Jules de Grandin, Pulp Superstar - Dark Worlds Quarterly

Who was the most popular author of Weird Tales in its four decades in publication, from 1923 to 1954 ? H. P. Lovecraft, the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos? Robert E. Howard, the author of Conan the Cimmerian? Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, August Derleth? Certainly all these writers were well-loved by the readers of “The Unique Magazine”, as were less-well remembered writers like Henry S. Whitehead, Manly Banister, Greye la Spina, Allison Harding, Dorothy Quick, Hugh B. Cave, Carl Jacobi, not to mention young neophytes like Manly Wade Wellman, Ray Bradbury and Fritz Leiber. But none of these famous people can claim the distinction of being “the” favorite writer of that magazine according to its letter column, “The Eyrie”. That person was a Washington-based writer named Seabury Quinn (1889-1969).

Seabury Quinn had a strangely appropriate job for a horror writer: teaching mortuary law and editing the mortician’s magazine Sunnyside and Casket. This, of course, was when he wasn’t writing the adventures of one particular character, the amazing and eccentric ghost-breaker, Jules de Grandin. The Frenchman, along with his faithful side-kick, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, saved the denizens of Harrisonville, New Jersey, again and again from the clutches of supernatural evil, mad scientists and law-breaking criminals.

Quinn wrote ninety-three Jules de Grandin supernatural mysteries, ninety-two stories and a single novel, The Devil’s Bride (February – July 1932). Quinn penned the entire saga in the span of twenty-six years, published from October 1925 to September 1951. In the day of one-cent-a-word pay (and often less from the financially troubled Weird Tales), the little French detective with his waxed cat-like mustachios and loud declarations was popular enough to demand triple the going price. Quinn wrote other fantasy stories, like the werewolf classic “The Phantom Farmhouse”(1923) and the Christmas tale “Roads”(1938), but Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, asked time and again for what his readers demanded, Jules de Grandin! Some years, like 1930, the great occultist appeared eight times in twelve issues!

So, who was this strange detective everybody wanted to read about? Beginning in “The Horror on the Links”(October 1925), the author tells us de Grandin was connected with the Service de Surete, the University of Paris and St. Lazaire Hospital, and the author of Accelerated Evolution. We learned de Grandin worked at the Ecole de Medecine when in France, being one of France’s foremost anatomists-physiologists (and yet strangely unlicensed to practice in the US!) But only four stories later, with “The Dead Hand” (May 1926) de Grandin’s medical history has faded in favor of his criminology and occult investigation for which he is equally famous. During WWI, de Grandin worked for Allied Intelligence Service, but after the Armistice did special missions for the French Ministry of Justice.

But that’s just his resume. The man himself is a most curious sight. Active, blond, mustached like a miniature Satan, de Grandin speaks only as a pulp character can, with his frequent injections of Nom d’un petit porc! and Nom d’un nom! Lin Carter, in his introduction to The Adventures of Jules de Grandin (1976), calls the Frenchman a “Gaelicized, medicinated, latter-day Sherlock Holmes,” but I think the book jacket is closer when it calls him “The Occult Hercule Poirot”. That Seabury Quinn had read Agatha Christie’s famous Belgian detective can not be doubted. If one requires proof, you need only look to the title of the first story, “The Terror on the Links” written in 1925. Christie had written The Murder on the Links two years earlier.

And what of the quiet, elderly physician, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, who accompanies this extraordinary fellow? There is very little to say about de Grandin’s faithful Watson, outside of the Renoir print hanging in his office and his egg-like bald head. Like all true companions, Trowbridge’s part is to relate the story, to never out do his friend or do anything very intelligent or interesting. First appearing solo as Dr. Towbridge in “The Stone Image” (Thrill Book, May 1919), the good doctor reappears in 1925 as the narrator of the first of ninety-three de Grandin stories.

In the second story, “The Tenants of Broussac” (December 1925) Trowbridge has gone to Europe, where he meets de Grandin for a second time in his native France. It is only a matter of one conversation before the doctor has fallen back into his role as Watson and the two run off to Castle Broussac to solve another mystery. This time the chase involves a family curse and a strange snake-like revenant that de Grandin slays in true knightly style.

