without even saying good-bye to family, “he leaped into his gray roadster … and the last that Beatrice, Nebraska, saw of him was a whirling cloud of dust as he raced north out of town toward Lincoln.” He left his car there and took a train to New York. He tracked the assassin across the ocean, eventually making his way to Burgova, Austria-Hungary, in early August 1914. Since World War I had broken out in the Balkans, the border with neighboring Lutha was closed.

Near the headquarters of an Austrian army corps, “his eyes hung long and greedily upon the great, high-powered machines that chugged or purred about him … If he could but be behind the wheel of such a car for an hour! The frontier could not be over fifty miles to the south … what would fifty miles be to one of those machines?” Clothed in the uniform of an Austrian corporal he had killed, Barney walked boldly to a “big, gray machine” left unattended in front of the headquarters building.

“To crank it and leap to the driver’s seat required but a moment. The big car moved slowly forward. A turn of the steering wheel brought it around headed toward the wide gates. Barney shifted second speed, stepped on the accelerator and the cutout simultaneously, and … shot out of the courtyard. None who saw his departure could have guessed from the manner of it that the young man at the wheel of the gray car was stealing the machine.”

Outside the town, Barney drove south down a country road with Austrian troops marching on both sides. He bluffed his way onto the open road toward the frontier, and at the border was waved through without comment by an Austrian customs officer.

Barney was bound for the castle of Prince Ludwig von der Tann, Prince of Lutha and father of Emma von der Tann. “He flew through the familiar main street of the quaint old village (Tafelberg) at a speed that was little, if any less, than 50 miles an hour … On he raced toward the south, his speed often necessarily diminished upon the winding mountain roads, but for the most part clinging to a reckless mileage.” Half way to his destination, a patrol of Austrian infantrymen signaled him to pull over. Instead, he pressed the accelerator down. “At over sixty mils an hour the huge, gray monster bored down upon them. One of them fell beneath the wheels — two others were thrown high in air as the bumper struck them.”

“For a few minutes he held to his rapid pace before he looked around, and then it was to see two cars heading toward him in pursuit. Again he accelerated the speed of the car. The road was straight and level. Barney watched the road rushing rapidly out of sight beneath the gray fenders. He glanced occasionally at the speedometer. Seventy-five miles an hour … He saw the needle vibrate up to eighty. Gradually he nursed her up and up to great speed … The needle rose steadily until it reached 90 miles an hour — and topped it.”

Then the radiator, penetrated by a bullet fired at the roadblock, began to hiss and expel steam. “At the speed he was going it would be but a short time before the superheated pistons expanding in their cylinders would tear the motor to pieces. Barney felt that he would be lucky if he were not killed when it happened.” The sight ahead of a bridge over a river gave Barney an idea.

 “As he neared the bridge, he reduced speed to 15 miles an hour, and set the hand throttle to hold it there. Still gripping the steering wheel with one hand, he climbed over the left-hand door to the running board. As the front wheels of the car ran up onto the bridge, Barney gave the steering wheel a sudden turn to the right and jumped. The car veered toward the wood handrail (and) the big machine plunged through them headforemost into the river. Barney ran across the bridge, leaped the fence and plunged into the shelter of the wood. Then he turned to look back up the road in the direction from which his pursuers were coming. They were not in sight — they had not seen his ruse. The water in the river was of sufficient depth to completely cover the car.”

After hiding in the woods for week avoiding capture by Austrians, Barney just happened to be in the right place at the right time to save Emma von der Tann, who was fleeing from abductors taking her to Blentz to be forcibly married to Peter. Looking for a way to reach the capital city of Ludstadt, the couple came upon a driveway outside a small town. “People who build driveways into their grounds usually have something to drive,” Barney said to Emma. “Whatever it is it should be at the other end of the driveway. Let’s see if it will carry two.” In a garage, Barney found a roadster. “He ran his hand over the pedals and levers, breathing a sigh of relief as his touch revealed the familiar control of a standard make.” For the second time in less than a week, Barney became a car thief. “It’s the through express for Lustadt and makes no stops for passengers or freight,” he joked with Emma.

Soon, though, they heard the sound of horses on the roadway behind them. Barney increased the speed of the car, but the road was heavy with sand, and ruts gripping the tires slowed the speed. They held the lead for a mile. “She’s reached her limit in this sand, and there’s a grade just ahead,” Barney lamented. “We may find better going beyond, but they’re bound to gain on us before we reach the top.” An excited Emma responded, “I know where we are now. The hill ahead is sandy, and there is a quarter of a mile of sand beyond, but then we strike the Lustadt highway, and if we can reach it ahead of them their horses will have to go ninety miles an hour to catch us.”

“They had reached the grade at last, and the motor was straining to the Herculean task imposed upon it. Grinding and grating in the second speed the car toiled upward through the clinging sand. The pace was snail-like. Behind, the horsemen were gaining rapidly … The top of the ascent lay but a few yards ahead, and the pursuers were but a few yards behind.” Emma turned and fired three shots at their pursuers. Then the car topped the hill and sped forward downhill through the last quarter-mile of sand toward the good road ahead.

“At last the white ribbon of the main road became visible. To the right they saw the headlights of a machine. But the machine was a mile away and could not possibly reach the intersection of the two roads before they had turned to the left toward Lustadt. Then the incident would resolve itself into a simple test of speed between the two cars — and the ability and nerve of the drivers. Barney hadn’t the slightest doubt now as to the outcome. His borrowed car was a good one, in good condition. And in the matter of driving he rather prided himself that he needn’t take his hat off to anyone when it came to ability and nerve.”

Suddenly, from the engine came a “sickly, sucking sputter,” and the car slowed down. The engine shut down, and the two passengers sat in silence as their “machine” coasted to a stop. It was out of gasoline. When their pursuers arrived they found Barney and Emma standing beside the worthless car. Peter’s soldiers took them into custody.