With six stories under his belt, Seabury Quinn settled in to write a long series and keep the pot boiling. One of his techniques that he used was to take classic stories or ideas and try to do something new with them. Sometimes this is pretty obvious when he used the same title like “The Great God Pan” and sometimes less so as in “The Grinning Mummy”. Which old mummy story is he riffing on? I have my suspicions.
“Faintly, so faintly it was like the half-heard echo of an echo, the fine, musical jangle of tiny bells wafted to us through the still, cold air of the dark old house.”
“Ancient Fires” originally appeared in Weird Tales, September 1926.
An ad in the paper offering a $10,000 reward to anyone who could rid a property of its haunted reputation takes De Grandin and Trowbridge out to the Adirondacks. Redgables had been built by John Aglinberry , a British Officer who had fallen for a native girl and had fled to America to live in bitter loss. (She has committed suicide by throwing herself off a cliff.) The first night in the massive mansion they witness a feminine ghost and the sound of bells.
The next day the duo and their host Aglinberry find gypsies camping on the property. John tells them to go but it takes de Grandin and his pistol to send them packing. That night the leader of the gypsies, Nikolai Brondovitch, comes to the window to murder Aglinberry but a beautiful female face appears and the gypsy is strangled by the ghost. Searching the library, de Grandin finds a leather satchel that contains a single bell like those worn by dancers in India.
The next day a Dr. Wiltsie comes from the nearby Thornwood Sanitaritum seeking de Grandin’s famed medical knowledge. One of the inmates, a young woman named Mary Ann, had gone from being an imbecile, having lost her mind at the age of six, to being aggressive. Aglinberry comes to the sanitarium with the two doctors and something seems to change in Mary Ann.
Later that night, she escapes from the hospital and comes looking for Aglinberry. John sees her and charges her in a rage, having put up with gypsies and now escaped lunatics. As soon as they touch, he recognizes her as Amari, the Indian woman he had loved in a previous life. The two lovers have been reunited after two generations, Amari claiming the vacant body of Mary Ann. The interns from the asylum come to take the girl back but de Grandin stops them, claiming that the ancient fires of love have finally been satisfied and no one will ever break them apart. De Grandin promises to defend her sanity in court and to claim his $10,000 reward.
Quinn has used India once again though setting the tale in upper state New York is unusual. He would often pair Old World lore with New World settings such as in “Gods of East and West”. His depiction of Gypsies is typically racist, providing an easy villain to what is essentially a reunited soul tale in the style of Conan Doyle or Sax Rohmer. As haunted house stories go, it’s pretty tame, being more of a romance.
“This house, it is not all as it should be, I fear me.”
“The Great God Pan” originally appeared in Weird Tales, October 1926.
De Grandin and Trowbridge are hiking in New Jersey and get lost. They are looking for a campsite when they spy a hill with the trees cleared and a great lawn planted there. At the center is a temple. A girl in a Grecian toga comes running towards them, crying that she has seen the Great god Pan.
They follow her to the temple proper where more girls are praying. There they meet Professor Judson who claims they have come to his school of Neopaganism. De Grandin quickly perceives that the girl who thought she saw Pan has a weak heart and de Grandin suspects the professor of trying to frighten her to death. After talking to some of the students, he finds that all the girls are rich orphans and had to sign a will leaving all their money to the school. The professor allows the visitors to sleep in the temple but the men have to be gone by daybreak. De Grandin finds the professor and the girls involved in a ceremony to raise Pan.
De Grandin shuts the ceremony down at gun point. The girl they met at the beginning runs in screaming she has seen Pan. De Grandin proves to her that it is all malarkey when he reveals the paper-mache mask the professor used. He stomps on the mask to make his point. De Grandin has the girls prepare to leave. As he and Trowbridge are about to go, De Grandin returns for a moment. He tells his friend that he has burnt all of Judson’s normal clothes and he laughs to think of him wandering around in his toga.
The obvious comparison is with Arthur Machen’s tale of the same name from 1895. Unlike the Machen story this tale is completely lacking in terror. It is little more than an excuse to get girls nekkid, again a “Weird Menace” story before that sub-genre existed. This is Quinn “phoning it in”, the worst kind of de Grandin tale.
“Fairy-tales, do you say?” de Grandin returned goodnaturedly. “Parbleu, my friend, do not you know that the most improbable of the tales of the fairies is sober logic itself beside the seemingly impossible miracles which science performs each day?”
“The Grinning Mummy” originally appeared in Weird Tales, December 1926.
The archaeologist professor Butterbaugh comes to Trowbridge in a fit of anger for someone has posed as him and ordered a tombstone with his own name on it. The stone bears the Latin for “beware the wrath of the Gods” and that day’s date for his death. Butterbaugh has received death threats while in Egypt acquiring a new mummy and he doesn’t believe the tombstone has any connection. That night, his niece calls Trowbridge when Butterbaugh is found dead, his head punctured by some hand-held weapon.
De Grandin brings in Sgt. Costello. They examine the mummy that Butterbaugh was unwrapping. The corpse bears the staff of Isis, a short wand with a metal bird on top, the murder weapon. The teeth of the mummy also bears blood. The sergeant begins questioning the servants. De Grandin doesn’t waste his time on it.
Later that day, the mummy disappears. While questioning the police in charge of guarding it, they hear from a young man delivering groceries. He claims two dark-skinned foreigners ran him off the road. Using this information, they have the two apprehended in a nearby town. When de Grandin arrives to talk to the captives he sees they are an Egyptian man and woman. Before he can stop them, they commit suicide by grabbing an asp from the mummy. The poisonous snakes were left with mummies in suspended animation to kill grave robbers.
Before the man dies, after De Grandin promises to bury their ashes in Egypt, he explains that they are Copts, worshippers of the ancient Egyptian gods and they had been following Butterbaugh to get him to return the mummy. The next day De Grandin explains how he solved the case: he had found four black hairs in Butterbaugh’s hand (which we were not told about!) that under examination showed they were black in color and had been cut two weeks ago. Knowing Butterbaugh had had threats in Egypt, he deduced that these hairs belonged to Egyptians. He also knew there were two because of the location of the wound. The man distracted the professor while the shorter woman applied the weapon. He gives a lecture of how police forensics can gain much from such information.
This tale could have been inspired by A. Conan Doyle’s “Lot 249” or other mummy tales but if so Quinn chose to give it a non-supernatural explanation. The result comes off like a bad detective story for he doesn’t provide clues fairly then bores us with a long explanation at the end about what is mostly obvious.
No matter how you feel about these three stories in particular, it is evident from now on that readers of Jules de Grandin stories realized that the series was not going to be predictable in that you never knew for sure if the solution would be supernatural or not. Some readers who wrote into “The Eyrie” celebrated this fact. They liked to be kept guessing. Others –who perhaps took their direction from M. R. James, who wrote in 1930 of stories: ” …belongs to a class of which I disapprove—the ghost-story which peters out into a natural explanation…”– saw the non-supernatural tales as weak cousins and used it as fuel to downgrade Quinn as a horror writer.
Next time, two classic de Grandin adventures…
