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Who was the most popular writer in Weird Tales's original run from 03/1923 to 09/1954? Not Robert E. Howard, not H.P. Lovecraft, not Clark Ashton Smith, all of whom have been extensively reprinted, but one Seabury Quinn. Quinn's stories appeared in no less than 60% of the original run issues of Weird Tales. So why isn't Seabury Quinn a household name? Well, mostly I suspect because many deem him a pulp hack, a connotation which anyone who has read Quinn's Christmas novella Roads knows is a crock -- Quinn simply knew what the people wanted, they wanted pulp and he gave it to them. Reading his retellings of human interest stories garnered from funeral directors (under the pseudonym Jerome Burke, reviewed here) makes it quite obvious that Seabury Quinn could write in perfectly straightforward if a bit saccharine non-sensational prose. Furthermore, his writings in the legal profession, such as his Syllabus of Mortuary Jurisprudence and his editing of funeral service trade magazines (a place where sensational pulp fiction would be most out of place) would suggest that the pulp style was something Quinn could turn on and off, depending on his target market.

While Quinn's early stories in Weird Tales, such as "The Phantom Farmhouse" in the second issue were popular, it was his development of the occult detective Jules de Grandin, beginning in October 1925's "The Horror on the Links" that made him the fixture he became in the "Unique Magazine." Seabury Quinn was certainly not the first writer to develop such a character, Algernon Blackwood's John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908), William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost-Finder (1913) and Sax Rohmer's Morris Klaw in The Dream Detective (1920), and particularly Jean Ray's Harry Dickson. Le Sherlock Holmes Américain (1931-1940) series having come before or concurrently, nor was he the last. Of course, 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 as Lovecraft's Arkham, if perhaps not so much by Old Ones. De Grandin, an eminent French surgeon and former intelligence operative resides there with Dr. Trowbridge, and together they solve crimes with occult or supernatural elements. Quinn's stories, unlike those of Howard, Lovecraft and Smith, are set in a very real, if fictional small-town America. The vast majority of the supernatural and occult elements in Quinn's stories are ultimately resolved to be the work of people, sick and twisted people perhaps, but not trans-dimensional beings or spell-casting wizards. De Grandin was the Kolchak of his time. 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 trade magazines, a degree and an on again-off again law career. Where Quinn outdid his rivals at Weird Tales was that he was market savvy, knew what the public wanted, and could crank out entertaining and remarkably unrepetitive pulp 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 his introduction 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 Library paperbacks (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, and The Skeleton Closet of Jules de Grandin. Weinberg's instructive afterwords from these titles are included in the current edition. Also included is an appraisal of de Grandin by a first-time reader, Jim Rockhill, who draws an interesting parallel between Quinn and the composer Georg Philipp Telemann on the one hand and Telemann's contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach and Lovecraft/Howard/Smith on the other: Quinn and Telemann were hugely popular in their time, Bach and Lovecraft/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 de Grandin. In The Devil's Bride, a young bride wearing an odd barbaric silver girdle passed down through her family is mysteriously abducted at the altar. De Grandin soon comes to suspect that the girdle was formerly used to mark a woman first for leadership and later for human sacrifice to the bloodthirsty Satanic cult of the Yezidis. A woman is crucified, and another woman who has witnessed this has had her hands cut off, her eyes pierced and her tongue cut out. Her interrogation leads de Grandin to a sort of Black Mass where a baby is sacrificed on an altar which is the naked body of the kidnapped bride. The young bride is saved, temporarily, but the Yezidis have numerous other Fu Manchu-like tricks up their sleeves, though of course they are ultimately defeated if not exterminated. What struck me most and was most unsettling about the story was the graphic violence, and an underlying sadism... the young blinded woman whose hands were amputated and tongue cut out is forced by de Grandin to spend an hour tapping out answers 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 blood and gore school of horror doesn't have much on Quinn's de Grandin stories:

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