A year or so after writing TARZAN OF
THE APES and its sequel, Edgar Rice Burroughs—perhaps not yet aware
as to how much of a permanent blockbuster he had in his ape-man—wrote
these two books. The basic structure of the MUCKER books was the same
as those of the first two Tarzan tales. Hero grows to maturity in
rough environment; meets a woman and falls in love; gives her up to a
rival who belongs to the same class as the woman; goes through a
series of adventures and then meets his beloved by chance, whereupon
they’re united for good despite class differences.
Next to the Tarzan books, though, the
Mucker books are set in a world much closer to our own. Billy Byrne,
the “mucker” of the title, grows up in the concrete jungles of
Chicago. He has no father to speak of and not until halfway through
the book does ERB reveal that the mother who raised Byrne abused him
until he was too big to take abuse any more. Byrne’s real mentors
are the toughs of the Chicago slums, and thus he grows up committing
petty crimes and despising the law and rich “swells.” There’s
no “nature’s nobleman” in this character: Byrne cares nothing
for fair play, being entirely willing to kick a man when he’s down.
He’s been taught to admire only raw strength, and though he’s not
a “superman” like Tarzan, he’s about as strong as a big man can
be.
As with most ERB books, the hero gets
propelled from one locale to another with uncanny rapidity. Thus
there’s no need to dwell on the specific circumstances that take
the Mucker to sea, where he becomes tentatively allied to modern
pirates. In the course of this new life of crime, though, he meets a
beautiful upper-class woman, Barbara Harding. Despite her rarefied
origins, though, Barbara tells Byrne what she thinks of him when he
commits an egregious assault on a helpless man. This stymies Byrne,
who’s used to women fleeing him in fear, and against his will he
finds himself impressed with the young woman’s courage. Nor is
Barbara’s courage limited to words. Whereas Jane Porter often seems
like a milksop, Barbara defends herself against a potential rapist by
stealing his knife and stabbing him with it. She also fights, to the
best of her ability, at Byrne’s side when the two of them are faced
with a horde of Malay Islanders descended from a clan of exiled
Japanese. (These polyglot Asians comprise the only metaphenomenal
element in either of the two books.)
To be sure, though ERB writes more
realistically about Byrne than he did about most of his protagonists,
he surely knew that his audience wouldn’t tolerate him alluding to
Byrne’s past sexual history. Yet, ERB does rise to the occasion, so
to speak, when Byrne, having fallen inextricably in love with
Barbara, finds himself alone with Barbara on their primitive island.
That he resists the impulse to rape his beloved is not a surprise in
the end, but that ERB presents the situation at all is certainly
noteworthy.
Sadly, the sequel is not nearly filled
with as many pulpish thrills as the first novel. Byrne, having nobly
told Barbara to marry a man of her own class, promptly gets put in
jail, breaks free, and makes friends on the road with an intellectual
hobo named Bridge. Then he and Bridge wander down to Mexico, where
they have quasi-western exploits during the rise of Pancho Villa.
Byrne fights a lot of guys, meets Barbara again, and has a happy
ending.
In both novels ERB makes no bones about
allowing his character to use insulting terms in reference to other
ethnicities. To an extent this may be mitigated by the fact that most
of the people receiving the insults are unremittingly hostile toward
white people, though the second novel has a smattering of “good
Mexicans.” Still, though the author doesn’t censor his
protagonist, he does make fun of the mucker’s limitations. In one
scene, Byrne and Bridge are speaking to a friendly Mexican who does
not speak English, any more than Byrne speaks Spanish. Byrne refers
to the Mexican as a “dago,” and when Bridge tells the mucker that
the other fellow is not of Italian descent, Byrne complains, “So
whoever said he was an Eyetalian?”
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