Seabury Quinn

The Ghostbusting Duo

There’s nothing better than reading a mystery that has a ghost or a monster in it. And that’s essentially what the occult detective genre is. A fusion of the traditional detective whodunit and the horror story.

Now, I will admit my description is a bit of an oversimplification. But for now, let’s run with it.

The prince, if not the king, of the ghostbusters is undoubtedly Jules de Grandin. Only Thomas Carnacki is perhaps more well-known.

Carnacki was the creation William Hope Hodgson. And Carnacki pastiches are almost as numerous as those of Sherlock Holmes. I’ll talk about Carnacki in another post.

Jules de Grandin and his “Watson”, Dr Trowbridge, were the creation of Seabury Quinn. They appeared in 92 stories and 1 novel, in the pages of Weird Tales magazine. From 1925 to 1951, the exploits of this dynamic duo thrilled readers of the Unique Magazine like no other.

GW Thomas, on his now defunct website, archived here, summarized de Grandin in this way:

Jules de Grandin is the master of the outrageous detective genre. Everything about him is over-the-top from his Hercule Poirot moustache to his outbursts of stilted French. De Grandin and his Watson-like companion, Dr. Trowbridge, live in Harrisonville, NJ, a town haunted by monsters, mad scientists and all manner of weird phenomena. As with Carnacki, not all of de Grandin’s adversaries were supernatural. The de Grandin stories appeared only in Weird Tales, where they were the most popular of all characters, beating even Conan the Cimmerian and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

From what I’ve read, Mr Thomas was spot on. Of all the writers who contributed to Weird Tales, Seabury Quinn was the most popular and, as a result, was paid at a higher rate.

Of all the characters to appear in WT, de Grandin was the most popular. And it was the promise of a serialized Jules de Grandin novel that held off the debt holders from shutting the magazine down in 1931.

Seabury Quinn and Jules de Grandin dominated Weird Tales. Quinn’s only real challenger was Allison V Harding in the 1940s.

Yet, Quinn was unfairly maligned and minimized by the Lovecraft Circle (because HPL didn’t like Quinn’s style and perhaps the fact that he wrote for money) and it has only been within the last dozen or so years that Quinn has come under reassessment. And I’m glad he has, because he was a good writer and should not be forgotten.

What I find interesting is that for all of de Grandin’s popularity, he was the product of having to meet a deadline. Quinn, himself, wrote:

One evening in 1925 I was at that state that every writer knows and dreads; a story was due my publisher, and there didn’t seem to be a plot in the world. Accordingly, with nothing particular in mind, I picked up my pen and — literally making it up as I went along — wrote the first story which appears in this book.

I don’t know what collection of stories GW Thomas got that quote from, but I find it simply delightful. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

I own the 5 volume Nightshade Books edition of The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin. You can, of course, find them on Amazon.

I’ve read over a dozen of the stories and I like them. The fun quotient is high and each story will give you an enchanting hour’s worth of entertainment. What more can you ask from a story?

Should you begin reading the de Grandin tales, and I encourage you to do so, keep in mind they were written for a monthly or bimonthly magazine. The storylines are somewhat formulaic. Certainly written to an established pattern. But then, so were the tales of Sherlock Holmes’ exploits.

I would recommend not reading more than a couple stories at one sitting in order to keep their charm and appeal fresh. Plus, doing so, will give you many, many days and weeks of reading pleasure. And who doesn’t want that?

Seabury Quinn was a superb storyteller. He had over 500 publishing credits during his lifetime, and was himself a magazine editor.

Approaching Quinn as a reader, I can say that he delivers the goods. He succeeds in transporting me to another time and place, and provides the entertainment value I’m looking for.

Approaching Quinn as a writer, I sit at the feet of a master and learn the craft of how to tell a story so that it will move the reader.

Last Christmas, I read Quinn’s Roads (his classic Christmas tale) to my sister and nephew. So captivating was Quinn’s prose that my nephew, at one point, uttered an interjection of awe. If only all of us writers could have that happen!

The occult detective genre is rich with exciting and spooky and chilling stories. The exploits of Jules de Grandin and Dr Trowbridge deliver on all counts.

