The first volume, The Adventures of Jules de Grandin, appeared in August 1976 and contained seven stories, as well as Seabury Quinn’s brief introductory note from The Phantom-Fighter. “Considering his immense popularity with the readership of Weird Tales, it is surprising to note how little of his work has been preserved between book-covers, either hardbound or paperback,” lamented Lin Carter about the author in his introduction. “With the appearance of this book,” he continued, “Jules de Grandin returns in a new, vigorous reincarnation . . . With the publication of these paperbacks, Jules de Grandin joins the immortals.”
“Other psychic detectives rarely ventured into rationalizing their enemies and using scientific devices to fight them,” noted Robert Weinberg in his historical Afterword. “de Grandin relied on such methods.”
Just a month later, The Casebook of Jules de Grandin appeared with an introduction by Robert A. W. Lowndes (who, of course, had reprinted many of the de Grandin stories in his magazine Startling Mystery Stories some years earlier). Quinn’s fellow Weird Tales contributor Manly Wade Wellman supplied the introduction to The Skeleton Closet of Jules de Grandin (October 1976), which was the last of the Popular Library editions to carry one, even though it was followed by The Devil’s Bride (November 1976), The Hellfire Files of Jules de Grandin (December 1976), and The Horror Chamber of Jules de Grandin (February 1977).
“In the last few years, Quinn has come into a good deal of criticism for the Jules de Grandin series,” Robert Weinberg observed in his afterword to this final volume. “The main thrust of these attacks was that the stories were written for money and not artistic achievement alone . . . While on the surface, a fine sounding argument, the truth is anything but so simple. Seabury Quinn was a professional author. He wrote to sell and, because of this, he had to write well. For a good part of his life, a major portion of his income was derived from writing, and he was easily the most popular writer ever to work for Weird Tales.”
Although more collections were planned, sales did not meet expectations, and Popular Library discontinued the series after the initial six volumes, which were never reprinted. Weinberg had managed to collect about one-third of the de Grandin stories along with the only full-length de Grandin novel before the paperback revival was cancelled, but he later went on to reprint further stories in his pulp fanzines.
Each of the Popular Library editions featured a cover by Vincent Di Fate; a detailed map circa 1934 of the fictional town of Harrisonville, New Jersey, which was the focal point of many of de Grandin’s cases; and portraits of the excitable French detective and Dr. Trowbridge by Stephen E. Fabian. The latter were actually recreations of the illustrations artist Virgil Finlay had done for Weird Tales, the originals of which could not be located at the time.
Finlay’s two drawings first appeared in the September 1937 issue of the magazine, accompanying the story “Satan’s Palimpsest,” and were reprinted at least sixteen times over an eight-year period.
“What can I say concerning the portraits of my dearest brain-children?” Seabury Quinn wrote to the artist on July 31st that year, after receiving his advance copy of the magazine. “They are just perfect . . . Thank you for taking them right out of my brain and making them live visually.”
In fact, Finlay had taken them from advertisements which had appeared the previous year in a number of pulp magazines from the Munsey chain, including Railroad Stories and Detective Fiction Weekly.
Despite the failure of the Popular Library series, Quinn’s de Grandin stories were still being sought out by anthology editors: in Britain, Peter Haining reprinted “Suicide Chapel” (WT, June 1938) in The Fantastic Pulps (1975) and “Frozen Beauty” (WT, February 1938) in his hardcover facsimile edition of Weird Tales (1976).
“In hindsight,” wrote Haining in the introduction to that book, “much that Quinn wrote was hack work, although readers loved him and one wrote in 1933 that he was ‘the best writer since Poe.’”
Michel Parry used “The Jest of Warburg Tantavul” in The Supernatural Solution (1976), a collection of “chilling tales of spooks versus sleuths,” while Vic Ghidalia selected “The Blood-Flower” (WT, March 1927) for his anthology about the plants taking over, Nightmare Garden (1976).
For many readers, the Popular Library paperback reprintings had been their first introduction to Jules de Grandin, and Quinn’s stories were soon turning up in fan publications. Editors Gene Marshall and Carl F. Waedt used “The House Without a Mirror” (WT, November 1929) in Incredible Adventures #2 (1977), while Robert Weinberg continued to champion the series with “Satan’s Palimpsest” (WT, September 1937) and “Living Buddhess” (WT, November 1937) in Lost Fantasies #9: The Sin Eaters (1979), which featured a cover and variant frontispiece illustration of de Grandin and Dr. Trowbridge by Stephen E. Fabian.
