The Mucker

A Chicago street tough is shanghaied aboard a ship sent to kidnap an heiress, and the voyage takes them to a lost Japanese island and a headhunters' village — after which the real trouble is Chicago. Burroughs wrote it in 1914, between Tarzan and Mars, and gave the brute a conscience he never asked for; the second half, in which the mucker comes home, is better than the first. Sixty plates of gulls, breakers, and coming storms by George Bellows and James McNeill Whistler give the sea voyage the weather it deserves.