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
Jules de Grandin: “The Pillar of Weird Tales”
by Darrell Schweitzer
FOR SOMEONE WHO PLAYED such an important role in the magazine’s heyday, there is surprisingly little information available about Seabury Quinn and his behind-the-scenes relationship with Weird Tales. Author and pulp magazine contributor E. Hoffmann Price, among the memoirs in his Book of the Dead (Arkham House, 2001), profiles Quinn, but doesn’t say much about him in connection to Weird Tales. Price also profiles WT editor Farnsworth Wright, but doesn’t mention Quinn. Price could be an insightful biographer, and he esteemed both men highly, but given that Price regarded pulp writing as purely a trade—something done for the money, the same as carpentry or brick-laying—it isn’t surprising that he skimps on the working details, which to him were unimportant.
It is clear enough that Quinn, who lived in Brooklyn until mid-1937, when he lost his job as editor of the mortician’s journal Casket and Sunnyside and moved to Washington, D.C., was not a member of Wright’s social circle. The Weird Tales office was in Chicago. So Quinn could hardly have been one of the “Varnished Vultures”—an informal club of writers, editors, and artists associated with the magazine who regularly met in Wright’s apartment (Price was a member)—or someone who stopped by on occasion to help read manuscripts. To my knowledge, Wright and Quinn never met—at least, I’ve yet to find someone who can confirm they did.
We do know that Quinn met H.P. Lovecraft on several occasions when Lovecraft was visiting New York. Lovecraft thought well of him, but not of his work, and it is not hard to find comments about him in the various volumes of Lovecraft’s letters. For example, HPL wrote the following to author J. Vernon Shea on July 30, 1931:
I met Quinn twice during my stay in N.Y. & find him exceedingly intelligent and likeable. He is 44 years old but looks rather less than that. Increasingly stocky, dark, with a closely-clipped moustache. He is first of all a shrewd business man & freely affirms that he manufactures hokum to order for market demands—in contrast to the artist, who seeks sincere expression as the result of an obscure inward necessity.
This was not the only time Lovecraft spoke poorly of Quinn’s contributions to the magazine. To author Robert Bloch he wrote, in mid-November 1934, that “de Grandin is merely a puppet moulded according to cheap popular demand—he represents nothing of Quinn.” To writer Natalie H. Wooley, on November 22, 1934, he bemoaned the “devolution” of various writers—including Quinn, Price, Edmond Hamilton, A. Merritt, and many others—who succumbed to the “insidious cheapness of the pulp magazine tradition” so that they lost their status as “sincere writers” and came across as mere “herd-caterers.” And again, to Bloch on May 9, 1934, he said: “Quinn, also, has frankly sold his soul to Mammon—but he could turn out magnificent stuff if he would.” And so on in a similar vein. There is no need to quote any more.
Since we tend to view the entire Weird Tales scene through a Lovecraftian lens, it has become perceived wisdom over the years that Quinn was a disinterested craftsman who just typed out his stories and sent them in, and Farnsworth Wright bought them like yard-goods. No interaction, just pure business.
What’s wrong with this picture is that it is not entirely true. It is not even mostly true. Fortunately, we do get a glimpse from Quinn’s point of view in a series of letters he wrote to the artist Virgil Finlay between January and October of 1937. This correspondence takes up thirty-two pages in Fantasy Collector’s Annual, 1975, edited and published by Gerry de la Ree.
The personality revealed in the letters is not quite what we’d expect from the dignified figure we see in the few surviving photos of Quinn. He is informal, slangy, maybe even a little pushy. He uses words like “feller” and signs himself with his initials, always drawing little smiley faces inside the “Q.” He also has a fairly large ego. The correspondence is prefaced with a letter from Quinn to Farnsworth Wright, in which he extolls the virtues of “The Globe of Memories” (one of his first non-de Grandin stories during the period in which he took a brief “vacation” from the mercurial Frenchman’s adventures) in no uncertain terms:
Dear Wright:
Ambrose Bierce might have written
THE GLOBE OF MEMORIES
but he didn’t. I did!
