Black Moon

by Seabury Quinn

  Finally, if Seabury Quinn is watching from above, and closely scrutinizing the shelves of bookstores, he would undoubtedly be pleased as punch, and proud as all get-out, to find his creation, Dr. Jules de Grandin, rising once again in the minds of readers around the world, battling the forces of darkness . . . wherever, whoever, or whatever the nature of their evil might be.

  When the Jaws of Darkness Open,

  Only Jules de Grandin Stands in Satan’s Way!

  Robert E. Weinberg

  Chicago, Illinois, USA

  and

  George A. Vanderburgh

  Lake Eugenia, Ontario, Canada

  23 September 2016

  The Further Appearances of Jules de Grandin

  by Stephen Jones

  SEABURY QUINN’S PSYCHIC INVESTIGATOR Jules de Grandin and his faithful associate Dr. Trowbridge are most closely identified with the classic pulp magazine Weird Tales, the periodical in which all of their exploits were originally published between 1925 and 1951. However, “The Unique Magazine” was not the only place where Quinn’s tales about the dapper French occult detective have appeared . . .

  In this, the introduction to the fifth and final volume of The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, we will explore, chronologically, the publication history of Seabury Quinn’s most memorable character outside of his appearances in Weird Tales.

  THE INITIAL DE GRANDIN story, “The Horror on the Links,” was published in the October 1925 edition of Weird Tales. Just under a year later it made its first hardcover appearance in the UK anthology More Not at Night (1926), the second of twelve volumes in the “Not at Night” anthology series edited for the Selwyn & Blount, Ltd. imprint by British literary agent and author Christine Campbell Thomson.

  The evidence suggests that Thomson had access to some of the magazine’s original manuscripts, and, following a mutual copyright arrangement between the two publishers, the “Not at Night” series of anthologies became the “official” British edition of Weird Tales for a while (as was indicated in several volumes’ preliminary pages), reprinting a selection of stories from the pulp magazine in each book.

  For her next anthology in the series, You’ll Need a Night Light (1927), Thomson selected the sixth de Grandin story, “The House of Horror,” which had originally been published in the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales.

  Although some writers, such as H. P. Lovecraft, were paid for their work by Weird Tales’ London agent Charles Lavelle, and received copies of the books their work appeared in, others, like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, did not, and had to track down copies for themselves. It is not known whether Seabury Quinn was even aware that his stories were being reprinted in hardcover on the other side of the Atlantic.

  He was, however, most probably aware of the anthology Not at Night!, published in America by Macy-Masius, Inc, in 1928. Edited with an introduction by journalist Herbert Asbury, best known for his non-fiction book The Gangs of New York (1928), the volume apparently pirated stories from the first three British editions, including Quinn’s “The House of Horror” and “The Horror on the Links.”

  Asbury not only appears to have been a bit confused about his source material (Weird Tales is credited by him as an English publication), but he also dismissed the quality of his own book when he stated in the Introduction: “Most of the authors represented in this collection appear to be comparatively unknown in this country (Seabury Quinn is the only one whose work I have ever seen before), and scholars and critics will look in vain for evidences of the skill and erudition displayed by such masters of the horror story as Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce and Algernon Blackwood.”

  When Weird Tales’ editor Farnsworth Wright proposed a class-action suit against Asbury’s illegal edition, which had basically reprinted stories from Christine Campbell Thomson’s anthologies without permission and with no acknowledgement of their original appearances, the US publisher reportedly withdrew the book from distribution rather than pay any royalties or damages.

  Meanwhile, Christine Campbell Thomson’s final Jules de Grandin selection, “The Curse of the House of Phipps,” appeared in her sixth volume, At Dead of Night (1931). It had originally been published the previous year in the January issue of Weird Tales.

  “The House of Horror” received a further outing from Thomson in 1937 when she reprinted it again in The “Not at Night” Omnibus, which collected thirty-five stories from the earlier books and was the final volume in the series.

