The Jules De Grandin stories by Seabury Quinn were not innovative so much as reactionary. Anyone familiar with the Horror and Mystery of the previous generation can easily glean where the author found inspiration. Quinn’s magic lies not in creating a Cthulhu Mythos, but in taking a fully modern approach to the old stand-bys, like Fritz Leiber, dragging the horror into the 20th Century.
Even Quinn’s detective borrows heavily from the past. Jules De Grandin’s Frenchness was inspired by Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot (who is actually a Belgian!) appearing for the first time in 1920 in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, five years before de Grandin and Trowbridge arrive. The genesis of the two ghostbreakers was nothing stellar as the author explained in 1966 in his afterword to The Phantom Fighter (Arkham House):
One evening in the spring of 1925, I was in 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.
The title of the second Poirot novel Murder on the Links (1923) no doubt suggested the first de Grandin tale “Horror on the Links” (aka “Terror on the Links”, Weird Tales, October 1925). Both De Grandin and Trowbridge (as with Poirot and Hastings) derive their formula from that most famous of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, with De Grandin exhibiting the quirks of a private detective, Trowbridge playing stuffy narrator Watson, Sgt. Costello as Lestrade and Nora McGinnis as Mrs. Hudson. The plot structure of most stories follows the classic visitor with a problem (sometimes a medical issue for Trowbridge) that leads to the uncanny or unexplained.
Quinn’s influences on the early stories outside of A. Conan Doyle, include Arthur Machen and Bram Stoker as well as occult lore and fairy tales. In many cases Quinn takes the essential idea of the classic and finds a new explanation for the supernatural activities, such as in “The Vengeance of India” (Weird Tales, April 1926) a dead girl wakes from her crypt and wanders the cemetery. You expect a Stokerian vampire but she turns out to be the victim of hypnotism and is still alive.
One story in particular of the early tales stands out for me as an interesting case of inspiration (almost sequelism). This is “The Man Who Cast No Shadow” (Weird Tales, February 1927). In this story two vampires terrorize the house of Mrs. Norman, a socialite widow. One of these is a typical Transylvannian Baron, who must replenish his life force every one hundred years with virgin blood. (Esther, Mrs. Norman’s daughter is the intended victim.) This idea is startlingly fresh for 1927. Richard Matheson would use it again to great effect inKolchak: The Night Strangler (1972) in which Oscar Goldman (Richard Anderson actually) played the Boston Strangler on a similar mission.
The other vampire is more interesting for her lineage is much easier to trace. In an old Scandinavian churchyard is a gravestone that says:
SARAH
Let nonne disturb her deathlesse sleepe
about ye tombe wilde garlick keepe
For if she wake much woe
will boast Praise Faither, Sonne &
Holy Goast.
De Grandin later hears a description of the vampire woman who has been attacking Guy Eckhart, one of Mrs. Norman’s boarders. She is described as having a rope around her neck, placed there by the mother of two of her young victims, who supposedly choked the killer to death.
In 1910, an English navel officer named F. G. Loring penned his single horror classic “A Tomb For Sarah” (The Pall Mall Magazine, December 1910). In this tale for Christmas, a diary is written by the man who is in charge of renovating a church. One of the changes he is to execute is moving a tomb that has sunk into the ground. This tomb bears this inscription:
SARAH
1630
FOR THE SAKE OF THE DEAD AND THE
WELFARE OF THE LIVING, LET THIS
SEPULCHRE REMAIN UNTOUCHED AND
ITS OCCUPANT UNDISTURBED TILL THE
COMING OF CHRIST.
IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, THE SON
AND THE HOLY GHOST.
When the builders unwisely open the tomb they find a shriveled old woman, not a skeleton, with a rope around her throat, the very rope that she was hanged with for witchcraft in 1630. The rest of the story follows the architect and a local priest and how they drive the vampire back into her tomb and dispatch her. If you are expecting a smashing climax, you’d be disappointed as Sarah’s end comes with a whimper not a bang.
Now the parallels are obvious. Quinn used Loring’s story as model for half of his own tale. All he had to do was rewrite the tomb’s warning in mock old English. He even kept the detail of the rope. But in how the vampire is dispatched, Quinn went his own marvelously modern way. Instead of digging up the coffin and driving a stake through her heart, De Grandin and Trowbridge get a long stake and drive it through the dirt into the coffin until it draws blood. This could be the author being lazy but what I suspect is he didn’t want that act to be the finale as the destruction of the Baron comes later. He needed to keep the suspense building so Sarah’s death had to be of lesser interest.
Now we could be harsh with Quinn for his little swipe (to use the artist’s term), but he’s not the first to put a little tip of the hat in a vampire tale. Bram Stoker, who we would all agree is the most famous vampire writer, did likewise. In the excised first chapter of Dracula (1897) that was publish in 1914 as “Dracula’s Guest”, Jonathan Harker unwisely tries to walk to Dracula’s castle and ends up in a graveyard at night. The ghosts and spirits of the place are held at bay by a gigantic wolf who we all know is Dracula in his wolf form. Stoker tips his hat to the most famous vampire writer before him, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, whose “Carmilla” (1872) is set in Styria. On one of Stoker’s gravestones is this inscription:
COUNTESS DOLINGEN OF GRATZ
IN STYRIA
SOUGHT AND FOUND DEATH 1801
F. G. Loring’s “A Tomb For Sarah” was a much-anthologized piece, well-liked by horror fans at the turn-of-the-century, and easily one that Quinn would have read. And Quinn may not be alone in this admiration, for M. R. James, the greatest ghost story writer of the Victorian era, had his own little “Sarah” moment in “An Episode in Cathedral History” (1921) only six years before Quinn’s pulp tale appeared in Weird Tales. This tale tells a similar experience from the point-of-view of the son of the man who must deal with the vampire.