He then asks that Finlay be allowed to illustrate it, at which point his correspondence with Finlay ensues.
The letters are full of revelations, about Quinn, Weird Tales, and de Grandin. For all Quinn claims—“Because of my inability to visualize my characters as pictures […] I don’t really know what [de Grandin] looks like”—he most definitely does know, and later includes a drawing (that looks like it was cut from a comic strip) to specify exactly what his hero looks like, down to the right kind of moustache – “needle,” not “fish-hook.” In fact, Finlay eventually found Quinn a little irritating and a micro-manager. Sometimes Quinn says that Finlay should follow his own imagination, but at other times he is specifying how many people are in a scene, in what poses, with what costumes, etc.
What is very clear from these letters from the author is that de Grandin is more than the “puppet” Lovecraft supposed, caring quite a bit for how his characters were portrayed. Of course, Quinn did make a substantial amount of money from the adventures of de Grandin and Trowbridge. “For that reason, if no other, I should be fond of them,” he writes. “But my liking goes deeper. I really regard them as personal friends, and it’s sometimes a shock to me to realize that there is no Harrisonville, NJ, no Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, no Jules de Grandin.”
That doesn’t sound like a mere hack writer, does it?
Quinn was very pleased with the portraits of de Grandin and Trowbridge that Finlay produced, which were used as a standard feature for most of the pair’s later appearances in Weird Tales. He also acquired some of Finlay’s cover paintings and decorated his office with them. (These he received from Wright as gifts, since in those days pulp artists sold their work to publishers outright, never imagining it would have any resale value.)
We learn some other intriguing details: While there is no evidence that Wright ever asked for revisions, or worked with Quinn on the content of the de Grandin stories very much, we do learn that “Frozen Beauty” was originally entitled “The Snow Queen,” presumably as an allusion to the fairy tale. Wright changed that. He thought it was too “highbrow.”
In one of the earlier letters Quinn expresses more than passing interest in Weird Tales itself, repeating to Finlay in detail what he must have previously written to Wright. He wanted to redesign the magazine entirely, transforming it into a quality digest on semi-glossy paper like Coronet or Reader’s Digest, which would appeal to a more general audience. He had very exact ideas about what kinds of art should be used, how they should be placed, etc. There’s no record of how Wright responded, but in any case, most of Quinn’s suggestions came to nothing. Weird Tales remained a pulp, its appearance (largely thanks to Finlay) steadily improving in the late ’30s, but another of Quinn’s ideas did come to fruition. It was he who suggested to Wright that Finlay should be given a full page each issue to illustrate a scene or image from famous fantastic or weird poems. Finlay’s “poetry page” soon became one of the most popular features in Weird Tales.
Of course, one of the reasons Weird Tales never transcended the pulp category was lack of money.
Quinn was fully aware of the privations the magazine had suffered in the depths of the Depression. It was, he explained to Finlay (who was younger, and had not been involved with the magazine at the time), “a minor miracle” that Wright and his associates were able to keep Weird Tales going at all.
How Weird Tales survived this crisis is a particularly dramatic story, which Quinn didn’t tell Finlay. The details were only discovered recently, and described in an essay by scholar Scott Connors, “Weird Tales and the Great Depression,” which was published in The Robert E. Howard Reader, an anthology I edited in 2010. It seems that, in order to pay printing bills as the magazine was struggling to establish itself, publisher J.C. Henneberger sold the majority interest in Weird Tales to the printer, one B. Cornelius. The understanding was that once the magazine became profitable, Cornelius would be repaid and he would return the stock to Henneberger.
Then the Depression hit. But, believing the claims of then-president Herbert Hoover that prosperity was “just around the corner,” Henneberger and his editor Farnsworth Wright instead decided to double down, launching a companion magazine, Oriental Stories, with its first issue dated October-November 1930. Customarily, distributors held back payments for three issues of a magazine, and so they wouldn’t pay for any sales of Oriental Stories until a fourth issue was delivered. Until that fourth issue, Weird Tales would have to earn enough to support both itself and Oriental.
