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The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin Vol. 1 -- Front    Back Vol. 2 -- Front    Back Vol. 3 -- Front    Back This I Remember Vol. 1 Vol. 2 Vol. 3 Popular Library: Jules de Grandin The Adventures The Casebook The Hellfire Files The Horror Chambers The Skeleton Closet

While Quinn's early stories inWeird Tales, such as "The Phantom Farmhouse" in the second issue werepopular, it was his development of the occult detective Jules de Grandin, beginning in October 1925's "The Horror onthe Links" that made him the fixture he became in the "Unique Magazine." Seabury Quinn was certainly not the first writerto develop such a character,Algernon Blackwood'sJohn Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908),William Hope Hodgson'sCarnacki the Ghost-Finder (1913) andSax Rohmer'sMorris Klaw inThe Dream Detective (1920), and particularlyJean Ray'sHarry Dickson. Le Sherlock Holmes Américain (1931-1940)series having come before or concurrently, nor was he thelast. Ofcourse, with his assistant and compiler of adventures Dr. Trowbridge, Jules de Grandin also owed something to Sherlock Holmes.

Most of De Grandin and Trowbridge's adventures occur in the town of Harrisonville, N.J., a town quite as haunted asLovecraft's Arkham, if perhaps not so much by Old Ones. De Grandin, an eminent French surgeon and former intelligenceoperative resides there with Dr. Trowbridge, and together they solve crimes with occult or supernatural elements. Quinn'sstories, unlike those of Howard, Lovecraft and Smith, are set in a very real, if fictional small-town America. The vastmajority of the supernatural and occult elements in Quinn's stories are ultimately resolved to be the work of people, sickand twisted people perhaps, but not trans-dimensional beings or spell-casting wizards. De Grandin was the Kolchak of histime. Quinn from all accounts was the antithesis of the Lovecraft circle, he was no poor Art for Art's sake, reclusive,psychologically-suspect autodidact -- basically, he had a life: a wife, a son, a number of jobs teaching, editing trademagazines, a degree and an on again-off again law career. Where Quinn outdid his rivals atWeird Taleswas that he was market savvy, knew what the public wanted, and could crank out entertaining and remarkably unrepetitivepulp fiction with the requisite nudie scene and bad guys getting their just desserts.

Well, I must confess to not having read all the 1400-odd pages of de Grandin tales, even Robert Weinberg in hisintroduction suggests that the stories be read over a period of time, i.e., "best when taken in moderate doses." However,I had read, some twenty years ago, the 35-odd de Grandin short stories reprinted in five Popular Librarypaperbacks (1976-77):The Adventures of Jules de Grandin,The Casebook of Jules de Grandin,The Hellfire Files of Jules de Grandin,The Horror Chambers of Jules de Grandin, andThe Skeleton Closet of Jules de Grandin. Weinberg'sinstructive afterwords from these titles are included in the current edition. Also included is an appraisalof de Grandin by a first-time reader, Jim Rockhill, who draws an interesting parallel between Quinn and thecomposer Georg Philipp Telemann on the one hand and Telemann's contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach andLovecraft/Howard/Smith on the other: Quinn and Telemann were hugely popular in their time, Bach andLovecraft/Howard/Smith relatively obscure in theirs. He also dissects the principal themes and elements of the stories.

I had never managed to get my hands on the paperback edition of Quinn's only Jules de Grandin novel:The Devil's Bride, so it is this novel in the current edition that served as my refresher course in deGrandin. InThe Devil's Bride, a young bride wearing an odd barbaric silver girdle passed down through her familyis mysteriously abducted at the altar. De Grandin soon comes to suspect that the girdle was formerly used to marka woman first for leadership and later for human sacrifice to the bloodthirsty Satanic cult of the Yezidis. A womanis crucified, and another woman who has witnessed this has had her hands cut off, her eyes pierced and her tonguecut out. Her interrogation leads de Grandin to a sort of Black Mass where a baby is sacrificed on an altar whichis the naked body of the kidnapped bride. The young bride is saved, temporarily, but the Yezidis have numerous otherFu Manchu-like tricks up their sleeves, though of course they are ultimately defeated if not exterminated. Whatstruck me most and was most unsettling about the story was the graphic violence, and an underlying sadism... the youngblinded woman whose hands were amputated and tongue cut out is forced by de Grandin to spend an hour tapping outanswers to his questions with her foot, 23 taps for "W," three taps for "C," all this before she dies. In"The House of Golden Masks" women are enslaved and golden masks permanently wired into their faces. Today's bloodand gore school of horror doesn't have much on Quinn's de Grandin stories:

       Nailed fast with railway spikes through outstretched hands and slim crossedfeet, she hung upon the cross, her slender, naked body white as carven ivory. Her head inclined towards her leftshoulder and her long, black hair hung loosed across the full white breasts which were drawn up firmly by the outstretchedarms. Upon her head had been rudely thrust an improvised crown of thorns -- a chaplet of barbed wire cut from somefarmer's fence -- and from the punctures that it made, small streams of coral drops ran down. Thin trickles ofblood oozed from the torn wounds in her hands and feet, but these had frozen on the flesh, heightening theresemblance to a tinted simulacrum. Her mouth was slightly opened and her chin hung low upon her breast, andfrom the tongue which lay against her lower lip a single drop of ruby blood, congealed by cold even as it fell, waspendent like a ruddy jewel against the flesh.

For pulp literature all these things are to the good, and if you like pulp literature you're sure to enjoy the deGrandin tales. However, inThe Devil's Bride there are some elements which when read at 18 may be amusing,but when read as an adult are a bit grating. De Grandin is forever exclaiming things in French like "ah, parla barbe d'un poisson rouge! (ah, by the beard of the goldfish!) and "nom d'un chou-fleur (in the nameof a cauliflower), which besides not being French expressions anyone but de Grandin has ever used, are silly andreminiscent of Robin's exclamations of "Holy tomato juice, Batman!" Besides this, the Yezidi Satanists arediscovered to be in league with Russian atheists, as though the latter would even acknowledge the existence ofSatan. Notwithstanding these criticisms, the de Grandin stories are highly entertaining and remarkably free ofethnic slurs for the era in which they were written. Certainly many of the stories do not have entirely happyendings, and not all the victims can simply regain their former lives. De Grandin while he often serves asjudge, jury and executioner, is not above sympathizing with some of the villains who have been driven to theiractions by unfair treatment at the hands of others. Similarly, sometimes it is expedient for de Grandin tosimply blast a were-wolf to kingdom-come with a shotgun, whereas at other times Christian paraphenalia (crucifixes,rosaries, etc.) is used to greater effect.

The Jerome Burke stories collected in three volumes ofThis I Remember are a completely different side ofSeabury Quinn's work. These stories are reminiscences of funeral directors Quinn knew in his capacity as editorof a number of trade publications which he retold and published inThe Dodge Magazine a publicationof the Dodge Company, purveyors of fine embalming fluids. Written in the 1950s, these stories are totally unlikeQuinn'sWeird Tales material. These are human interest stories, and except for "The Touch of aVanished Hand" in Vol. 1, have no supernatural elements. They are narrated by a small-town funeral director ofIrish descent and describe how different funerals were handled, and the unexpected bonuses of doing a good turnto someone. While perhaps a bit saccharine in places, and overly-laden with folk-wisdom, these feel-good storiesare a fascinating glance into the world of funeral directors. Certainly these stories show that Quinn was nota one-trick pony.

Now, at $250 the three coffee-table size hardcover volumes ofThe Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandinmight appear a bit steep, but the old paperback editions only collected a third of the tales, didn't reproducetheWeird Tales covers, and are now fairly difficult to find. (I found mine second-hand at DowntownBooks in Duluth, Minnesota in the summer of 1979 and have seen few since.) The Arkhan House titleThe Phantom Fighter, besides being long out of print, only collected 10 of the tales, and collecting theclose to 100 issues of the original Weird Tales would certainly set you back a great deal more. Certainly ifyou're partial to pulp horror, this is amongst the best out there. Conversely, if occult detectives are notyour cup-of-tea, then perhaps you might be best entertained by Quinn's tales of the funeral director trade.

Georges Dodds is a research scientist in vegetable crop physiology, who for close to 25 years hasread and collected close to 2000 titles of predominantly pre-1950 science-fiction and fantasy, bothin English and French. He writes columns on early imaginative literature for WARP,the newsletter/fanzine of theMontreal Science Fiction and Fantasy Associationand maintains asite reflecting his tastes in imaginative literature.