'MISS FISHER'S MURDER MYSTERIES'
"MURDER IN MONTPARNASSE"
Bert Johnson was the target of the man who had murdered a famous painter in France. Bert and several of his fellow soldiers had witnessed it and the killer had tracked them down to eliminate them one by one.
Exasperated by what he considered the inefficiency of the police, Bert vowed to take care of the matter on his own in order to avenge his friends. But when he tried to storm out, Constable Hugh Collins was blocking his way, seemingly with no intention on moving to one side so that he might pass.
"Out of my road, Tarzan," growled Bert, but Hugh didn't step aside until Detective Jack Robinson nodded his okay.
Team Toobworld, you know the rules of the Toobworld Dynamic: Bert's pejorative, calling Hugh "Tarzan" (meaning that he was a big ape-man standing in the way as I interpreted it) had no attribution back to the source material - the Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Had there been mention of the books, which began in 1912, then it might have been Bert was familiar with them. (Two of them were both completed and published in 1928 - "Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle"was serialized from December of 1927 through May of 1928 and then published in hardcover in September of 1928. This particular episode of the Australian "History Mystery" took place in October of 1928. It's pozz'ble, just pozz'ble, that Bert had recently read it. If not, there had been the ten previous novels.
Then again, Bert doesn't really come off as the reader type. No worries. An argument could be made that he probably saw one of five feature length films that came out before this investigation (with a sixth "currently" running as a serial.)
But as there was no attribution to either the books or the movies, I'm going with the idea that Bert was making a comparison between Constable Collins and the actual Jungle Lord, Tarzan.
You don't know how long I've been waiting for this in my televisiological studies! To actually have "proof" that Tarzan existed in the main TV dimension around the same time his timeline was chronicled by Philip Jose Farmer in "Tarzan Alive" (and mapped out with more details by Wold Newton scholar Win Scott Eckert.)
(A word of caution: I am not equating Toobworld with the Wold Newton Universe. They are two wholly distinctive meta-fictional universes, but they do share a few characters and locations, with Tarzan being one of them.)
However [and alas for Toobworld!], the legend of Tarzan (NOT "The Legend Of Tarzan"!) always seemed to be locked into the mid-1960s - ERB's far future - because of the televisual dominance of the Ron Ely TV series. But with last year's celebration of Wold Newton Day, we accepted the immortality of Tarzan as established in the meta-fictional universe of BookWorld as having happened in Toobworld as well. So the Tarzan that Bert Johnson knew of in 1920s Australia was the same Lord of the Jungle known to Private Kelly in WWII France and that Ape--Man was still active in the 1960s, thanks to the immortality elixir.
BCnU!
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