Cornelius, the printer who had been sold a majority interest in Weird Tales, had been patient. Depression-era pulp printers often had to run on credit because otherwise they might have nothing to print and not even the promise of income, and would have to let their employees go. But enough was enough, and sometime in late 1931, Cornelius ordered Henneberger and Wright to shut Weird Tales down. That could very well have been the end of the magazine, except that Wright was able to convince Cornelius that he had in inventory two serials strong enough to save the magazine.
One was Tam, Son of Tiger an imitation Tarzan novel by Otis Adelbert Kline, which in theory could draw some buyers away from Argosy, where that sort of thing usually appeared.
The other was The Devil’s Bride by Seabury Quinn, easily the longest Jules de Grandin story ever written, which was ultimately stretched out over six issues, February to July 1932. In Quinn’s story was something reliably popular enough to keep Weird Tales going, and it eventually did make it through, if only barely, to the other side of the Great Depression. When you consider that Robert E. Howard still had his best Weird Tales material in front of him (the first Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” appeared in the December 1932 issue), and that all of the Weird Tales work of C.L. Moore, Robert Bloch, and many others was yet to come, it is worth pausing to reflect on how much fantastic literature owes to Seabury Quinn’s excitable Frenchman.
The Devil’s Bride is, of course, quintessential pulp fiction. Here Quinn pulls out all the stops. Yet another imperiled society girl (a standby in the de Grandin series) is kidnapped at her wedding rehearsal by a truly fiendish cult of Yezidees, Satanists, Communists, and who knows what else. There ensue gory murders, a raid on a Black Mass, and, at the climax, a police and army raid on an even larger cult orgy in West Africa, which is conducted with such violence that it makes Inspector Legrasse’s adventure in the Louisiana swamp, from Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” look like the issuance of a parking ticket. Don’t forget the family curse. The girl in question is the descendant of a Yezidee promised to Satan. A family heirloom, a “bridal girdle,” is partially composed of human skin. Various young ladies end up unclad throughout the course of the story (Quinn certainly knew how to get his tales featured on the covers of Weird Tales, which in this period almost always featured nudes).
What more could any pulp reader want? The Devil’s Bride is lurid as all get-out, containing weird cultism, thrilling action, kidnappings, escapes, a sinister wolf-master, a naked lady found crucified in a convent garden, jungle adventure, massive slaughter … just about everything short of dinosaurs and a giant ape. There is also more characterization than usual. If we are to be in the company of Jules de Grandin for six issues, we must inevitably learn more about him, including the surprising tale of the lost love of his youth.
It might not have been “literature,” but it was certainly what kept the customers coming back, month after month. The Devil’s Bride was an important expansion of the character’s universe for readers, as well as a well-timed financial life preserver for the magazine. The Jules de Grandin series in general was unquestionably one of the major pillars of Weird Tales, and new tales of the Frenchman appeared so frequently that he very much helped to define what Weird Tales was.
Seabury Quinn was, of course, a professional writer. He did this for a living, particularly after he lost his Casket and Sunnyside gig. Times were hard. We know that after the worst of the Depression he, along with many other writers, took a pay cut and was sometimes paid late. He explained to Finlay in 1937 that he was no longer enjoying the luxurious rates he had in 1928. He wrote for other magazines, too—detective stories, jungle stories, a few historicals for Golden Fleece in the late ’30s—but it’s clear that for Quinn, Weird Tales and Jules de Grandin were something special.
They still are. That is why you are holding this volume in your hands. This isn’t throw-away writing. It has survived.
The Lost Lady
1. The Stranger from Cambodia
FOUR MILES AWAY, WHERE Hopkins Point light thrust its thin rapier of luminance into the relentless advance of the sea-mist, a fog-horn hooted with dolorous persistence. Half a mile out, rising and falling rhythmically with the undulation of an ocean which crept forward with a flat, oily swell, a bell-buoy sounded a warning mournful as a funeral toll. “Clank-a-clang—clang-a-clang!” it repeated endlessly.