  “This Not at Night Omnibus has been a dream of my own for some time now,” wrote Thomson. “I only hope that most readers will like at least a large proportion of what I have chosen, and that no one will imagine that non-inclusion is any disparagement of quality.”

  Meanwhile, the influence of Weird Tales and its contributors began to spread beyond the shores of the US and UK, and the first translations of stories started turning up on other continents.

  Edited by future novelist José Mallorqui in Barcelona for Editorial Molino of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Narraciones Terrorfícas (Terrifying Stories) was a Spanish-language pulp magazine which ran for seventy-six issues, from 1939 until 1952. It featured new and classic horror stories, including many that had originally appeared in the pages of Weird Tales.

  As with the “Not at Night” series, it is not clear if the WT authors were even aware that their work was being translated for overseas markets.

  The first Jules de Grandin story to appear in Narraciones Terrorfícas was “The Venomed Breath of Vengeance” (WT, August 1938), which was published in the second issue in 1939. That same year it was followed by “The House of Horror” in the eleventh issue, and the following year “The Poltergeist of Swan Upping” (WT, February 1939) and “The House Where Time Stood Still” (WT, March 1939) appeared in the eighteenth and twentieth issues, respectively.

  “The House Where Time Stood Still” was also reprinted in the 1941 hardcover anthology The Other Worlds, edited by novelist Phil Strong for the Wilfred Funk, Inc. imprint. The following year it was reissued by Star Books/Garden City Publishing Co., Inc. as The Other Worlds: 25 Modern Stories of Mystery and Imagination.

  “No anthology of current periodical horrors would be complete without a small sample of the best known supernatural detective in weird fictions,” explained Strong, who was best known for his 1932 novel State Fair. “After all, in more conventional whodunnit [sic] 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 his 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.”

  As with Herbert Asbury some years before him, you get the feeling that, as a sophisticated New Yorker, Phil Strong felt that editing a book of science fiction and horror stories selected from the pulp magazines was somehow beneath him—which might explain why The Other Worlds was his only venture into the genre.

  Seabury Quinn held a different opinion: “It is an undisputed fact,” he wrote in 1948, “that more Weird Tales writers are ‘tapped’ for inclusion in anthologies than those of any other pulp magazines, that many of its regular contributors are also ‘names’ in the slick-paper field, and that a high percentage of them have had one or more successful books published.”

  During the 1940s and early 1950s, Canadian and British publishers reprinted their own editions of Weird Tales with different advertisements and, in the case of the Canadians, different artwork during the years of World War II. Otherwise, these were, for the most part, straight facsimiles of the American publication and included all Quinn’s later de Grandin stories that appeared in those issues. The final new story about the French occult investigator, “The Ring of Bastet,” appeared in the September 1951 issue of the declining pulp magazine.

 
Following the demise of Weird Tales in 1954, the Dalrow Publishing Company stepped in to fill the gap in Britain with a weird fiction digest magazine entitled Phantom, which first appeared in April 1957 and ran for sixteen monthly issues. The title was basically an unofficial continuation of Weird Tales, and reprinted a number of stories from that publication, including the Jules de Grandin novella “The Body-Snatchers” (WT, November 1950) in the fourteenth issue (May 1958).

  British publisher and editor Herbert van Thal recalled “The House of Horror” from its publication in Christine Campbell Thomson’s “Not at Night” anthologies when he included it in the first volume of his perennial paperback anthology series, The Pan Book of Horror Stories (1959). “Bertie,” as van Thal was known to friends, returned to the character again in 1964 when he used “Clair de Lune” (WT, November 1947) in The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories. He had discovered the story in Leo Margulies’ anthology The Ghoul Keepers, which had been published by Pyramid Books three years earlier.

  “‘Nom d’un nom, friend Trowbridge!’—and one of the truly great characters of fantastic writing is on the hunt for some new horror, outrage or supernatural skulduggery [sic],” wrote Margulies. “For a quarter-century, dapper Jules de Grandin and his reserved sidekick pursued astonishingly varied forms of evil through the pages of Weird Tales, Trowbridge staunch and baffled, de Grandin peppery, ingenious, and ever debonair. WT is no more, but it is a pleasure to revive Jules de Grandin and see him once again in action against the powers of darkness.”

