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Linda didn't leave the window. In about half an hour Joh
The sound of a shot reached Linda through the half-opened window. The men on the street looked startled, milled around for a moment, and then ran towards the stable. Linda raced down the hall and down the steps to the street. When she was halfway to the stable, she heard what the whole town of Acheron knew by then.
Doc Grandtoul was dead. He had accidentally shot himself.
Some stories have happy endings. Any story of young love should have a happy ending. It means two young citizens settling down in a town and raising more happy young citizens.
And this was what happened in Acheron after the uproar over Doc Grandtoul's sudden and sad demise had quieted down. Doc Grandtoul was pronounced dead by Doc Evans, and the burial took place next day.
Only Linda thought it was peculiar that, when the coffin lid was closed over Doc Grandtoul, Doc Evans was the sole person present. And she noticed that Skeeter left town the same day. She didn't think it was so peculiar that not a word was said about the money paid to Doc Grandtoul. Those who had paid were not going to raise a fuss. Everybody pulled a long face and said what a pity it was that only Doc
Grandtoul knew how to operate his machine. But very few moped around because of what had happened.
For a long time Linda never opened her mouth to Joh
And one night, years later, when she and Joh
Joh
"If Doc Grandtoul had had an 'accident' in every town," she said, "nobody would have been left holding the bag."
Joh
Linda looked into the fireplace a moment, and then she said, "I wonder where Doc Grandtoul is now?"
Joh
"I don't know, darling. I'll bet he went to the Good Place. After all, he brought us together, didn't he?"
An Exclusive Interview With Lord Greystoke
A subgenre of biographical literature is that which claims that certain people thought to be fictional are, or were, very much living. Splendid examples of this are Blakeney's Sir Percy Blakeney: Fact or Fiction? (a biography of the Scarlet Pimpernel), Baring-Gould's Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street and Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street, Parkinson's The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower, and the Flashman Papers (three volumes so far) by Fraser. In fact, some public libraries stock these in the "B" or biography section. (The Blakeney book is in the "B" section of the Peoria, Illinois, public library.)
I've written two such "lives": Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life. (The former is in the biography section of the Yuma City, California, Library.) I plan to write biographies of The Shadow, Allan Quatermain, Fu Manchu, d'Artagnan, Travis McGee, and a number of others. Fu Manchu, by the way, may have been based on a real-life model, a Vietnamese named Hanoi Shan whose operations in early twentieth-century France were every bit as sinister and fantastic as Rohmer's creation. I was informed of this after I'd made the statement in Tarzan Alive that Fu Manchu had no living counterpart.
This form of apologia is a lot of fun and much hard work. It requires as much imagination as the writing of science fiction but more discipline. Historical facts must not be ignored. Baring-Gould, in writing his Holmes biography, had an enormous amount of scholarship, articles published in The Baker Street Journal and other periodicals, to draw upon. But he had not only to read all these but to study them and make decisions. He found many conflicting theories, and he had to pick the one that seemed most valid. In addition, where theories or speculations were lacking, he had to generate his own. He had to explain discrepancies, which are numerous in Watson's account of Holmes's life. And, I might add, Burroughs, in his semifictional narratives of Greystoke's career, left many discrepancies for the scholar to reconcile, if he could. There are also gaps in the life of the hero which the biographer must fill in. And if the original writer has neglected the hero's genealogy, the biographer must research this.
Sometimes, a biographer makes a statement which he ca
The following article is part of my interview with "Lord Greystoke" and appeared in the April, 1972, issue of Esquire under the title of "Tarzan Lives." It was accompanied by a portrait of Greystoke, a photograph of a painting by Jean-Paul Goude. The staff of Esquire went to great lengths and much trouble to acquire this, for which they should be thanked. The report that Goude got the commission to do the painting because he is a relative of Admiral Paul d'Arnot of the French navy, Greystoke's closest friend, is being checked. It is said that Goude, like Holmes, is a descendant of Antoine Vernet, father of four famous French painters.
Editor's Note: For a number of years Mr. Farmer, who recorded the following interview, has been engaged in writing a definitive biography of the man Edgar Rice Burroughs called Tarzan of the Apes. Mr. Farmer's book, Tarzan Alive, to be published by Doubleday in April of this year, is similar in method to Baring-Gould's Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street and Parkinson's The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower, with the very important difference that Mr. Farmer firmly avers that "Lord Greystoke" or "Tarzan" is really alive. In fact, Mr. Farmer was able to track his subject to earth in a hotel in Libreville, Gabon, on the coast of Western Africa just above the equator, where he was granted this interview. "I met him," Mr. Farmer tells us, "in his hotel room --fittingly enough, on September 1, Edgar Rice Burroughs' birthday. He is six feet three and, I suppose, about two hundred forty pounds. I did not have the opportunity to see him in action, of course, but just from the way he moved about the room I could guess at his immense physical strength. As Burroughs said, he is much more like Apollo than Hercules; his power lies in the quality not the quantity of his muscles. I don't hesitate to admit that I was awed. I was concerned, of course, that after all my research I might still have been the victim of a hoax; but from the moment I knocked on the door and heard that deep, rich voice say 'Enter,' I knew I had the right man. And of course I was even more convinced when I saw him move --like a leopard, like water falling." The text of Mr. Farmer's interview follows.
TARZAN: How do you do, Mr. Farmer.