The Devil's Rosary

by Seabury Quinn

  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

  “Loved by Thousands of Readers”:The Popularity of Jules de Grandin

  by Stefan Dziemianowicz

  FANS OF WEIRD TALES, the groundbreaking pulp fiction magazine that changed the course of modern horror and fantasy fiction in the first half of the twentieth century, regularly debate who was the most popular author published in its pages. Although Weird Tales published the work of virtually every weird fiction writer of consequence during that time period—including H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Ray Bradbury, and Manly Wade Wellman, to name but a few—a compelling case could be made for Seabury Quinn, on the strength of how the magazine’s readers regarded his most memorable literary creation, the occult detective Jules de Grandin.

  Although less well remembered today than Weird Tales’ leading luminaries, Quinn racked up honors in the magazine that are mind-boggling even for the era of multi-million-words-per-year pulpsmiths. He published a total of 146 stories in Weird Tales over thirty years, an average of more than one story per two issues of the magazine’s 279-issue run. Ninety-three of those stories, most of which ran to novella-length, featured Jules de Grandin and his sidekick Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, whose first adventure appeared in the October 1925 issue and whose last appeared in September 1951. That’s an average of one Jules de Grandin story per three issues of the magazine. The statistics are even more formidable when you consider that the bulk of the de Grandin stories appeared in Weird Tales before 1934. In the years 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1933, Quinn placed seven stories featuring his psychic sleuth in each year’s twelve issues. In 1929, he placed nine. In 1930 and 1932 (the year that the sole Jules de Grandin novel, The Devil’s Bride, was serialized over six consecutive issues) de Grandin made ten appearances apiece. No other author in Weird Tales ever came close to duplicating this feat.

  Equally impressive is the number of the magazine’s covers that the de Grandin stories copped. The second adventure of Jules de Grandin, “The Tenants of Broussac” in the December 1925 issue, was the first to be featured on the cover. Over the next twenty-four years, a Jules de Grandin adventure made the cover an additional thirty-six times—seven of them in the year 1930 alone. And de Grandin stories shared mention on the cover with works by other writers another six times, meaning that nearly half of all of the adventures of Jules de Grandin merited cover honors—yet one more feat that no other Weird Tales author could claim.

  It’s hard to know why any phenomenon catches fire as rapidly as Quinn’s tales of Jules de Grandin did in Weird Tales, but the author’s familiarity to the editor and readers of the magazine up to that point may have played a role. His first fiction sale to Weird Tales, the werewolf story “The Phantom Farmhouse,” appeared in the October 1923 issue and remained one of the most requested reprint stories for the magazine’s duration. Quinn had also contributed a series of thirteen weird crime articles under the series names “Servants of Satan” and “Weird Mysteries,” some of whose contents he would later mine for de Grandin’s adventures.

  Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales when de Grandin made his debut, appears to have recognized early that Quinn had latched onto a memorable storytelling approach in his fusion of weird fiction and detective fiction. He appended a note to the end of “The Terror on the Links,” the first de Grandin story in the October 1925 Weird Tales, promising that “further adventures of the little French scientist, de Grandin, will be narrated in ‘The Tenants of Broussac,’”—indicating that he had already bought a second story in the series before the magazine’s readers had even read the first. He used his editorial paragraphs in the December 1925 issue of the Weird Tales letter column, “The Eyrie,” to promote the third de Grandin story effusively: “Even Poe never wrote a more gripping tale of terror than Seabury Quinn has penned in ‘The Isle of Missing Ships,’ which will be printed month after next.” And at the end of the fifth de Grandin adventure, “The Dead Hand,” published in the May 1926 issue, the magazine posted an ad listing back issues featuring the four preceding de Grandin stories for sale.

  The readers responded in kind to Wright’s enthusiasm. “The greatest series of stories published in Weird Tales, I think, are the Jules de Grandin ones,” wrote a reader in the July 1926 “Eyrie.” A letter writer in the February 1927 issue concurred: “Jules de Grandin is one of your most interesting and entertaining characters. Sometimes the plots are a little far-fetched, but the story is always told in such style with occasional humor and scientific theories mixed into the mystery, which carry the interest to the last word.”

  Smart editor that he was, Wright used “The Eyrie” to stoke reader enthusiasm for the magazine and its contributors. In the September 1926 issue, after having asked readers to name their favorite stories published in the magazine to date, he revealed that Quinn led the pack, garnering five of the readers’ top-thirty picks. In the February 1927 issue he showed how much he believed that readers valued Quinn’s work by offering a signed typescript of the de Grandin tale “The Man Who Cast No Shadow” to “the writer of the most helpful and constructive letter to ‘The Eyrie’ discussing the stories in this issue.” Small wonder, then, that readers were so adulatory in their subsequent praise of Quinn and de Grandin. “Seabury Quinn’s stories … are without a doubt above all others, and I wish to say that he has the immortal Poe shoved off the map,” wrote a reader in April 1927. He was echoed by another letter writer the following month, who wrote that “Jules de Grandin and Seabury Quinn should become synonymous with the immortal Poe.”