  The Austrian-born Dr. Kurt Singer, who described himself as some kind of secret agent in his jacket-flap biography, was another anthology editor who drew upon Quinn’s character for his story compilations for British publisher W. H. Allen. Starting with “Lords of the Ghostlands” (WT, March 1945) and “Catspaws” (WT, July 1946) in Kurt Singer’s Ghost Omnibus (1965), the following decade he reprinted “Vampire Kith and Kin” (WT, May 1949)—one of three stories by the author—in Ghouls and Ghosts (1972), “Clair de Lune” in Satanic Omnibus (1973), and “The Hand of Glory” (WT, July 1933) in They Are Possessed: Masterpieces of Exorcism (1976).

  Three years before his death in 1969 at the age of 80, Seabury Quinn saw ten revised and updated versions of his Jules de Grandin stories collected in The Phantom-Fighter from Mycroft & Moran, the crime and mystery imprint of August Derleth’s legendary genre publisher Arkham House (which is actually the publishing house credited on the dust-jacket spine).

  “The ten tales comprising this volume have been chosen with a dual purpose,” explained Quinn in his brief introduction, “By Way of Explanation.” “(1) to present ten typical incidents in the early career of the little phantom-fighter, and (2) to detail his methods of combating what the Catechism refers to as spiritual and ghostly enemies. He is, for example, as far as I know, the first one to electrocute a troublesome revenant, to cause a zombie to return to its grave by smuggling a bit of meat into its diet, and certainly the first to anesthetize a vampire before administering the coup de grâce.”

  In the same piece, the author also claimed that de Grandin’s adventures “total almost 300,” although the actual number is ninety-three.

  Limited to just over 2,000 hardcover copies and subtitled “Ten Memoirs of Jules de Grandin, sometime member of la Sûreté Général, la Faculté de Medicine Légal de Paris, etc., etc.,” The Phantom-Fighter included two stories that had their titles changed from their original publication—“The Horror on the Links” was amended to “Terror on the Links,” while “The Curse of the House of Phipps” became “The Doom of the House of Phipps”—most probably for copyright protection.

  “In any event,” continued Seabury Quinn, “if the stories in this, the first collected sheaf of Jules de Grandin’s adventures, serve to help the reader to forget some worrysome [sic] incident of the workaday world, even for an hour or two, both Jules de Grandin and I shall feel we have achieved an adequate excuse for being.”

  Following the end of the pulp magazines in the 1950s due to the growing market in paperback books, editor and science fiction author Robert A. (Augustine) W. (Ward) Lowndes was working for a low-rent New York publishing company called Health Knowledge, Inc. when publisher Louis C. Elson asked him to edit a new horror digest.

  “Doc” Lowndes had always been a horror enthusiast—he’d even received a couple of encouraging letters from H. P. Lovecraft back in 1937 when he was still a young fan—and the result was Magazine of Horror and Strange Stories, launched in August 1963. Produced on a miniscule budget of $250 per issue (with payment of a penny a word), the new periodical was split between original fiction and classic reprints.

  The magazine was enough of a success to allow Lowndes to follow it with a number of other titles for the company, including Startling Mystery Stories in the summer of 1966. From the very first edition of this new publication “stressing the eerie, bizarre, and strange type of mystery,” Lowndes began reprinting Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin stories in the majority of issues, starting with “The Mansion of Unholy Magic” (WT, October 1933).

  “I wanted to try some of the de Grandin stories to see if readers of the 1960s would be fascinated with them,” Lowndes later recalled. “I had re-read them and found they still retained their appeal to me, after thirty years. But I could not help but notice that they did contain elements—such as ethnic dialects long out of fashion, a writing style which to contemporary young readers might seem more appropriate to the Edwardian era, and an underlying affirmation of patriotic and moral values which the younger generation were ridiculing when not angrily condemning. I determined, however, to try a few; and then continue unless a decided majority of the readers’ letters indicated dissatisfaction or worse.

