HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: The Jules de Grandin Stories - Seabury Quinn

Jules de Grandin may not have been the first occult detective in weird and supernatural fiction but he will always be the original Night Stalker to me.  Around the time that cult TV show Kolchak: The Night Stalker was airing in the 1970s a series of paperback books appeared in my local Woolworth's on the paperback racks I used to regularly pore over. The garishly colorful covers with bizarre creatures and titles like The Horror Chamber of Jules de Grandin and The Hellfire Files of Jules de Grandin were perfect lures for my teenage eyes.  I eagerly bought them all over a period of three or four months that summer.  In them I was introduced to the small but fierce French physician who battled every possible evil creature imaginable and did it all almost entirely in a fictional town in New Jersey.  Of all places - New Jersey!  The only state in the USA that was the butt of jokes of every stand-up comic and episode of Laugh-In during the 1970s.  But from the pen of Seabury Quinn Harrisonville, New Jersey was one of the most terrifying places you would ever want to visit.  A town overrun with vampires, werewolves, reincarnated Egyptian mummies, worshippers of Satan, and myriad evildoers obsessed with immortality and willing to make bargains with any demonic being they could summon and not unwilling to kidnap, steal or murder in the process. Not all the tales took place in New Jersey, but the bulk of the stories that appeared in Weird Tales from 1925 through 1951 did.  I devoured these stories in the six paperback volumes thinking that that was all I could get my hands on.  Now all 92 Jules de Grandin supernatural stories as well as the single novel featuring the occult detective, The Devil's Bride, are available to devotees of pulpy horror in a five volume set. Each volume runs close to 500 pages and there are dozens of tales I'd never heard of or read before.

As George Vanderburgh, owner of the indie press Battered Silicon Dispatch and a Sherlockian of some note, and Robert Weinberg, that renowned collector of mystery and supernatural books and Weird Tales maven extraordinaire, remind us in the detail rich introduction to each volume Seabury Quinn is not the most famous of Weird Tales writers.  But Jules de Grandin, his engaging intelligent and extremely knowledgeable occult detective, was definitely one of the most popular characters among the readers of the magazine. From de Grandin's first appearance in "The Horror on the Links" in 1925 the Frenchman known for his frequent bizarre exclamations like "Barbe d'un chameau!" or "Larmes d'un poisson!" was an instant hit.  Readers demanded more stories from Quinn and the publisher. Every year de Grandin tales made the "best of " lists and were frequently reprinted in later issues.  It's not hard to see why for Jules and his physician sidekick Dr. Samuel Trowbridge are truly likeable and heroic in the manner that the best of pulp fiction characters always are.

Short in stature, athletic in build, blond, bearded, a speaker of several languages de Grandin is like a mix of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and John Silence, all characters he must have been modeled on.  Well, perhaps not so much Poirot for he was only five years old when the first of the de Grandin adventures was published.  But surely Holmes, Silence and perhaps Carnacki, William Hope Hodgson's other well known occult detective might have been Quinn's source as Weinberg and Vanderburgh tell us in their introduction. Letters pored in from readers analyzing the stories, praising and critiquing Quinn's imagination. A cult grew around the character.  As the two men describe the popularity and the phenomenon of de Grandin he began to take on a life and legend similar to Holmes. They write in their intro: "Readers smitten by how believable de Grandin seemed as a character wrote to Weird Tales asked if he was a person in real life."

There is not enough room here to describe all of the stories and I have no way near finished even the first two volumes. At random I selected stories that I haven't read based merely on length (avoiding those over 25 pages in order to read as many as I could in two weeks) and also I was lured by those with odd titles. Vanderburgh and Weinberg's intro also whetted my appetite by pointing out the more grisly and horrific of the stories.  I was drawn mostly to Quinn's fascination with Eastern mythology and religions and his penchant for pitting de Grandin against creatures less well known in the lore of the supernatural. Here is a modest sampling of the strange and fantastic adventures of the French physician turned occult detective. Each tale's first appearance in is in parentheses.

