The Efficiency Expert

Jimmy Torrance sat a long time in thought after the Lizard left. "God!" he muttered. "I wonder what dad would say if he knew that I had come to a point where I had even momentarily considered going into partnership with a safe-blower, and that for the next two weeks I shall be compelled to subsist upon the charity of a criminal?" ~~~ Edgar Rice Burroughs created one of the most iconic figures in American pop culture, Tarzan of the Apes, and it is impossible to overstate his influence on entire genres of popular literature in the decades after his enormously winning pulp novels stormed the public's imagination. The Efficiency Expert, first published in 1921 and often overlooked by Burroughs' fans, is a cracking tale of young Jimmy Torrance, an upstanding college graduate in post-World War I Chicago who inadvertently rubs shoulders with mobsters and ends up framed for murder. American novelist EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS (1875-1950) wrote dozens of adventure, crime, and science fiction novels that are still beloved today, including Tarzan of the Apes (1912), At the Earth's Core (1914), A Princess of Mars (1917), and Pirates of Venus (1934). He is reputed to have been reading a comic book when he died.