In 1979, the French publisher Librairie des Champs-Elysées issued a paperback collection of six stories entitled Les archives de Jules de Grandin. Published as part of “Le Masque—Fantastique” series, it was edited with an introduction by Danny de Laet and translated by Mary Rosenthal.
Ever-popular, “The House of Horror” was selected by editor Mary Danby for her bumper 1981 anthology from Octopus Books, 65 Great Tales of Horror.
Never one to waste a story, Peter Haining not only used “The Poltergeist” (WT, October 1927) in Supernatural Sleuths: Stories of Occult Investigators (1986) for publisher William Kimber, but recycled it the following year in Poltergeist: Tales of Deadly Ghosts for the Severn House imprint.
As with Haining, Italian editor Gianni Pilo liked Seabury Quinn’s werewolf story “The Wolf of St. Bonnot” so much that he reprinted it in his 1988 anthology, I signori dei lupi, one of a series of Lovecraftian-inspired trade paperback novels and anthologies published by Fanucci Editore, as well as in Storie di lupi mannari for Newton Compton in 1994.
“The House of Horror” enjoyed another outing in 1990 when Karl Edward Wagner selected it for his medical horror anthology Intensive Scare from DAW Books.
Along with Robert Weinberg, another champion of the de Grandin stories was prolific American anthologist Martin H. Greenberg. He used “Restless Souls” (WT, October 1928) for his DAW Books anthology with frequent collaborator Charles G. Waugh, Vamps: An Anthology of Female Vampire Stories (1987), and “The Man in Crescent Terrace” in Mummy Stories (1990) for Ballantine Books.
Greenberg and Waugh teamed up with Frank D. McSherry Jr. in 1990 for Eastern Ghosts, which was part of Rutledge Hill Press’s “The American Ghost Stories” series and included “The Jest of Warburg Tantavul.” The following year the editors used the story again in the hardcover anthology Great American Horror Stories from the same publisher.
During the late 1980s and 1990s, Greenberg, Weinberg, and Stefan R. Dziemianowicz teamed up in various combinations to produce several bumper reprint anthologies for various publishers, a number of which included Jules de Grandin stories by Seabury Quinn.
They began with “Satan’s Stepson” (WT, September 1931) in Weird Tales: 32 Unearthed Terrors (Bonanza Books/Crown Publishers, 1988) and followed that with “The Man Who Cast No Shadow” (WT, February 1927) in Weird Vampire Tales (Gramercy Books, 1992), “The Jest of Warburg Tantavul” in Nursery Crimes (Barnes & Noble Books, 1993), and “Restless Souls” in Virtuous Vampires (Barnes & Noble Books, 1996).
Editors Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh reunited for Supernatural Sleuths: 14 Mysterious Stories of Uncanny Crime (1996) for Roc/New American Library, which included “Children of Ubasti” (WT, December 1929), and Robert Weinberg teamed up with John Betancourt to reprint Quinn’s final de Grandin story, “The Ring of Bastet,” in Weird Tales: Seven Decades of Terror (Barnes & Noble Books, 1997).
Over in Europe, there was another outing for “The Man Who Cast No Shadow” in Peter Haining’s The Vampire Hunters’ Casebook (1996), and that same year French publisher Editions Fleuve Noir issued the collection Jules de Grandin, le Sherlock Holmes du surnaturel (Jules de Grandin, The Sherlock Holmes of the Supernatu
ral) as #28 in its “Super Pocket” series.
French editor Barbara Sadoul used the slightly re-titled “The Wolf of Saint-Bonnot” in her 1999 werewolf anthology Le Bal des loups-garous (The Ball of the Werewolves) for Denoël.
Finally, in January 2001, nearly fifty years after the last de Grandin story was published in Weird Tales, Seabury Quinn’s entire canon of Jules de Grandin stories was collected together for the first time ever by George A. Vanderburgh’s Canadian small press imprint The Battered Sillicon Dispatch Box as a boxed, three-volume hardcover set entitled The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin. This not only included all ninety-three of Quinn’s stories about de Grandin, but also reprinted Robert Weinberg’s afterwords to the Popular Library editions, original introductions by Weinberg, Jim Rockhill, and Seabury Quinn, Jr., and the author’s own introduction to The Phantom-Fighter.