Strange meetings fill the first three stories, for in the third tale, the two friends meet off the Low Holland coast, where sailing ships are vanishing in “The Isle of Missing Ships” (February 1926) Nothing supernatural afoot, just old fashioned piracy. But de Grandin makes no distinction between villains and dispatches the ruthless Goonong Besar as easily as any werewolf.

After only two adventures away from home, the duo take up lodgings again in Trowbridge’s home in Harrisonville, where they remain for the rest of de Grandin’s brilliant career. The great number of strange happenings in this little New Jersey town, as both Phil Strong and Lin Carter point out, ranks it up there with Lovecraft’s Arkham County for unusual phenomenon. But de Grandin and Trowbridge seem happy in town with loyal Sergeant Costello to keep them busy with mysterious affairs. In the best Lestradian tradition, Costello (who’s cliché Irish dialect is one of those annoying pulp stand-bys) provides de Grandin with information and good old fashioned disbelief. Only Dr. Parnell, the town coroner, cares less for the Frenchman and his “jiggery-pockery”.

A large part of de Grandin and Trowbridge’s comfort at home is to the credit of Nora McGinnis, Trowbridge’s ‘household factotum’, who like Mrs. Hudson, and with a brogue as thick as the Sergeant’s, keeps the two investigators in clean sheets. And so, with Costello bringing in the cases and Nora looking after the house, de Grandin and Trowbridge are ready for the next werewolf, Satanist or alien who’s come to town. The formula was set and Quinn did not disappoint.

Virgil Finlay based these famous portraits on laxative ads in the slicks.

Seabury Quinn described his method of writing de Grandin stories as no method at all. “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.” Quinn might have added, using his own middle name “de Grandin” for the lead character. This stream-of-consciousness style of production has made the job of literary detective work easier, when looking for his inspirations. The initial tale, “Terror on the Links” deals with an escaped gorilla that terrorizes a golf course. Poe’s “Murder in the Rue Morgues” is the obvious antecedent. “The Isle of Lost Ships” begins with de Grandin being hired to find ships that have been attacked mysteriously at sea. The opening bears a strong resemblance to the second chapter of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. “Suicide Chapel” (June 1938) concerns a scientist who transforms men into apes ala Conan Doyle’s “The Creeping Man”. “The Dead Hand” smacks of de Maupassant, “Conscience Maketh Cowards” (November 1949) bears a strange resemblance to Poe, and the examples go on. (For an in-depth look at influences, see my piece on “The Tomb of Sarah” here.)

The criticism might make it sound as if there was nothing of merit in the de Grandin tales, but this is not true. While the props of Quinn’s fiction are often well-worn pulp clichés and borrowed hand-me-downs such as vampires and werewolves, his qualities as a story teller were considerable. Writing quickly, he often produced stories which, while not exceptional, often contained clever surprises and fun for the reading. In “The Gods of East and West” (January 1928) de Grandin thinks to use Western Indian magic to fight Eastern Indian evil. In “The Tenant of Broussac”, the detective uses flour to track a snake-like monster to its hiding place. Quinn also utilized supernatural creatures better known today, like poltergeists, which were not household words back in 1927. He also did not limit himself to the accepted idea about many supernatural beings, finding a trusty sword sufficient to kill a vampire, such as Count Czerny in “The Man Who Cast No Shadow” (March 1927). The fabric might have been worn but he found new and entertaining way to use it.

