This past week saw my 59th birthday, and as a present my wife got me The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin by Seabury Quinn, all five hardback volumes.
Many of you might be saying “who?’ right now. I don’t blame you. Even back in the 1970s and 1980s when there was a bit of a renaissance in interest about the pulp writers of the first half of the 20th century, Quinn was a bit of a punching bag for those writing forwards to reprints of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Even though he was a Weird Tales contemporary of all of them, people tended to look down their nose at him. He was popular, he was prolific, and he was pulpy, so he wasn’t worthy of consideration.
It’s a shame, because in his stories of the occult detective Jules de Grandin, he is anticipating much of what we would come to think of as urban fantasy. He investigates monsters, sprits, devil worshippers and serial killers in a milieu that would be familiar to most fans of the genre. Where more modern occult detectives draw from noir detectives like Sam Spade and Phillip Marlow, de Grandin draws more from Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. It’s a fun combination and it’s easy to see why he was the most popular writer in Weird Tales.
He saw one set of paperback reprints of his stuff back in the 1970s, which is how I came to be familiar with his work. It’s nice now to see that Night Shade books saw fit to reprint the entirety of de Grandin’s tales.