Meanwhile, Charlotte F. Otten reprinted “The Thing in the Fog” (WT, March 1933) in The Literary Werewolf: An Anthology (2002) published by the Syracuse University Press, and the same story turned up the following year in the Ash-Tree Press collection of eleven Quinn stories, Night Creatures, edited by Peter Ruber and Joseph Wrzos and limited to six hundred copies.
In 2003 the Spanish publisher Avalon re-issued the novel The Devil’s Bride (La novia del diablo), which led to Valdemar Gotica publishing the six-story collection Las cámaras del horror de Jules de Grandin (The Horror Chambers of Jules de Grandin) the following year, with an introduction by Antonio José Navarro.
This was followed in 2005 by La dama sin límite y otras historias (The Lady Without Boundaries and Other Stories) from Río Henares Producciones Gráficas Pulp Ediciones, which featured six de Grandin stories and a prologue by Arturo Bobadilla. The book was named after a re-titling of the 1938 story “Incense of Abomination.”
In 2009, editor Peter Straub included “The Curse of Everard Maundy” (WT, July 1927) in American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps, published by the prestigious Library of America imprint, and Otto Penzler featured “The Corpse-Master” (WT, July 1929) in his massive 2011 anthology Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! from Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. Seabury Quinn’s de Grandin stories were finally receiving the recognition they deserved.
“Pledged to the Dead” (WT, October 1937) was published in 2010 as a chapbook by TGS Publishing and reissued the following year under the Ægypan imprint as a thin hardcover, while a trade paperback reprinting of The Devil’s Bride: Mysteries of Jules de Grandin in 2012 by the UK imprint Scorpionic/Creation Oneiros also included the novella “The House of the Golden Masks” (WT, June 1929).
The following year, Positronic Publishing issued both “Satan’s Stepson” and “Eyes in the Dark” (WT, November 1946) as stand-alone chapbooks.
Luigi Cozzi’s Italian imprint Profondo Rosso (named after the Little Shop of Science Fiction and Horror founded by Dario Argento in Rome in 1989) published the six-story collection Jules de Grandin: il cacciatore di fantasmi (Jules de Grandin: The Ghost Hunter) in 2014, which also included the 1934 map of Harrisonville and Stephen Fabian’s portraits of de Grandin and Dr. Trowbridge from the Popular Library paperbacks. The same publisher followed it in 2015 with Jules de Grandin: La sposa del diavolo (Jules de Grandin: The Devil’s Bride).
That same year, La Hermandad del Enmascarado published El horror de los páramos (The Horror of the Moors) in Spain. Containing sixteen stories and an introduction by Javier Jiménez Barco, it was the first volume in that country’s own series of “The Complete Adventures of Jules de Grandin.”
“It is good to think and think again of Seabury Quinn,” recalled pulp writer Manly Wade Wellman in 1976; “what he did and how he acted; this full-blooded, good-humored, hospitable, wise friend, whose taste in food and drink and reading and writing always seemed so admirable, who lived his long life to a rewarding full. He has gone to where things of evil are only diverting topics of conversation. I hope he knows that this book is being printed, that it is still happily baleful nighttime under the Harrisonville moon, that Jules de Grandin knows how to drive the hideous wickedness back to its unhallowed grave.”
Now, more than ninety years after the character was first introduced in the pages of Weird Tales, the enduring legacy of Seabury Quinn’s supernatural detective series continues to be celebrated in this new five-volume series of The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, as the exploits of “the occult Hercule Poirot” are brought back into print once again to enthrall a whole new generation of readers.
—Stephen Jones
London, April 2017
Suicide Chapel
ALTHOUGH THE CALENDAR DECLARED it was late May the elements and the thermometer denied it. All day the rain had streamed torrentially and the wind keened like a moaning banshee through the newly budded leaves that furred the maple boughs. Now the raving tempest laid a lacquer-like veneer of driven water on the window-pane and howled a bawdy chanson down the chimney where a four-log fire was blazing on the hearth. Fresh from a steaming shower and smelling most agreeably of Roman Hyacinth, Jules de Grandin sat before the fire and gazed with unconcealed approval at the toe tip of his purple leather slipper. A mauve silk scarf was knotted Ascot fashion round his throat, his hands were drawn up in the sleeves of his deep violet brocade dressing-gown, and on his face was that look of somnolent content which well-fed tomcats wear when they are thoroughly at peace with themselves and the world. “Not for a thousand gold Napoléons would I set foot outside this house again tonight,” he told me as he dipped into the pocket of his robe, fished out a pack of “Marylands” and set one of the evil-smelling things alight. “Three times, three separate, distinct times, have I been soaked to saturation in this sacré rain today. Now, if the Empress Josèphine came to me in the flesh and begged that I should go with her, I would refuse the assignation. Regretfully, mais certainement, but definitely. Me, I would not stir outside the door for—”
“Sergeant Costello, if ye plaze, sor,” came the rich Irish brogue of Nora McGinnis, my household factotum, who appeared outside the study entrance like a figure materialized in a vaudeville illusion. “He says it’s most important, sor.”