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

Share This!

The Occult Detective

Fear is one of our oldest emotions — if not the oldest. And fear of the unknown is one of our greatest fears.

I don’t know what I don’t know, and that lack of knowing scares us. It is primal, that fear of the unknown.

Fear, and playing on our fears, is the stock in trade of the writer of the macabre. Those spinners of stories that parade our fears before us and scare us to death — and we love it.

For all of our façade of sophistication, biologically speaking we are no different than our ancestors from 300,000 years ago. We may no longer be afraid of thunder and lightning, and we may have outgrown our fear of what’s under our beds — we are, however, still controlled by our fears.

Just look at the nightly news. Listen to David Muir’s tone of voice. He’s playing into our fears. And how often do we say, “I’m afraid…” — no matter the context?

Is it any wonder that the tale of terror, the horror story, has never lost its appeal with readers?

Of late, I’ve been reading in the Weird West and Occult Detective genres.

I grew up watching Westerns on TV, although I didn’t read any until recently. I suggest any writers reading this to pick up a few old Westerns and read them. You will quickly see how most genre fiction today is really a Western in disguise.

The Weird West, as the name suggests, infuses the old West with something weird. It could be ghosts, demons, mad scientists, monsters of one sort or another, just as long as it falls into the category of weird fiction.

The Weird West is a somewhat recent category. The earliest examples I’ve found date from the 1950s.

The Occult Detective, on the other hand, had its beginnings in mid-1800s, and picked up steam in the wake of the success of Sherlock Holmes.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been impressed with the Weird West stories I’ve been reading. They are either too weird, or they come off too campy.

On the other hand, the Occult Detective stories I’ve read have been quite good, on the whole.

For contemporary stories featuring occult detectives, I turn to the pages of Occult Detective Magazine. You can find their website here. They are the only publication totally devoted to the Occult Detective genre. It’s one super magazine, and I heartily recommend it.

Then there are the classics. Those occult detectives that began appearing in the 1890s and perhaps reached their peak in the 1940s and 1950s.

Flaxman Low probably started the subgenre, at least in the form that we know it today. He was the creation of E and H Heron. The stories are pretty good, although some readers might find them somewhat slow going. Ghosts: Being the Experiences of Flaxman Low is the only current edition I’ve found (both free and for purchase) that contains all of the stories. It is priced at present for less than $2, and that is a steal.

Thomas Carnacki, the creation of William Hope Hodgson, is perhaps the most famous of all occult detectives, and Carnacki pastiches abound. You can find the original stories at Carnacki the Ghost-Finder for free. Marcus L Rowland also provides a publishing history.

If you want the stories in book form, you can find them all in The House On Borderland And Other Mysterious Places, which is volume 2 of The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson.

Thus far, my favorite among our Fighters of Fear is Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin.

Quinn wrote some 500 stories for the pulp fiction magazines. He was Weird Tales’ most popular writer and was paid at a higher rate than any other writer published by the magazine.

Today, Quinn is little known. Which is a shame. He was an engaging, entertaining, and talented writer.

However, a large selection of his work is available for free on the Internet. And publishers are finally starting to reprint his stories. All I can say is that it’s about time.

All of the Jules de Grandin stories have been collected in 5 volumes by Night Shade Books. You can find the books on Amazon.

Flaxman Low, Thomas Carnacki, Jules de Grandin, and Occult Detective Magazine. That should be enough to get you started enjoying the spooky and sometimes terrifying weird world of the occult detective.

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

Share This!

The Christmas Season

Advent is nearly over and the Twelve Days of Christmas are soon to begin.

Whether or not we believe in the Christ story, I believe the Christmas season speaks to everyone. We all want peace. We all want to be persons of goodwill. We all want others to be persons of goodwill. We all want the troubles of this world to go away. And Christmas expresses these desires that everyone has — whether a Christian, or not.

To my mind, Christmas is the perfect time for all of us to come together, commit to practicing the Golden Rule, and move forward together. A time to put aside our sectarian differences and to acknowledge that we are all people who want the same things out of life. We are, in fact, all one.

