The Efficiency Expert

Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in 1875 in Chicago, Illinois. Although Burroughs wrote in many genres he is best known for creating the jungle hero Tarzan. Burroughs began writing for pulp fiction magazines and in 1912 he published Tarzan of the Apes. The Efficiency Expert was originally published in the All Story Weekly in 1921. The story is in some ways partly autobiographical in regards to Burroughs's youth and the many jobs he had before becoming a writer. The best friends of the main character are also unique. There is a pickpocket studying to be a safe cracker and a young prostitute with a heart of gold. Jimmy faces hard times and eventually he finds his niche and grows up.

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.