“Tiens, bid him enter, ma petite, and bring a bottle of the Irish whisky from the cellar,” de Grandin answered with a smile; then:
“C’est véritablement toi, ami?” he asked as the big Irishman came in and held cold-reddened fingers to the fire. “What evil wind has blown you out on such a fetid night?”
“Evil is th’ word, sor,” Costello answered as he drained the glass de Grandin proffered. “Have ye been radin’ in th’ papers of th’ Cogswell gur-rl’s disappearin’, I dunno?”
“But yes, of course. Was she not the young woman who evaporated from her dormitory at the Shelton School three months ago? You have found her, mon vieux? You are to be congratulated. In my experience—”
“Would yer experience tell ye what to do when a second gur-rl pops outa sight in pracizely th’ same manner, lavin’ nayther hide nor hair o’ clue?”
De Grandin’s small blue eyes closed quickly, then opened wide, for all the world like an astonished cat’s. “But surely, there is some little trace of evidence, some hint of hidden romance, some—”
“Some nothin’ at all, sor. Three months ago today th’ Cogswell gur-rl went to ’er room immejiately afther class. Th’ elevator boy who took her up seen her walk down th’ hall, two classmates said hello to her. Then she shut her door, an’ shut herself outa th’ wor-rld entirely, so it seems. Nobody’s seen or heard o’ her since then. This afthernoon, just afther four o’clock, th’ Lefètre gur-rl comes from th’ lab’ratory, goes straight to ’er room an’”—he paused and raised his massive shoulders in a ponderous shrug—“there’s another missin’-persons case fer me to wrastle wid. I’ve come to ask yer help, sor.”
De Grandin pursed his lips and arched his narrow brows. “I am not interested in criminal investigation, mon sergent.”
“Not even to save an old pal in a hot sp
ot, sor?”
“Hein? How is it you say?”
“’Tis this way, sor. When th’ Cogswell gur-rl evaporated, as ye say, they gave th’ case to me, though be rights it b’longed to th’ Missin’ Persons Bureau. Well, sor, when a gur-rl fades out that way there may be anny number o’ good reasons fer it, but mostly it’s because she wants to. An’ th’ more ye asks th’ family questions th’ less ye learn. ‘Had she anny, love affairs?’ sez you, an’ ‘No!’ sez they, as if ye’d been set on insultin’ her. ‘Wuz she happy in her home?’ ye asks, an’ ‘Certainly, she wuz!’ they tells ye, an’ they imply ye’ve hinted that they bate her up each night at eight o’clock an’ matinees at two-fifteen. So it goes. Each time ye try to git some reason for her disappearin’ act they gits huffier an’ huffier till finally they sez they’re bein’ persecuted, an’ ye git th’ wor-rks, both from th’ chief an’ newspapers.”
“Perfectly,” de Grandin nodded. “As Monsieur Gilbert says, a policeman’s life is not a happy one.”
“Ye’re tellin’ me! But this time it’s still worse, sor. When I couldn’t break th’ Cogswell case they hinted I wuz slowin’ down, an’ had maybe seen me best days. Now they goes an’ dumps this here new case in me lap an’ tells me if I fail to break it I’ll be back in harness wid a nightsthick in me hand before I’ve checked another birthday off. So, sor, if ye could—”
“Pas possible! They dare say this to you, the peerless officer, the pride of the gendarmerie—”
“They sure did, sor. An’ lots more—”
“Aside, Friend Trowbridge; aside, mon sergent—make passageway for me. Await while I put on my outside clothing. I shall show them, me. We shall see if they can do such things to my tried friend—les crétins!”
SO INCREDIBLY SHORT WAS the interval elapsing before he rejoined us with his hat pulled down above his eyes, trench coat buttoned tight beneath his chin, that I could not understand until I caught a flash of violet silk pajama leg bloused out above the top of his laced boots.
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