This Christmas season I am going to re-read Seabury Quinn’s Roads. It is a charming Christmas story that expresses our hope for a better world.

Merry Christmas to you all!

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

Share This!

Pierce Mostyn – Paranormal Investigator

Pierce Mostyn fighting inter-dimensional beings. Photo from a secret OUP file.

The other week I ran across a magazine called The Occult Detective Quarterly. Since the occult detective is a relatively new interest of mine, I loaded a couple issues onto my iPad for a read.

I’m about halfway through the first issue and I can honestly give the zine a big thumbs up! I hope they get the money they need to publish issues 5 and 6.

The occult detective has a long and venerable history. I outlined a bit of that history in a previous post. I also noted that it was Seabury Quinn’s occult detective, Jules de Grandin, that saved Weird Tales magazine from going under very early in its history.

Today I’d like to focus attention on my own occult, or paranormal, investigator creation: Pierce Mostyn and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena.

I’m a fan of the Cthulhu Mythos, vampires, werewolves, re-animated corpses (whether they be creations of Dr Frankenstein, Herbert West, mummies, or old-fashioned zombies and zuvembies), and, of course, ghosts. Pretty much anything supernatural gets my vote, and even a few things that aren’t exactly supernatural but can be classed as weird.

Pierce Mostyn, paranormal investigator extraordinaire, and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena, led by uber-mysterious Dr Rafe Bardon, are America’s ultra-secret fighters whose mission is to stop and destroy those things it is best for us not to know they exist.

In Nightmare in Agate Bay, Mostyn and his team meet an off-shoot of the Esoteric Order of Dagon in backwater Agate Bay, Minnesota. Which Order was the same mysterious cult that plagued poor Innsmouth. We meet fish people and a shoggoth. Some of our favorite paranormals.

Mostyn’s next adventure, Stairway to Hell, takes him and his team to the subterranean world of K’n-yan. Where we find a super-race of fickle and sadistic beings, who just so happen to be worshippers of Cthulhu and his buddies.

In K’n-yan, while trying to find a way to escape, Mostyn encounters the beautiful and seductive H’tha-dub, who gives him a Faustian choice that could save his team and at the same time destroy his budding romance with team member Dotty Kemper. Duty or love, that is Mostyn’s choice. The choice should be easy. But is it?

We all know that while Cthulhu is a pretty gargantuan bad guy, he isn’t the only monster on the block. In Terror in the Shadows, Mostyn and his team encounter a family that has degenerated beyond the classification of human. A family that has undergone reverse evolution. The classic term for such a being is abhuman. And Mostyn encounters lots of them in the hills of Appalachia. For their part, the abhumans recognize a good protein source when they see one.

And if the monsters of natural degeneration aren’t enough, there’s Van Dyne’s Vampires — the product of modern science and the laboratory. Mostyn and team must face hordes of these lab-cultured demons who’d just as soon chomp your liver as suck your blood.

Evil never rests. After all, if it did, what would we paranormal writers write about? Which brings me to the upcoming Pierce Mostyn paranormal investigation: The Medusa Ritual. As an experiment, I intend to serialize the working draft of this short novel here on the website prior to its publication in book form this summer. But more on the serialized novel and The Medusa Ritual in the next couple weeks.

The first Pierce Mostyn investigation went public a year ago. And in the 12 months since I’ve had great fun getting to know the central gang: Mostyn himself, Dr Dotty Kemper, Willie Lee Baker, DC Jones, Helene Dubreuil, Dr Rafe Bardon, and the newest addition, Kymbra NicAskill.

I encourage you to take a look at my interpretation of the occult detective. You’ll find everything you love about the paranormal and good stories in the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations. There be monsters here!

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

Share This!

In March of 1918 a story appeared in the pages of Detective Story Magazine and the author of the story was Seabury Quinn. The title of the story was “Demons of the Night”.

As near as we can tell, “Demons of the Night” was Quinn’s first fiction sale. That sale began a fiction writing career that spanned over half a century, and saw the production of over 500 short stories and 2 novels. And those numbers don’t include his many non-fiction writings.

