Seabury Quinn | |
|---|---|
 Seabury Quinn, date unknown | |
| Born | (1889-01-01)January 1, 1889 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Died | December 24, 1969(1969-12-24) (aged 80) |
| Other names | Jerome Burke |
Seabury Grandin Quinn (also known asJerome Burke; January 1, 1889 – December 24, 1969) was an American government lawyer, journalist, andpulp magazineauthor, most famous for his stories of theoccult detectiveJules de Grandin, published inWeird Tales.[1]
Seabury Quinn was born January 1, 1889, inWashington, D.C.[2] In 1910 Quinn graduated from the law school of theNational University and was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar.
Quinn served in the Army inWorld War I. After his service he became editor of a group of trade papers in New York, where he taught medical jurisprudence and wrote technical articles and pulp magazine fiction.
His first published work was "The Law of the Movies", inThe Motion Picture Magazine, December 1917. (His story "Painted Gold" may have been written earlier.) "Demons of the Night" was published inDetective Story Magazine on March 19, 1918, followed by "Was She Mad?" on March 25, 1918. He published "The Stone Image" in 1919. He introduced Jules de Grandin as a character in 1925 (taking the character's surname from his own middle name), and continued writing stories about him until 1951.[1] The longest of the de Grandin stories is the 1932 novel-length storyThe Devil's Bride, strongly influenced byRobert W. Chambers' 1920 novelThe Slayer of Souls.[1]
In 1937 he returned to Washington to represent a chain of trade journals, and there subsequently became a government lawyer for the duration ofWorld War II. He alternated between law and journalism all his life. He published over five hundred short stories.
His first book,Roads (a new origin forSanta Claus, drawn from the original Christian legends), was published byArkham House in 1948.
Ten of the Jules de Grandin stories were collected inThe Phantom Fighter (Mycroft & Moran, an imprint of Arkham House), 1966. A broader selection of the stories, including the novelThe Devil's Bride, was issued in a six-volumePopular Librarypaperback edition in 1967–77. A three-volume omnibus reportedly including all the de Grandin stories was issued by Battered Silicon Dispatch Box in 2001.[3]
Although the De Grandin stories were enormously popular on their initial publication, modern critics tend to regard them as the weakest part of Quinn's work, withBrian Stableford describing the De Grandin stories "as indeed rather undistinguished", claiming they are full of stereotyped characters and poorly resolved plots.[1] Quinn wrote several non-De Grandin tales in the 1940s and 1950s; Stableford states Quinn's "best stories here are ironically perverted love stories", such as "The Globe of Memories" (1937) and "Glamour" (1939).[1]
His writing was secondary to his career as a lawyer specializing in mortuary jurisprudence. He taught this subject at mortuary schools for many years, and for some 15 years was the editor ofCasket & Sunnyside, a leading trade journal. His Jerome Burke stories are still published in theDodgeembalming magazine.
Of his professional work, only two books were published. The first wasA Syllabus of Mortuary Jurisprudence, published in book form in 1933 by Clement Williams of Kansas City, Kansas, with a foreword by C. A. Renouard (of the Renouard School of Embalming) and Clement Williams (of the Clement Williams School of Embalming). This was distilled from a lecture he gave in 1914. The text was extant as early as 1924/1925, being serialized inCasket and Sunnyside. Quinn became editor ofCasket and Sunnyside in December 1925.
The second wasAn Encyclopedic Law Glossary For Funeral Directors and Embalmers, published by the Williams Institute of Mortuary Science, Kansas City 1940, with an introduction by Quinn, dated January 1940. This had a series of definitions of terms that had puzzled his students.
Besides contributing to the thenDe-Ce-Co Magazine, later theDodge Magazine, for the Dodge Chemical Co, ofCambridge, Massachusetts, Quinn wrote articles forThe American Funeral Director and other trade journals. His Jerome Burke material, not necessarily in sequence, is available inThis I Remember: Memoirs of a Funeral Director, published by theBattered Silicon Dispatch Box, with a foreword by Arnold Dodge.
Quinn was a contemporary ofRobert E. Howard,H. P. Lovecraft, andClark Ashton Smith.Mary Elizabeth Counselman was a friend of Quinn's and wrote a tribute to him after he died.[4]
Quinn's posthumously published novelAlien Flesh (1977) is a sexually explicit erotic fantasy about a male Egyptologist who has a magicalsex change into a beautiful young woman.[1] It has been described as a "bold and striking celebration of sexual confusion" in the style ofPierre Louÿs.[1] It was illustrated byStephen Fabian.
On July 4, 1926, Quinn and his first wife Mary Helen Molster Quinn, had one child. Their son, Seabury Quinn, Jr., received drama degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and Yale Universities and served as professor of theater at Ohio University close to thirty years, endowing the Seabury Quinn Jr. Playwrights Festival in Athens, Ohio.[5]
Night Creatures, a collection of stories by Quinn, edited byPeter Ruber andJoseph Wrzos forAsh-Tree Press appeared in (2003).
Demons of the Night, another collection of his stories, was published byBlack Dog Books, of Normal, Illinois. Edited by Gene Christie, it contains his early stories. It has two of the "Major Sturdevant and his Washington Nights' Entertainment series", subtitled "Stories of the Secret Service", and two more featuring Professor Forrester, another amateur detector of crimes. It also contains one of the most complete bibliographies of Quinn yet published.[citation needed]
Someday I'll Kill You!, was published byBlack Dog Books, of Normal, Illinois. Edited by Gene Christie, it contains all of Quinn's non-series stories published outside of Weird Tales between 1925 and 1963.
All of the Jules deGrandin stories were reprinted in 5hardcover volumes in 2018 & 2019 byNight Shade Books.
A facsimile of the 1948 Arkham House edition of "Roads" was published 2017 by Shadowridge Press.