"The Horror on the Links" - The life of the idle rich at a golf country club is no party when an ape-like creature kills a woman and pursues another. Shades of Poe's Rue Morgue and Well's Dr. Moreau meld in a story of revenge and diabolical experiments. (Oct 1925)

"The Isle of Missing Ships" - More of a pirate adventure than an occult detective story it foreshadows Indiana Jones' derring do. Jules Verne set pieces also crop up in this story of a self-proclaimed god who calls himself Goonong Besar and rules an island in the South Pacific populated with the usual cannibalistic inhabitants armed with poison arrows. Seemingly filled with silent movie clichés from its maze-like underground fortress to the scenes of captives tied to stakes being cooked for dinner. Tiresome, not thrilling nor original in the least. My least favorite story of those I selected. (Feb 1926)

"Ancient Fires" - Haunted house, ghost of an Indian princess and reincarnation. Nicely done, but very familiar to anyone who has read a lot of these types of tales. Margery Lawrence handles reincarnation and lost love in her Miles Pennoyer stories better than Quinn. (Sept 1926)

"The Grinning Mummy" - What's an occult detective series without a smattering of Egyptology and a vengeful mummy? Incomplete, that's what. Here's the requisite angry mummified corpse on the rampage.  De Grandin is in fine form acting as a true detective in this outing. It's genuinely thrilling. Jules' habit of bizarre French exclamations adds "Nom d'un porc!" and "Dieu et le diable!" to his ever growing list. (Dec 1926)

"The Gods of East and West" - Jules enlists the help of a medicine man of the Dakotahs to help save Idoline Chetwynde (love that name!) from the grip of a spell cast by the malevolent goddess Kali. Only one bizarre French expression ("Nom d'une anguille!") but the action filled tale, the spells and rites and originality more than make up for the lack of odd vocabulary. A good one! (Jan 1928)

"The Serpent Woman"  - Jules and Dr. Trowbridge prevent a woman 's suicide then hear her story of being accused of her child's murder.  She claims he was not killed but stolen in the night. However, there is no sign of anyone having entered her home.  An impossible kidnapping!  This is one of the rare genuine detective stories in the de Grandin canon. The title of course reveals the culprit, but the discovery of who she is, how and why she accomplishes her misdeeds makes for gripping and entertaining reading. It even makes use of a genuinely surprising reveal. Added bonus: Quinn incorporates the Jersey Devil legend, probably its earliest fictional appearance. (June 1928)

"The Devil's Rosary" - A curse has befallen the Arkwright family. Nearly every one of them has died a violent death and at the site of each death a small red bead is found.  Haroldine Arkwright has found a red bead in her purse and is terrified she will be the next to die. Jules and Dr Trowbridge investigate and uncover another supernaturally enforced vendetta this time at the hands of victimized Tibetan monks. One of the more original stories making use of Quinn's fascination with Eastern religion and mysticism. (Apr 1929)

The five volumes that make up The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin are published by Night Shade Books.  Each hefty tome is available through the usual bookselling websites in both new and used copies.  The most recent volume, Black Moon (vol 5), was released in March 2019. I still have three more volumes to acquire and with all the other books I have in my mountainous TBR piles I may never finish reading the entire collection.

Seabury Quin wrote pulp fiction in its purest form. It's text book pulp, a quintessential example of early 20th century American popular storytelling and genre fiction. As such these are far from great literature but that doesn't make them any less entertaining. You need to enter the world of Jules de Grandin prepared for not only over-the-top action and melodrama, but xenophobic comments and a generous supply of ultra un-PC descriptions of "foreigners".  But I am never one to be repelled by these sins of the past.  Horror stories and movies from every era are replete with similar embarrassing and shameful depictions. It's the imaginative storytelling that will get me all the time. And I'm a sucker for learning new mythology, superstition and ancient rites. The de Grandin stories are chock full of that too and to me that's what makes them worth reading.

HALLOWEEN SPECIAL 1: The Shapes of Midnight - Joseph Payne Brennan

I've known Joseph Payne Brennan as the creator of Lucius Leffing, a Sherlockian style consulting detective, who appears in two books.  Although I own one other collection of Brennan's more varied horror tales and ghost stories I've never read any of them. Then I stumbled across this paperback in one of my all too infrequent (these days at least) bookstore jaunts. With the introduction by horror guru Stephen King I figured it was about time to acquaint myself with Brennan's short stories without Leffing.