Seabury Quinn was the quintessential pulp fiction master, along with such greats as H. Bedford-Jones, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Robert E Howard. He knew how to craft a story that would sell and he wasn’t shy about going where the money was to be found.

In his day, Quinn was an exceedingly popular author. A Weird Tales poll of the magazine’s readers put Quinn as their number one favorite author — ahead of such luminaries as HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, and August Derleth. More Seabury Quinn stories received cover art than any other writer for Weird Tales. As I noted in another post, it was Quinn and his creation, Jules de Grandin, who saved Weird Tales from folding in the early ‘30s, which would have possibly denied us the best of Lovecraft’s work, and such talents as Robert Bloch.

So why is Seabury Quinn denied his claim to fame and basically relegated to a footnote? The answer lies with the politics of the Lovecraft Circle, specifically the machinations of August Derleth.

In order to elevate Lovecraft, Seabury Quinn became the whipping boy. Quinn was a hack and the epitome of what was bad in pulp magazine fiction. Lovecraft, on the other hand, was a genius and represented the highest ideals and possibilities of the pulp magazines. Derleth’s hero worship put the knife in Quinn’s back. And why Quinn, and not someone else? Probably because Lovecraft didn’t like Quinn’s fiction, making him an easy target.

For a long time I held to the common, albeit unfair, assessment that Quinn was a hack. I held that view until I actually read some of his stories. Much to my surprise, his stories are no worse than Lovecraft’s, or Howard’s, or Frank Belknap Long’s, to name three, and in some cases better.

Seabury Quinn was a decent, prolific, and inventive writer, much like Robert E Howard. Quinn was paid more than the other writers for Weird Tales because the magazine’s readers wanted his stories.

Now, thanks in large part to ebooks, publishers are republishing the work of Seabury Quinn, and I am very pleased to see him regaining the recognition he is due.

Yesterday, for Christmas, I received two volumes of Quinn’s work: Demons of the Night and Other Early Tales, edited by Gene Christie and published by Black Dog Books; and A Rival from the Grave, The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, Volume 4, edited by George A Vanderburgh and published by Nightshade Books. Santa was indeed good!

In short order, Seabury Quinn has become one of my favorite authors. His books stand right next to the works of Lovecraft and Howard. He’s easily their equal. Sure, he’s different from them. But that doesn’t make him a lesser writer. Seabury Quinn’s stories have immense entertainment value. What more can one ask from a writer?

As always, comments are welcome; and, until next time, happy reading!

Share This!

The Man Who Saved Weird Tales

…and saved weird fiction.

Really? Weird Tales and weird fiction owe their existence to one man? The Unique Magazine? The magazine of HP Lovecraft?

Actually, Weird Tales wasn’t the magazine of HP Lovecraft. Sure, he submitted stories to WT and had them published (and a few rejected). But HPL actually disdained the commercial press and those who wrote for money, or “sold their soul to Mammon”, as he once put it. Lovecraft was willing to live in genteel poverty and support the amateur press to keep his art pure.

I wonder sometimes why he submitted to the pulp magazines at all. He in truth disdained them. I guess even a purist has to eat.

No, Weird Tales was not Lovecraft’s magazine. That is revisionist history started by his proteges August Derleth and Donald Wandrei.

Actually the man who was the defining persona of The Unique Magazine was Seabury Quinn. The man usually relegated to the footnotes of WT history telling.

Quinn was a lawyer, magazine editor, and prolific writer of fiction. He wrote over 500 stories. His published works number more than 5 times that of Lovecraft, and that includes HPL’s ghost written stories and collaborations. Granted Quinn lived 32 years longer than Lovecraft, but HPL was even out written by his younger contemporary, Robert E Howard, who had far fewer productive years than Lovecraft.

In actuality, Lovecraft saw himself first and foremost as a poet. Let’s be honest here. Lovecraft wrote around five dozen stories and maybe half are memorable. It’s also true that HPL would have faded into oblivion were it not for Derleth’s continual paean of praise.