  “Surprise! There were some complaints along the lines I’ve indicated above, but even these were mixed—that is, the readers noticed these elements but said that they still enjoyed the stories; please give us more.”

  The Fall 1967 edition of Startling Mystery Stories featured the de Grandin adventure “The Druid’s Shadow” (WT, October 1930), along with pulp reprints by Arthur J. Burks and Sterling S. Cramer, and a previously unpublished poem by Robert E. Howard. However, that issue is mostly remembered today for a short story called “The Glass Floor”—the debut of a previously unknown author named . . . Stephen King!

  Although most of Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin stories ran to novelette or novella length, his only full-length novel featuring the character, “The Devil’s Bride,” was serialized over consecutive issues of Weird Tales from February to July, 1932. Robert Lowndes reprinted it in three parts in the March, May, and July 1969 issues of Magazine of Horror, accompanied by Joseph Doolin’s original illustrations from Weird Tales.

  Unfortunately, the collapse of Health Knowledge, Inc. in 1971 resulted in the end of the run of both Startling Mystery Stories and Magazine of Horror, along with their companion titles Famous Science Fiction, Weird Terror Tales, and Bizarre Fantasy Tales.

  “The Devil’s Bride” was reprinted in book form for the first time in 1971, when it appeared in Germany as Horror Expert #9 Die Braut des Teufels, from Wolfheart Luther Verlag, and in France as La fiancée du démon, by Edition Christian Bourgeois.

  That same year also saw the reprinting of the de Grandin stories “Body and Soul” (WT, September 1928) in the hardcover anthology Horrors Unknown, edited by Sam Moskowitz for Walker & Co., and “The Man in Crescent Terrace” (WT, March 1946) in editor Vic Ghidalia’s paperback anthology The Mummy Walks Among Us from Xerox Education Publications.

  In 1973, “The Devil’s Bride” was reprinted in Spanish as a standalone novel entitled La novia del diablo by the Mexican publisher Novaro.

  “During his long, successful career Jules fought every conceivable denizen of the phantom world, but it was his dramatic encounters with vampires and werewolves that were the most memorable,” observed British editor Brian J. Frost in his introductory essay “The Werewolf Theme in Weird Fiction” in the 1973 Sphere Bo
oks anthology Book of the Werewolf, which included the de Grandin story “The Wolf of St. Bonnot” (WT, Dec 1930).

  Belgian-born Michel Parry was another anthology editor working in the UK during the 1970s. In 1974 he kicked off a new paperback reprint series with The 1st Mayflower Book of Black Magic Stories (a.k.a. Great Black Magic Stories) for the eponymous publisher, which included Seabury Quinn’s “The Hand of Glory.” He followed it with two further de Grandin reprints, “Children of Ubasti” (WT, December 1929) and “Incense of Abomination” (WT, March 1938), in The 2nd Mayflower Book of Black Magic Stories (1974) and The 3rd Mayflower Book of Black Magic Stories (1975), respectively.

  In France, editor Jacques Sadoul included “The Curse of the House of Phipps” in Les meilleurs récits de Weird Tales: Tome 1 période 1925–32 (1975), published by J’ai Lu. The second retrospective volume, published the same year, covered the period 1933–37 and featured another de Grandin novella, “The Jest of Warburg Tantavul” (WT, September 1934). Both stories were also in the omnibus edition, which appeared in 1989.

  Born in Newark, New Jersey, Robert Weinberg was a bookseller, author, publisher, editor, and art collector. But first, and foremost, he was one of the world’s leading authorities on pulp magazines.

  So when Weinberg put together the pulp-reprint anthology Far Below and Other Horrors for FAX Collector’s Editions in 1974, it was not surprising that he included the de Grandin story “The Chapel of Mystic Horror” from the December 1928 issue of Weird Tales.

  By the mid-1970s, the pulp revival was in full swing, with the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and others being rediscovered and reprinted around the world. In 1976, Weinberg was hired by Popular Library to compile a series of collections of Jules de Grandin stories.