Moneen McDougal glanced at the fog-obscured window, half in annoyance, half in what seemed nervous agitation. “I wish it would stop,” she exclaimed petulantly; “that everlasting clang-clang is getting on my nerves. A storm would be preferable to that slow, never-ending tolling. I can’t stand it!” She shook her narrow shoulders in a shudder of repugnance.
Her big husband smiled tolerantly. “Don’t let it get you, old dear,” he counseled. “We’ll have a cupful of wind before morning, that’ll change the tempo for you. This fog won’t last; never does this time o’ year.” To us he added in explanation:
“Moneen’s all hot and bothered tonight, her colored boy friend—”
“Dougal!” his wife cut in sharply. “I tell you he wasn’t a Negro. He was a Chinaman—an Oriental of some kind, at any rate. Ugh!” she trembled at the recollection. “He sickened me!”
Turning to me, she continued, “I drove into Harrisonville this afternoon, Doctor Trowbridge, and just as I was leaving Braunstein’s he stepped up to me. I felt something pawing at my elbow without realizing what it was; then a hand gripped my arm and I turned round. A tall, thin man with a perfect death’s-head face was bending forward, grinning right into my eyes. I started back, and he tightened his grip on my arm with one hand and reached the other out to stroke my face. Then I screamed. I couldn’t help it, for the touch of those long, bony fingers fairly sickened me.
“Fortunately the doorman happened to notice us just then, and came running to my assistance. The strange man leaned over and whispered something I couldn’t understand in my ear, then made off through the crowd of shoppers before the doorman could lay hold of him. B-r-r-rh!” she shuddered again; “I can’t get the memory of that face out of my mind. It was too dreadful.”
“Oh, he was probably just some harmless nut,” Dougal McDougal consoled with a laugh. “You should feel complimented, my dear. Cheerio, Christmas is coming. Licker up!” He poured himself a glassful of Napoleon brandy and raised it toward us with a complimentary gesture.
Jules de Grandin replaced his demitasse on the low tabouret of Indian mahogany and decanted less than a thimbleful of the brandy into a tiny crystal goblet. “Exquis,” h
e pronounced, passing the little glass beneath his narrow nostrils, savoring the ruby liquor’s bouquet as a languishing poet might inhale a rose from his lady-love’s girdle. “C’est sans comparaison. Madame, Monsieur—to you. May you have a truly Joyeux Noël.” He inclined his head toward our hostess and host in turn, then drained his glass with ritualistic solemnity.
“Oh, but it won’t be Christmas for three whole days yet, Doctor de Grandin,” Moneen protested, “and Dougal—the horrid old thing—won’t tell me what my gift’s to be!”
“Night after tomorrow is la veille de Noël,” de Grandin reminded with a smile as he refilled his glass, “and we can not be too forehanded with good wishes, Madame.”
Dougal McDougal and his bride sat opposite each other across the resined logs that blazed in the wide, marble-manteled fireplace—the cunningly modernized fireplace from a vandalized French château—he, tall, long-limbed, handsome in a dark, bleak, discontented fashion (a trick of nature and heredity, for by temperament he was neither); she, a small, slight wisp of womanhood, the white, creamy complexion of some long-forgotten Norse ancestor combining charm with her Celtic black hair and pansy eyes, clad in a scanty eau-de-Nil garment, swinging one boyishly-slim leg to display its perfection of cobweb silken sheath and Paris slipper. The big, opulent living-room matched both of them. Electric lamps under painted shades spilled pools of light on bizarre little tables littered with unconsidered trifles—cigarette boxes, bridge-markers, ultra-modern magazines—the deep mahogany bookshelves occupying recesses each side of the mantelpieces hoarded current bestsellers and standard works of poetry indiscriminately, a grand piano stood in the deep oriel window’s bay, the radio was cunningly camouflaged in a charming old cabinet of Chinese Chippendale; here and there showed the blurred blue, mulberry and red of priceless old china and the dwarfed perfection of exquisitely chosen miniatures in frames of carved and heavily gilded wood. The room was obviously the shrine of these two, bodying forth their community of treasures, tastes and personalities.
The Dark Angel Page 2