Quinn, on the other hand, had no champion and did fade into obscurity — and only now is being given a fair assessment. And the verdict is that he was a very decent writer. In fact, he was the most popular of Weird Tales’s cadre of authors.

Quinn and Lovecraft made their debut WT appearance in the 7th issue, October 1923. Lovecraft’s contribution was “Dagon” and Quinn’s was “The Phantom Farmhouse”.

Quinn’s story was so popular among WT readers they consistently asked for it to be reprinted. Not the case with “Dagon”. I’ve read both stories. Both are good. Different, but equally satisfying reads — for differing reasons.

Quinn’s occult detective, Jules de Grandin, first appeared in the October 1925 issue of Weird Tales and immediately became a hit with the readers. They couldn’t get enough of the little Frenchman and it was Quinn’s de Grandin who saved Weird Tales from dying in 1931.

The Unique Magazine had financial troubles throughout its entire history. This was partly due to its small readership. Competition for readers was fierce amongst the plethora of pulps and slicks. Not unlike the competition amongst indie authors today for readership.

The first issue of Weird Tales was March 1923. Edwin Baird was the editor. In just 13 issues, Baird had saddled WT with a debt of over $40,000. In contemporary dollars, that’s close to $600,000. Most of this money was owed to WT’s printer.

The publisher, J. C. Henneberger, decided to solve the problem by selling majority interest in the magazine to B. Cornelius, the printer, with the understanding that when the magazine became profitable, Cornelius would get his money back and the stock returned to Henneberger.

In the re-organization, Baird left and Farnsworth Wright took over as editor in 1924 when Lovecraft failed to accept Henneberger’s offer. And even though Wright’s tenure as editor is considered the magazine’s Golden Age, Weird Tales remained an unprofitable enterprise.

By late 1931, Cornelius’s patience had run out (we are talking 7 years here) and he ordered Henneberger to shut the magazine down.

Let’s think about this for a moment. If Cornelius had gotten his way, the history of weird fiction would have been very, very different. The best of Robert E Howard’s horror and fantasy, gone. No CL Moore or Robert Bloch. Much of Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s weird fiction, gone . Most of Carl Jacobi’s weird fiction, gone. We wouldn’t have Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, “The Dreams in the Witch House”, “The Thing on the Doorstep”, or “The Haunter of the Dark”.

The best years of the magazine would not exist.

However, Wright managed to convince Cornelius he had two serials that would turn the magazine around. They were Otis Adelbert Kline’s Tarzan pastiche, Tam, Son of Tiger, and Seabury Quinn’s The Devil’s Bride, the longest de Grandin story Quinn wrote.

The Devil’s Bride ran for six issues and effectively saved the magazine.

Darrell Schweitzer wrote, in his introductory essay, “Jules de Grandin: ‘The Pillar of Weird Tales’”:

“When you consider that Robert E Howard still had his best Weird Tales material in front of him and that all of CL Moore, Robert Bloch, and many others was yet to come, it is worth pausing to reflect on how much fantastic literature owes to Seabury Quinn’s excitable Frenchman.” (The Dark Angel: The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, Vol. 3. Night Shade Books, 2018)

So why is Seabury Quinn so little known today? I think the answer is August Derleth and his indefatigable championing of Lovecraft. Derleth placed all Weird Tales writers either in Lovecraft’s circle or outside it. And because HPL did not like Quinn’s writing, Quinn was damned. Because those outside the circle were promptly forgotten.

That Weird Tales was a Lovecraftian world is a myth. A myth created by HPL’s protege, August Derleth. Who also happened to be the second most published Weird Tales author. Much of that due to his “fake” collaborations with Lovecraft.

Stefan Dziemianowicz noted in his essay “‘Loved by Thousands of Readers’: The Popularity of Jules de Grandin”:

“In retrospect, Seabury Quinn’s tales of Jules de Grandin played a vital role in the development of weird fiction, if largely through their relationship with Weird Tales and its readers.” (The Devil’s Rosary: The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, Vol. 2. Night Shade Press, 2017)

Now that’s not something we weird fiction fans hear every day. Nor something we should ignore.

Comments are always welcome! And, until next time, happy reading!

Share This!