With the fourth story in what was now a popular series, Seabury Quinn made a few decisions. First off, all the adventures of De Grandin and Trowbridge would happen in their hometown of Harrisonville, NJ. No more globe trotting. Secondly, Quinn thought to try some scary thrills without actual monsters. He did this in two different ways (that he would use again in the series), first by making a terrestrial event look supernatural. This is the second oldest trick in the Gothic book, so not really new but new to de Grandin.
Secondly, he created horror by describing horrific but possible events that were terrible in the extreme. In this way, Quinn predated the Shudder Pulps by ten years. He might have been tempted to write for those publications in 1936 (they paid triple what Weird Tales did) if he wasn’t already the darling of Farnsworth Wright and receiving more for his work than other writers.
…“Beyond the Bouvier tomb, like a column of mist, too strong to be dissipated by the wind, yet almost too impalpable to be seen, a slender white form was rising, taking shape — coming toward us.”
” The Vengeance of India “originally appeared in Weird Tales, April 1926.
When Dr. Trowbridge has a patient die mysteriously without cause, his old friend Jules de Grandin steps in to investigate, checking the body for embalming. The young lady is Ramalha Drigo, the daughter of a Brazilian gentlemen recently moved to New Jersey. The young lady is laid to rest in St. Benedict’s Cemetery, in the crypt of an old, extinct family, the Bouviers.
After some research de Grandin drags Trowbridge out to the cemetery to see Ramalha’s white corpse walking. de Grandin grabs the girl and hands her to Trowbridge, who discovers she is actually alive. De Grandin and several cops under his command invade the graveyard and find the two responsible. They are unfortunately killed in the exchange.
Trowbridge returns Ramalha to her family, reviving her to good health. The next day de Drandin explains to his friend what has happened: two Hindoos with a grudge against the father (because of events in India) captured and hypnotized the daughter to die. Their spell over her made her rise up each night at midnight to haunt the cemetery.
The second non-supernatural tale of Jules de Grandin, its inspiration is not hard to find: Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker and The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins (or Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Crooked Man” (1893) which is descended from Collins too.) The scene of Ramalha Drigo walking in the graveyard is quite Stokeresque. This was Quinn’s trick for this tale, to explain away the vampire.
He would write other de Grandin tales with real vampires. The family running from vengeance from an event in India comes from the two Mystery tales. Quinn gets to show off his professional knowledge of embalming, for he had worked as a lawyer specializing in mortuary law and as an editor of a magazine for funeral home workers Casket and Sunnyside (but wasn’t an undertaker as some early critics claimed). Despite the apparently girl walking through a cemetery, he failed to get the cover for this issue, losing out to Robert E. Howard’s “Wolfshead”.
….“Like the lid of a boiling kettle, the top of the shoe box had lifted, and the slim quiescent hand that lay within leaped through the
opening and hurtled across intervening space like a quarrel from a crossbow. All delicate, firm-muscled fingers outspread, it swooped like a hawk, missed de Grandin by the barest fraction of in inch…”
” The Dead Hand ” originally appeared in Weird Tales, May 1926.
When de Grandin and Trowbridge hear of the death of Mrs. Richards, the wife of a rich financier, they offer to help Sgt. Costello investigate. The husband, the surly Mr. Richards, explains that when he returned from a trip he heard his wife call out. In her room was a ghostly hand, which has scared the wife to death and taken her jewels and securities. Richards allows de Grandin only 48 hours to find his missing goods before he will go to a private detective firm.
Just after this the duo come across Mr. Kinnan who claims a ghostly hand smashed his kitchen window with a hammer then took off with his Lafayette cup, worth over a thousand dollars. De Grandin quickly gathers up the hammer that has been left at the scene and begins doing research.
The next day de Grandin invites the two men to Dr. Trowbridge’s. First he shows them a woman’s hand in a box, asking if this was the culprit. Both men identify the limb. De Grandin explains that using fingerprints he discovered the hand belonged to a petty criminal, Katherine O’Brien, who had worked as an assistant for a traveling hypnotist named Professor Mysterio. The woman’s hand had been taken from her body before burial.
