Ray A. Palmer, editor of Fantastic Adventures, was always on the look-out for a good Edgar Rice Burroughs clone. He published the actual ERB in novellas from 1940 to 1943. World War II put an end to that when Burroughs signed up as the world’s oldest war correspondent. But Palmer wanted more. His magazines Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures were not Astounding Science Fiction. They were Science Fiction and Fantasy adventure mags, sold mostly to teens and unsophisticated readers.
Robert Moore Williams took on the task and began the Jongor trilogy in the Pellucidar vein in October 1940, penning two sequels over the next 11 years. That’s a long time to wait, so Palmer dealt with it by paying his underling Howard Browne to write another series about a character named Tharn in “Warrior of the Dawn” (Amazing Stories, December 1942). But Tharn wouldn’t return until October-December 1948 in “The Return of Tharn”.
It looked like if Palmer wanted to get the job done he’d have to do it himself and so he wrote King of the Dinosaurs by J. W. Pelkie. The novel appeared in October 1945. (Almost as important, like Jongor and Tharn’s first novel, it appeared with a J. Allen St. John cover. Nothing said “Burroughs” like as St. John!) “King of the Dinosaurs” was followed by two stories, “Toka and the Man-Bats” (February 1946) and “Toka Fights the Big Cats” (December 1947). Palmer provided a bio that was as much a fiction as the plots about the mighty Toka and his world of sabertooth tigers and dinosaurs.
Why the elaborate sham, with handsome mustached man and his mother? The reality was much different. Palmer had been hit by a truck when only a child, breaking his back and stunting his growth. He would spend the rest of his life as a hunchback, little over four feet tall. J. W. Pelkie is all the things Palmer could wish to be. A rancher from Montana with a bad heart but-oh-so handsome. Not all the hero worship Fantasy is in the pages of Toka’s jungle world.
No matter the personal reasons, it also made good commercial sense to be the author as well as the editor. Strangely, J. W. Pelkie only wrote four tales but he outlived the magazine that spawned him. Palmer wrote a final story for Planet Stories (“In the Sphere of Time”, Summer 1948). He would resign his editorship shortly after the Ziff-Davis magazines moved their offices.
Palmer would start his own small line of Pulps with Other Worlds. It was for this magazine that he tried to convince the Burroughs heirs in 1955 with his Dimes for Tarzan campaign to become the publisher of Burroughs knock-offs. That bid would fail and Palmer moved away from Science Fiction. He had discovered the fascinating world of Flying Saucers. (After his years of promoting the Shaver Mystery in Amazing Stories, this seemed another chance.) He would spend the next twenty years publishing books on UFOS.
Cover Art by J. Allen St. John and Interiors by Seward
Cover art by Walter Parke with interior art by William Juhre.
Cover art and interiors by Robert Gibson Jones
Interior art from Planet Stories by Vincent Napoli
