The Tharn novels were but a moment in the career of Howard Browne. Browne (April 15, 1908 – October 28, 1999) began as a writer before becoming the editor of Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures (later retitled Fantastic) after Ray A. Palmer. Browne was a mystery writer, penning the Wilbur Peddie series in Mammoth Detective for Palmer. Browne followed this up with detective novels about Paul Pine beginning with Halo in Blood (1946). He could have gone his merry way writing about detectives and clues but he became a sub-editor at Amazing and was pulled into the fantastic genres.
One of his assignments as managing editor was producing content for the magazines. He did this with his first Tharn novel, since Ray Palmer was always looking for Edgar Rice Burroughs knock-offs. The December 1942 issue bore a J. Allen St. John cover for a novel about a prehistoric man named Tharn. The story finished in the January 1943 issue. The plot has Tharn, chief of his tribe of Cro-Magnon men, going in search of his kidnapped girl, Dylara. He rescues her from the rival cavemen only to have her taken by civilized men, the Sepharians. Dylara’s beauty causes the city-dwellers to fight over her with intrigue and invasion. Tharn, captured and put in the arena to die. The novel ends with Tharn still in pursuit of Dylara and her new kidnappers, the men of Ammad.
The Kirkus Review said: “This is typical pulp magazine stuff in book form.” but readers of Amazing Stories wanted more. (Reader reaction in the letter column was both in favor and critical, calling it “over-rated”.) Only, they’d have to wait. Six years…
Browne would repeat the feat a second time in 1948 with The Return of Tharn. Spread over three issues, none receiving a cover, Amazing Stories, October November December 1948. All three issues had different illustrators, with J. Allen St. John finishing off the novel. A much less welcome return six years later. The story continues where it left off, with Tharn searching for Dylara. Tharn heads for Ammad, gains an ally in Trakor. Dylara manages to get taken by spider-men, escapes and heads into the jungle. Plots and intrigues plague the Ammadians and the cave people will win free and live the good life away from the city.
In 1950, Browne took over the full editorship of the magazines he had worked on for years, with Palmer leaving to found his own line of Pulps. Browne has written about this change over in his “Profit Without Honor” (Amazing Stories, May 1984), where he talks about dropping the goofy Shaver Mystery and other Palmer-isms and crafting new digest-sized magazines written by real SF writers. He would edit for six more years before leaving magazine publishing in 1956 to work in Hollywood. Tharn never received any more sequels but did go to hard cover editions in 1943 and 1956.