The Shapes of Midnight (1980) contains Brennan's classic story "Slime", perhaps the most often anthologized of his stories. First appearing in print in a 1953 issue of Weird Tales "Slime" tells a gruesome tale from a twisted imagination reminiscent of a more terrifying version of The Blob, that old monster movie starring a very young Steve McQueen before he became a 1970s movie icon of action films. It's one of the best stories in a decidedly mixed bag most of which are variations on the themes of haunted houses and witchcraft.

King, as is usual when he gets into his fanboy mode, is gushing in his praise for Brennan's work. Too often I found most of the stories to be familiar in plot and theme and I wasn't sure what King saw in them. There was lots of imitation of better writers like Hodgson and Blackwood and more than an ample amount of Lovecraftian homage. However, King's favorite of this volume, "Canavan's Back Yard", is justly praised as a work of ingenuity, originality and genuine thrills. It most resembles Hodgson's classic novel of an alternate universe The House on the Borderland, yet I could not help but draw comparison to "The Open Door" by Saki in that both tales deal with the horror of the unknown. What's really out there? is the question the reader asks himself when reading "Canavan's Back Yard." Unlike Saki's story, which turns out to be nothing more than a nasty girl's joke, Brennan's story of the desolate and decaying backyard is one of true terror.  He relies on the reader's imagination, for the most part, to fill in the blanks. These are the best types of horror stories. No gut spilling, blood soaked explosions of violence, just the eerie quiet of a man haunted by a compulsion to wander into the "blowing brindle grass and rotting trees" of his ugly and forbidding backyard. What is it that draws him there?  What did he see that left him literally speechless when he returned?  The narrator and the reader are curious to discover what lies out there waiting to be discovered. If the quasi explanation that Brennan supplies is less than satisfying that is no real fault of the storyteller.  But I wish he had spared us the few paragraphs that discuss a witch's curse, an utterly prosaic touch in light of the truly chilling effects he had created throughout the story by mere suggestion.

Joseph Payne Brennan (circa 1950s)

This is sadly a formulaic touch that I find a bit disappointing when reading all these stories one after the other.  Brennan tends to undermine the real terror he has created in the reader's imagination by explaining the mystery.  For me, it is the absence of a solution to the otherworldly mysteries in supernatural and classic horror stories that make them successful. A gifted horror writer plants a seed in the reader's imagination and lets it fester there. Those images created by the reader himself linger in the memory long after the book has been closed.

Amid the many haunted houses ("The Horror at Chilton Castle," "The House on Hazel Street," "House of Memory") we get "The Diary of a Werewolf" with its touches of deeply black humor,  the riddle story of an enigmatic creepy barber in "Who Was He?", the village idiot Henry Crotell of "The Willow Pattern" whose curiosity gets the better of him when he finds a partially burned book in the ashen remains of a destroyed house, a radioactive zombie that is "The Corpse of Charlie Rull", and some Lovecraft inspired horror in "The Pavilion", "Slime" and "Disappearance."

Modern horror fans will find "The Impulse to Kill" one of Brennan's most compelling and prescient stories. In it we follow the rantings of a nameless murderously obsessed narcissist who sees himself as a vigilante of sorts. Originally published in 1959 this story foreshadows the entire serial killer genre and in particular the kind of sociopathic killer like Dexter who kills criminals and amoral people who have escaped capture, trial and imprisonment. To these self-appointed executioners the criminals on the loose deserve to die. This story more than any of the others disturbed me deeply. The tone is bleak and narcissistic. The story perfectly encapsulates the nihilistic ego at work in all its destructive power. "The Impulse to Kill" has echoes of Robert Bloch's early stories about mad murderers and the work of crime writers like Jim Thompson whose book The Killer Inside Me is eerily similar in tone, style, and worldview. And Brennan accomplishes in a mere ten pages what Thompson needed a full length novel to explore.

For those eager to sample Brennan's work there is good news. Dover Publications has reprinted two of his collections including this one. Both were released back in July of this year. I'm sure they are easy to find at your favorite online bookseller, if not directly from Dover.

FFB: Ray Bradbury's Weird Fiction (a sampling)

In tribute to Ray Bradbury, who recently left us to go travelling for eternity through space and time, I offer up a brief review of some stories I found in my pulp magazines and the anthologies on my overcrowded shelves.

