Seabury Quinn (1889–1969)

This volume is one of a series of collected Jules de Grandin stories drawn from the body of ninety-three originally published in the pulp era pages of Weird Tales. As usual, they are "detective" stories ranging a gamut of mundane to magical menaces. The French sleuth himself is reliably amusing, giving vent to various exclamations in his characteristic idiom. "Pains of a dyspeptic bullfrog, I am greatly annoyed, me!" (59)

Two of these six stories feature villainy involving the Burmese worship of the goddess Kali: "The Gods of East and West" and "Stealthy Death." The one completely non-supernatural tale is "The House of Golden Masks," concerning an international human trafficking operation abducting young women from New Jersey. Grudge-bearing spirits of the deceased feature in both "The Poltergeist" and "The Jest of Warburg Tantavul." The latter story is notable for de Grandin's entirely non-judgmental attitude toward incest.

There are also two tales in which de Grandin brings in consultants for their esoteric expertise and powers. "The Gods of East and West" features the "full-blooded Dakotah" Doctor John Wolf, and a Muslim thaumaturge Doctor Hussein Obeyid comes to the aid of Dr. Jules in "A Gamble in Souls." This second helper is so vividly drawn that I suspected author Seabury Quinn must have used him in other stories as well, but editor Robert Weinberg in his afterword says that it is disappointingly not so.

Quinn's stories were frequently featured on the covers of Weird Tales, inevitably with illustrations of their climactic moments. "The Gods of East and West" supplied the cover for January 1928, depicting the scene on p. 37 of this book. June 1929 showed "The House of Golden Masks" with the action on p. 92. The others in this book did not make it to cover art.… (more)

This 1976 mass market paperback collects a half dozen of the ninety-three tales about occult detective Jules de Grandin. This set were all written for publication in Weird Tales from 1926 to 1933. Although all of these books by Seabury Quinn under the Popular Library imprint boast "SCIENCE FICTION" on the cover, they don't conform to the genre as it is currently understood. They are pulp-era action stories in mundane settings. The "Hellfire" title here is reasonably apposite, since each story has something to do with diabolism or a nefarious cult.

One yarn is called "The Great God Pan," and although it compares unfavorably to identically-titled stories by Arthur Machen (1894) and M. John Harrison (1988), it is still a palatable romp regarding a neo-pagan cult in the wilds of New Jersey. This one is actually the earliest included here, although it appears second.

Quinn, in the voice of de Grandin, supplies a little occult theorizing around the notion of "psychoplasm." (A likely proximate source for the term and concept was the 1920 Adventures of a Modern Occultist by Oliver Bland.) The supernatural element in the stories is highly variable, and the final pair of tales furnishes an admirable contrast between "The Hand of Glory" where exorcism is the effective solution to thwart genuine demonic influence, and "Mephistopheles and Company Ltd." where sleuthing and physical combat overcome a criminal gang who use superstition and trickery to terrify their victims. Both stories, like nearly all of these, derive motivation from a young woman in peril. Quinn seems to have preferred such ladies to be tall, slender, and pale.

The selections here include both a vampire story and a werewolf story. The latter, "The Wolf of Saint Bonnot" was the basis for the Hugh Rankin cover art of its December 1930 issue of Weird Tales (scene on pages 125-6 of this book). "The Hand of Glory" inspired the July 1933 cover by Margaret Brundage (pages 174-5). Both covers were racy illustrations typical of their genre and era, and pretty accurate to Quinn's text.

The book includes an appendix by editor Robert Weinberg that furnishes full biographical sketches of de Grandin and his amanuensis Dr. Trowbridge, as abstracted from Quinn's stories. For readers new to the de Grandin material, it might be helpful to read this end matter before the stories. Steve Fabian's map of Quinn's fictional Harrisonville, New Jersey appears at the start of the book, but the printing is a little muddy and hard to read in my copy.… (more)

This first volume of the 1970s paperback series reprints seven out of the ninety-three Jules de Grandin stories by Seabury Quinn, including several of the earliest. These began in the 1920s and quickly became a staple of Weird Tales, where they appeared nearly every other month. They were not a serial, however. There is no overarching plot nor development over time of the central characters, who are stock types of an occult investigator and his medical doctor amanuensis. In general, the stories rely on broadly-drawn characters and stereotypes in order to maintain a high tempo and to create a quotidian background for shocking crimes and supernatural menaces.

The sleuth de Grandin himself is an amusingly exaggerated, sword-cane-wielding, mustachioed, gallic scientist of diminutive stature. Most of his adventures take place in the hometown of his host and colleague Doctor Trowbridge, Harrisonville, New Jersey. Being a European in America allows de Grandin to make amusing asides castigating Prohibition, religious bigotry, and other forms of American provincialism. "Today your American courts convict high school-teachers for heresy far less grave than that charged against our Jeanne [d'Arc]. We may yet see the bones of your so estimable Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin exhumed from their graves and publicly burned by your heretic-baiters of this today" (53, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!).

The narrator Trowbridge maintains a naïve skepticism in the face of exotic events that grows less believable with each passing tale. One of the strengths of the stories is their use of menaces drawn from folk traditions and popular culture (vampires and werewolves, for instance) while allowing that the common lore may be inaccurate in its details. Thus the reader can see where de Grandin's hypotheses are leading him--while Trowbridge refuses even to consider such fanciful notions--but the tension of the unknown is maintained, along with a sense of the "scientific."

In those points where de Grandin explains or employs occultism as such, the details tend to be fairly flawed. For example, Trowbridge describes a hexagram (and the book even supplies a diagram) but de Grandin calls it a "pentagram" (182). In another adventure, de Grandin calls elemental spirits "Neutrarians," a term I hadn't previously encountered, but which appears to have been coined by Elliot O'Donnell in his Twenty Years Experiences as a Ghost Hunter.

These stories are not great works of literature, and it doesn't seem that anyone has ever mistaken them for such. They are pulp paragons, and one of their attractions is their great variety, from the piracy-and-cannibalism yarn of "The Isle of Missing Ships" to the parapsychological crime mystery of "The Dead Hand." Quinn's de Grandin stories frequently served as the basis for the cover illustrations of the numbers of Weird Tales in which they appeared. Even reading them in this mass market paperback reprint, it is not difficult to spot the moments in the stories that would be chosen for this honor. They usually featured a naked woman in peril. "The Tenants of Broussac" (scene on page 67) and "The Man Who Cast No Shadow" (153-4) are the two stories in this collection that were realized as cover art in their magazine appearances, and it is easy to note Quinn offering similarly "graphic" climaxes in every tale.… (more)