Occult Noir and Mythos meet!The classic Mythos collection!
Even Quinn’s detective borrows heavily from the past. Jules De Grandin’s Frenchness was inspired by Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot (who is actually a Belgian!) appearing for the first time in 1920 in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, five years before de Grandin and Trowbridge arrive. The genesis of the two ghostbreakers was nothing stellar as the author explained in 1966 in his afterword to The Phantom Fighter (Arkham House):
One evening in the spring of 1925, I was in 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.
The title of the second Poirot novel Murder on the Links (1923) no doubt suggested the first de Grandin tale “Horror on the Links” (aka “Terror on the Links”, Weird Tales, October 1925). Both De Grandin and Trowbridge (as with Poirot and Hastings) derive their formula from that most famous of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, with De Grandin exhibiting the quirks of a private detective, Trowbridge playing stuffy narrator Watson, Sgt. Costello as Lestrade and Nora McGinnis as Mrs. Hudson. The plot structure of most stories follows the classic visitor with a problem (sometimes a medical issue for Trowbridge) that leads to the uncanny or unexplained.
Quinn’s influences on the early stories outside of A. Conan Doyle, include Arthur Machen and Bram Stoker as well as occult lore and fairy tales. In many cases Quinn takes the essential idea of the classic and finds a new explanation for the supernatural activities, such as in “The Vengeance of India” (Weird Tales, April 1926) a dead girl wakes from her crypt and wanders the cemetery. You expect a Stokerian vampire but she turns out to be the victim of hypnotism and is still alive.
One story in particular of the early tales stands out for me as an interesting case of inspiration (almost sequelism). This is “The Man Who Cast No Shadow” (Weird Tales, February 1927). In this story two vampires terrorize the house of Mrs. Norman, a socialite widow. One of these is a typical Transylvannian Baron, who must replenish his life force every one hundred years with virgin blood. (Esther, Mrs. Norman’s daughter is the intended victim.) This idea is startlingly fresh for 1927. Richard Matheson would use it again to great effect in Kolchak: The Night Strangler (1972) in which Oscar Goldman (Richard Anderson actually) played the Boston Strangler on a similar mission.
The other vampire is more interesting for her lineage is much easier to trace. In an old Scandinavian churchyard is a gravestone that says:
SARAH
Let nonne disturb her deathlesse sleepe
about ye tombe wilde garlick keepe
For if she wake much woe
will boast Praise Faither, Sonne &
Holy Goast.
De Grandin later hears a description of the vampire woman who has been attacking Guy Eckhart, one of Mrs. Norman’s boarders. She is described as having a rope around her neck, placed there by the mother of two of her young victims, who supposedly choked the killer to death.
In 1910, an English navel officer named F. G. Loring penned his single horror classic “A Tomb For Sarah” (The Pall Mall Magazine, December 1910). In this tale for Christmas, a diary is written by the man who is in charge of renovating a church. One of the changes he is to execute is moving a tomb that has sunk into the ground. This tomb bears this inscription:
SARAH
1630
FOR THE SAKE OF THE DEAD AND THE
WELFARE OF THE LIVING, LET THIS
SEPULCHRE REMAIN UNTOUCHED AND
ITS OCCUPANT UNDISTURBED TILL THE
COMING OF CHRIST.
IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, THE SON
AND THE HOLY GHOST.
When the builders unwisely open the tomb they find a shriveled old woman, not a skeleton, with a rope around her throat, the very rope that she was hanged with for witchcraft in 1630. The rest of the story follows the architect and a local priest and how they drive the vampire back into her tomb and dispatch her. If you are expecting a smashing climax, you’d be disappointed as Sarah’s end comes with a whimper not a bang.
Now the parallels are obvious. Quinn used Loring’s story as model for half of his own tale. All he had to do was rewrite the tomb’s warning in mock old English. He even kept the detail of the rope. But in how the vampire is dispatched, Quinn went his own marvelously modern way. Instead of digging up the coffin and driving a stake through her heart, De Grandin and Trowbridge get a long stake and drive it through the dirt into the coffin until it draws blood. This could be the author being lazy but what I suspect is he didn’t want that act to be the finale as the destruction of the Baron comes later. He needed to keep the suspense building so Sarah’s death had to be of lesser interest.
Now we could be harsh with Quinn for his little swipe (to use the artist’s term), but he’s not the first to put a little tip of the hat in a vampire tale. Bram Stoker, who we would all agree is the most famous vampire writer, did likewise. In the excised first chapter of Dracula (1897) that was publish in 1914 as “Dracula’s Guest”, Jonathan Harker unwisely tries to walk to Dracula’s castle and ends up in a graveyard at night. The ghosts and spirits of the place are held at bay by a gigantic wolf who we all know is Dracula in his wolf form. Stoker tips his hat to the most famous vampire writer before him, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, whose “Carmilla” (1872) is set in Styria. On one of Stoker’s gravestones is this inscription:
COUNTESS DOLINGEN OF GRATZ
IN STYRIA
SOUGHT AND FOUND DEATH 1801
F. G. Loring’s “A Tomb For Sarah” was a much-anthologized piece, well-liked by horror fans at the turn-of-the-century, and easily one that Quinn would have read. And Quinn may not be alone in this admiration, for M. R. James, the greatest ghost story writer of the Victorian era, had his own little “Sarah” moment in “An Episode in Cathedral History” (1921) only six years before Quinn’s pulp tale appeared in Weird Tales. This tale tells a similar experience from the point-of-view of the son of the man who must deal with the vampire.