1. From Weird Tales, May 1946: "The Smiling People"

"Nothing is quite so horrible, so final as complete utter silence" is the tagline for this chilling tale about Mr. Greppin who claims to have found true happiness with Alice. She is the love of his life and he remembers announcing his news that they are to be married to his uncle and aunt and how he made them smile. But now something strange has happened. Mr. Greppin's aunt and uncle sit at the kitchen table in utter silence, not moving, not speaking as he prepares to bring Alice to this house. And every sound in the house is amplified. Drops of water sound like harp strings being plucked at a deafening level, even whispers are like screams.

Bradbury has concocted a devilish little portrait of a diseased mind and a pathetic soul that brings to mind the work of Robert Bloch who seems to have been an influence on so many of the writers who contributed to Weird Tales in the 1940s. It's not hard to figure out what happened to Aunt Rose and Uncle Dimity but that's not the point of the story. It's Bradbury's depiction of the house, its sounds, and the supposed absence of sound, the wonderful silence that Greppin thinks he has finally achieved.

This particular passage is sublime, I think:

But of course nothing is perfect. The police make a visit to the house and Greppin's dream world comes to a literal crashing end.

"The Smiling People " later appeared in Bradbury's first short story collection Dark Carnival published by the preeminent purveyor of weird fiction Arkham House. August Derleth again selected it to appear in his anthology The Night Side (Rinehart, 1947) and it has since been anthologized in numerous collections in both the US and the UK.

2. From Nightmare Garden, edited by Vic Ghidalia: "Come into My Cellar" (originally published in Galaxy, October 1962)

This is a variation on the themes previously explored by Jack Finney in his classic novel The Body Snatchers (1955). Bradbury takes inspiration from those goofy ads seen in the back of comic books and magazines for do it yourself kits and get rich quick schemes. In this case the ad is for  "Sylvan Glade Jumbo-Giant Guaranteed Growth Raise- them-in-Your-Cellar-for-Big-Profit Mushrooms. Tom Fortnum is terribly excited when he receives his order. Special Delivery no less. Tom's father is less than excited about the postage expense but allows his son to tend to his fungus garden in the dank basement. Meanwhile, Mrs. Goodbody, the paranoid neighbor next door, is fearful about an invasion from outer space and is already beginning the fight in her front yard by spraying all the insects attacking her plants. Is it possible invaders from another world could travel to Earth as insects? Or even tinier forms of life? Spores, perhaps. Once they've arrived what would they do with us? Tom and his family find out all too soon.

3. From Masterpieces of Mystery & Suspense, compiled by Martin H. Greenberg: "And So Died Riabouchinska"
(originally written in 1953)

Which was the first story to play with the idea of duality in the life of a ventriloquist I wonder. John Keir Cross wrote a nightmarish version of this theme in his story "The Glass Eye" back in the mid 1940s. Were there others prior to that story? Bradbury's certainly is one of the earliest and predates the famous Twilight Zone episode "The Dummy." William Goldman's Magic, at one time the most famous ventriloquist movie, borrows heavily from all the stories and movies of the 40s and 50s with twisted dummy handlers. It's worth some research, I think.

John Fabian is a successful ventriloquist with a breathtakingly beautiful doll named Riabouchinska as his partner. Fabian's wife serves as his drudge assistant. When the story opens there is a dead body on the floor of Fabian's dressing room and a police detective named Krovitch is interrogating the ventriloquist, his wife and this press agent. They all deny knowing the dead man. As the story progresses Krovitch confronts Fabian with his many lies. He produces a photograph of Fabian's former assistant who bears a striking resemblance to Fabian's female dummy. The assistant even bears a similar Russian name. She disappeared in 1934 and Krovitch now suspects foul play. Krovitch is relentless in his pursuit of the truth and manages to get Fabian to reveal all in a most unusual manner. The story ends on a surprisingly poignant note.

Claude Rains with the lovely Riabouchinska
(talented radio actress Virginia Gregg did the voice of the dummy)

"And So Died Riabouchinska" was adapted for the TV series "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" in a very faithful teleplay by Mel Dinelli who also did fine adaptations of crime novels in his screenplays for The Reckless Moment, The House by the River and The Spiral Staircase. So true is Dinelli to the spirit of the story that he used much of Bradbury's original dialog and managed to craft some of Bradbury's more artful prose into speeches delivered by the great Claude Rains in the role of Fabian. Charles Bronson plays Lt. Krovitch. The adept director was Robert Stevenson, a Hitchcock series regular. It's one of the highlights of the long running series and can be viewed at for free at hulu.com here.