De Grandin expounds his theory that the hand still worked for the hypnotist that had hypnotized Katherine so many times before. Professor Mysterio had retired from show business and now lived in New Jersey. Costello and de Grandin go to the professor’s house, arrest him and find the missing goods. Richards is skeptical of the details but gets the undead hand around his throat as it jumps from the box. De Grandin destroys it with a scalpel from the doctor’s bag.
A phone call to the jail reveals that the professor has hung himself but not before charging the hand to “Kill the Frenchman!” De Grandin returns the cup for free to Mr. Kinnan, but not Mr. Richards. Richards has offered a $5000 reward for his items. De Grandin forces him to pay up.
There are many severed hand stories to inspire Quinn and he even makes an inventory of possible types when he explains: First” — he ticked off on his fingers — “it may be some mechanical device. In that case I shall find no traces. But then again it may be the ghost-hand of someone who once lived, in which case, again, it is one of two things: a ghost hand, per se, or the reanimated flesh of one who is dead (“The Hand” or another tale “The Flayed Hand” by Guy de Maupassant, “The Brown Hand” by Arthur Conan Doyle but not “The Beast With Five Fingers” by W. F. Harvey since it was published in 1928). Or, perchance, it is the hand of someone who can make the rest of him invisible (The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells). Like the previous story, “The Vengeance of India”, hypnotism plays a part in the story.
“Lined up against the wall was a series of seven small wooden boxes, each with a door composed of upright slats before it, similar in construction to the coops in which country folk pen brooding hens — and no larger. In each of the hutches huddled an object, the like of which I had never before seen, even in the terrors of nightmare.”
” The House of Horror” originally appeared in Weird Tales, July 1926.
De Grandin and Trowbridge are driving on a rainy night to give aid to an injured boy but become lost in the woods. They spot a mansion they have never seen before and go to the house for aid. The front door opens without anyone opening it and they enter. The door locks behind them. They meet the master of the house, a Mr. Marston who invites them to stay the night.
Once in their room, they find themselves locked in. De Grandin picks the door with two wires. They are about to look for Marston, who they have seen heading out of the house in the direction of their car, when they hear a scream. The screamer is a beautiful blond girl who has been drugged. Her eyes have been horribly altered by Marston, who is a surgeon. The girl wants to see if her face has been ruined but falls back asleep.
The two men figure out the front door lock then hurry to their car. Marston has driven it over a cliff and into a swamp. As he shrieks his mad glee, a branch breaks off a tree and smashes his spine. His dying words reveal he has a journal that explains the “pets he has in the cellar”.
De Grandin locates the book and through clippings figures out that Marston is a famous surgeon who had a malformed son. The son was to marry a movie star but she jilted him and he killed himself. The father was driven mad by this, repeatedly seeking revenge on women who looked like the actress. In the cellar, they find a well that leads to skeletal arms and legs hanging on a wall, then the “pets” mentioned by the dying man. The surgeon has cut off their arms and legs, altered their eyes, split their tongues, creating hideous snaky monsters. Each is kept in a box with a label: “Paid” – then a date.
De Grandin and Trowbridge leave to debate what to do with the unfortunate women, all mysteriously abducted, including the actress who had jilted his son. While they consider killing them, the storm floods the well and they all die. The duo takes the one survivor and flees. De Grandin, being a famous surgeon, will fix the unfortunate girl’s eyes.
What is so striking about this story is that it is the creepiest of all the De Grandins up to this time, and yet contains no supernatural creatures. It has the Gothic trappings of the old mansion but not much else. Quinn doesn’t even attempt the false monster thing. It’s just a nasty, creepy tale, much like the whole “Shudder Pulp” school that will appear in seven years. Quinn beat them there, may have even inspired them? Quinn would write other houses of horror in later De Grandin tales.
