The Swordsman of Mars

The Swordsman Of Mars

Kline and the Art of the Tall Tale
By Michael Moorcock

These days, if the public has heard of Otis Adelbert Kline at all it is generally in association with Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan, whose agent Kline became. Those of us who enjoyed the first post-WW2 “fantasy boom” knew him from the few titles reprinted, usually by small press houses; but before the war his was a name eagerly watched for by readers who had become hooked on fantastic interplanetary adventure stories, especially those of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose first three Mars books still set the benchmark for the genre. Kline’s name on the cover of Argosy Weekly magazine or Weird Tales was a certain way of keeping a healthy circulation. He was considered a draw second only to Burroughs himself.

A Chicagoan, like Burroughs, Kline began his early career as a would-be Broadway songsmith. He then discovered a knack for writing horror tales but his best-known work was so evidently presented in the tradition of ERB that some even thought the writers to be the same man. To this day he is regarded as Burroughs’s closest rival. Burroughs wrote Martian scientific romances, Kline wrote Venusian. Jan of the Jungle was a South American version of the Tarzan stories. Burroughs came up with a Venusian series featuring Carson Napier. Kline produced this Martian tale and another also set on the very different Mars he had created. Those who recognized that the authors had very different styles speculated about a kind of feud between them and after their deaths told rather sensational stories of a rivalry
in which ERB wrote Martian tales, so OAK wrote Venusian tales,
whereupon Burroughs responded to this challenge by creating his own Carson of Venus, and so on and so on. Even the magazine illustrations, either by J. Allen St. John, Burroughs’s usual illustrator, or by someone very similar in style, were alike. But this was more the result of editors commissioning the work and anxious to trade in on Burroughs’s popularity. Actually there is no evidence of rivalry at all and, if Burroughs was irritated by Kline, he never said anything in print or to anyone close to him. He had become rather used to imitators and had even been accused in his day of pinching Tarzan from Kipling’s Mowgli (which he strenuously, if a little disingenuously, denied).

Anyone who reads the two authors recognizes at once that while Kline failed to match Burroughs’s atmospheric lyricism (read the opening of The Warlord of Mars if you want to understand why Burroughs has endured so well for almost a hundred years) he tended to produce a more coherent and better-considered rationale for his tales of swords and science on distant worlds, be it the Moon, Venus or Mars, and that all his stories of that kind took place against a well-worked-out history of the Solar System and the people who inhabited it.

“Kline and the Art of the Tall Tale” © 2007 by Michael Moorcock.