Journey into Darkness - Frank Belknap Long

It was jury duty for me yesterday. I know all too well what that means. A day of nothing but reading. And I get paid for it! As my nephews would say, "Sweet!" Granted from the city of Chicago I only get $17.20 for sitting in a quiet room filled with strangers and reading crime fiction all day, but luckily I have a real job with genuine benefits and jury duty pay is one of them. I could write a whole other post on jury duty and my insane run of bad luck and fill that post with ridiculous anecdotes and tales of Cook County bureaucracy gone haywire, but I'll spare you. This is a blog about books.

While I was sitting and waiting for my jury panel number to be called I managed to read an entire paperback novel and three short stories from The Department of Queer Complaints by Carter Dickson. The Dickson book will be reviewed later when I finish it. For now you get a review of the novel. I picked it because it seemed like it would be a detective novel with fantastic elements. But it turned out to be a Lovecraftian style horror/sf story with a lot of gruesome murders and a heck of a lot of new age crapola. The blurb was definitely misleading. But surprisingly I found the book was something I could not put down.

Frank Belknap Long was one of those frenetically prolific writers in the heyday of the pulp magazine era. He wrote everything. Horror, fantasy, science fiction, Gothic romances, and a couple of scripts for comic books including Green Lantern, Superman and Captain Marvel. I have a paperback reissue of The Hound of Tindalos and in that book there is a mini biography of his writing career passed off as an introduction. He tells some amazing anecdotes and he writes lucidly, clearly and entertainingly of his life as as "fictioneer" and of his fellow writers. Long's fiction writing is another thing altogether.

Journey into Darkness was the first novel by Long I've read having only been familiar with a handful of his stories penned for Weird Tales. It's dense and rambling, hypnotic and maddening, revelatory and derivative. A cornucopia of contradictions. While much of it irritated me I never found it boring. I couldn't stop reading. It seems like you know what's going to happen then he'll thrown in some off the wall sequence and the story takes off in a completely different direction.  Forget about the utterly bland title that tells you nothing about the story. What begins as a story eerily similar to Samuel Hopkins Adams' The Flying Death slowly reveals itself to be a re-telling of Lovecraft's "The Color Out of Space."  Long even directly references that story (without coming right out and naming it) in a four paragraph sequence that also discusses Wilhelm Reich, his fascination with the color blue and the male orgasm, and his bizarre theory of orgonomy.

Psychologist John Holloway has invited a group of creative souls (three artists, a singer, and a professor of philosophy) to his East coast retreat-cum-lab for a weekend of personality experiments and treatment methods. The discovery of the gruesomely mutilated body of one of those guests initiates a police investigation (see the blurb on the rear cover at left).  Over the course of the weekend several of the other guests witness strange flying creatures, worm-like manifestations on the beach, and glowing lights in the dunes surrounding the Holloway estate.  More bodies turn up each with similar burn wounds and mutilations.  Two of the guests - Ralph Kilmer, the professor, and Joan Wilderman, the singer/dancer -- turn amateur sleuths in order to learn if these manifestations are real or merely hallucinations caused by Holloway's experiments.  The secret lies in a bomb shelter they discover as they flee yet another creepy amorphous being that pursues them on the beach.

The author in his youth

If all this sounds like a bad marriage between new age intellectualism and a pulp magazine plot that's because it is. But for some reason I had to keep reading. There is even a didactic dialog section that could have come from an episode of The X Files in Chapter 12 where Kilmer lectures on endlessly about the Jungian collective unconscious. He also gives a crash course in the iconography of fear and the power of the mind to transcend imagined horrors. It all got to be a bit grating. I was thankful for the outbursts from Joan who at least displayed a sarcastic sense of humor and shut up Kilmer's new age mumbo jumbo with snappy retorts like: "If that sand starts moving again I'm pretty sure I'm not going to just stand here and fight them with my mind."

But if I hadn't trudged through the book I would never have learned about Wilhelm Reich and his crackpot ideas. Nor would I have been acquainted with the American College of Orgonomy.  Truth can be stranger than fiction. And often even more gasp inducing. For these bits of trivia I will be forever indebted to Frank Belknap Long.

As for jury duty --  it was another day of sitting and reading. I was never called. For the twelfth time in 25 years.