Stories about “ghost-breakers” did not originate in Weird Tales. Quinn was writing in the tradition of Le Fanu and Blackwood, but with a Holmesian conviction that not all things need be caused by supernatural beings, like the criminal but terrestrial villain in “The Great God Pan”(October 1926), or the science fictional alien visitor in “Bride of Dewer”(July 1930). Perhaps, one out of every ten tales could be explained with a rational explanation, such as the blood-thirsty pirates in “The Isle of Missing Ships”. Quinn, aware of the growing power of rationality in the science fiction magazines, borrowed a little of their common sense to add a new believability to fantasy which perhaps was only available elsewhere in the later works of H. P. Lovecraft and those that followed him. Quinn was there first, and was loved for it by the Weird Tales readership. (So much so that when E. Hoffman Price created ghostbuster Peter D’Artois he received so many accusations of copying Quinn he abandoned the series.)

If the readers loved him, the critics, even in Quinn’s own day, have been less adoring. Phil Strong collected stories from the pulps that he felt worthy of a more permanent venue. In The Other Worlds: 25 Modern Stories of Mystery and Imagination (1942), after praising Manly Wade Wellman for his “well-tooled structure and effect” Strong says:

A contrary judgment can be put down for Seabury Quinn. He is, this anthologist may remark gratefully in payment for the use of his story, the worst fictional opportunist in the business. He cheats, he steals — always from himself –; he imitates — always himself –; he will get a happy ending on a story if he has to call in every Irish policeman, holy Father, yogi, clairvoyant, prizefighter, Surete detective and naked blonde in the longitude of the horribly-beset precincts of the accursed Harrisonville, N. J., presumably an aristocratic suburb of New York.

Strong tries to ride the fence, by acknowledging the ghost breaker tradition and his love-hate relationship with Quinn’s writing:

Nevertheless, no anthology of current periodical horrors would be complete without a small sample of the best known supernatural detective in weird fictions. After all, in more conventional whodunnit fiction, there was the great Sherlock Holmes, quite as incredible as the small Jules de Grandin.

“The House Where Time Stood Still” is one of Seabury Quinn’s best stories and one of the worst. It is one of the ugliest and most ingenious; and on the other hand it demonstrates to an exaggerated degree his deplorable determination to have everything turn out right up to, and unhappily beyond, the point of using definitely farcical devices.

H. P. Lovecraft (according to Darrell Schweitzer in “Lovecraft Read This” from the Lovecraft Annual #1 (2007) was equally unkind:

…Like many superior writers, he was no doubt exasperated with the tripe he encountered, particularly when he saw more potential in the material than the authors apparently did. Recall his famous comment about Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin series, that these had managed to bungle so many ideas and situations that a more competent writer ought to get permission to go back and write the stories.

By April 1943, de Grandin and his cases had become so familiar that David Wright O’Brien writing as John York Cabot wrote a parody of the detective called “The Last Case of Jules de Granjerque” in Fantastic Adventures. The ironic part was the author of this tale was the nephew of Farnsworth Wright, the editor that asked for more de Grandin. (For more see here.)

The feelings that Phil Strong and others have voiced have proven largely true. Despite a fanatical following in Weird Tales, Jules de Grandin never made the jump from pulp to paperback that characters like Conan and the Cthulhu monsters did. He remains the idol of a few special collectors and fans, readers who quickly snapped up the Complete Jules de Grandin Volumes 1 to 3 from The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box Press that appeared in 2000. Fortunately the entire series was released again 2017 by Night Shade Books.

As Quinn said himself in the introduction “By Way of Explanation” to his first de Grandin collection, The Phantom Fighter (1966), “… if the stories in this [book] … serve to help the reader to forget some worrysome incident of the workaday world … both Jules de Grandin and I shall feel we have achieved an adequate excuse for being.” No pretensions — Quinn wrote to entertain, the goal of every story-teller. And a teller of tales he was, leaving for us one of the all-time great psychic detectives.

A NOTE ON COVERS

Seabury Quinn understood Pulp cover psychology well. He knew what Farnsworth Wright was looking for when selecting cover images. Seabury Quinn holds the record for most covers because he knew Wright would be looking for some way to get a naked lady in jeopardy front and center. A look through these images is like a showcase for a bondage magazine. I believe Quinn added elements to his stories to insure such scenes, knowing Wright would bite. Lovecraft may not have thought much of Quinn’s writing but HPL only received one cover, and that for a poem.