  The fans were not alone in their praise of Jules de Grandin. Quinn’s stories also received accolades from colleagues and writers-to-be. Robert E. Howard, the future creator of the sword-and-sorcery legend Conan the Cimmerian, was a Weird Tales author for less than a year when he praised the stories in the February 1926 “Eyrie” as “sheer masterpieces,” and continued, “The little Frenchman is one of those characters who live in fiction. I look forward with pleasurable anticipation to further meetings with him.” Future Weird Tales author Henry Kuttner considered Quinn a favorite writer, and over time Quinn and his series were praised by Greye La Spina, Manly Wade Wellman, Ray Bradbury, and other Weird Tales stalwarts. It’s well known that horror titan H. P. Lovecraft did not think highly of the de Grandin stories, but several of Lovecraft’s acolytes praised them in the “Eyrie,” among them J. Vernon Shea, Willis Conover, Duane Rimel, and Bernard Austin Dwyer.

  Fans of the de Grandin stories were not uncritical. They frequently provided analysis of why de Grandin and his adventures appealed to them. “There is no more inspiring, pleasant, amusing character in fiction than this little French criminologist, always courteous, civil, active, yet with a hard line of viciousness and heartlessness in him,” wrote a reader to the April 1928 issue. Another letter-writer in October 1930 gave reasons for the impact of Quinn’s tales: “He has a delightfully finished style of writing, most refreshing after the infernal, cut-down, written-to-sell stuff the authors of America have allowed an ignorant public to force on them.” Writing in the February 1933 issue, one reader elaborated further on why Quinn’s tales of de Grandin hit their mark: “There never has been one story by him that wasn’t dynamic and tense until the last word. Not only does he give a fine narrative, but an extremely plausible explanation also is incorporated in his stories.” Other letter writers singled the verisimilitude with which Quinn made esoteric subjects accessible to the layman: “He is meticulously correct without being pedantic and without annoying the lay reader by technical language,” wrote a self-proclaimed student of legal medicine in the October 1929 “Eyrie.” “Such exactness and the ability to explain medical and legal matters in plain
language are far greater assets in an author than most publishers realize.”

  It’s not going too far to suggest that within a few years of his appearance in the magazine, a cult had grown up around Jules de Grandin. Readers smitten by how believable de Grandin seemed as a character wrote to Weird Tales asking if he was a person in real life. When more than a few issues of the magazine appeared without a de Grandin story, readers fearful that the series had been discontinued deluged the magazine with letters. “It is a real feat to create a character in fiction so likable, so human, and so fascinating that he immediately makes himself loved by thousands of readers,” Wright wrote to allay such concerns in the August 1928 issue, “and this is just what Seabury Quinn has done in creating the temperamental and vivacious Jules de Grandin for your delectation.” When de Grandin appeared in only three issues of Weird Tales in 1931, Wright had to mollify complaining readers with the explanation that Quinn had been busily writing the novel-length work The Devil’s Bride, to be serialized in multiple issues of the magazine the following year. Fans even had the audacity to warn Quinn not to write anything but de Grandin stories. “Jules de Grandin is just as perfect as he thinks he is (which is saying a lot),” wrote a reader in December 1930. “Tell Seabury Quinn that if he ever writes any other type of story the readers will come en masse and lynch him.” Another writer in the July 1935 “Eyrie” was more temperate in explaining why he felt the de Grandin stories outranked Quinn’s other fiction: “Seabury Quinn is just another writer when he leaves Harrisonville [the town in which all of de Grandin’s adventures took place], but de Grandin puts him at the top of your list.”

  And yet, as much as readers adored de Grandin and did not want his adventures to end, some were aware of the formulaic quality of many of his adventures and proposed ideas to bring variety to the series. “Can’t Seabury Quinn take him and friend Trowbridge out of Harrisonville?” one reader wrote of de Grandin in July 1930. “It would seem that one city is the only spot left where our beloved Jules may spin his webs—and what a demon-infested place to live! Too long has he tarried in a prosaic little city. Let him conquer new worlds. And one suggestion: Just once—in a really, gripping, tragically sad tale I would like to have de Grandin bested—just once. Don’t you think it would make him even more human and lovable than he is now?”

  Another writer in the February 1931 issue also took issue with de Grandin’s invincibility. “Someday, give us a story in which the inimitable Frenchman fails—fails miserably through overlooking some item that he should have known. It might be well, in order that some beautiful girl who usually figures in their adventures may come out of it well and happy, to have Trowbridge discover and correct de Grandin’s oversight, thus giving the worthy Trowbridge something to remind de Grandin of in future when the Frenchman gets too cocky.”

  Whether or not Quinn was receptive to such reader comments, it appears that he did read them. In the May 1929 “Eyrie,” a de Grandin fan complained that Quinn’s stories “allow the forces of evil almost unlimited modes of self-expression, while restricting the opposite force to use by the hero of such symbols as a holy relic or sprig of some plant, waved under the nose of the particular devil in the case.” Quinn responded in the letters section of the July 1929 issue with a sternly worded two-page analysis of the last six de Grandin stories published to rebut that reader’s claims and concluded, “My traducer has done nothing but make a blanket accusation, without one shred of evidence to support it.”

  If anyone needed more evidence of the high regard in which Weird Tales readers held Quinn’s Jules de Grandin stories, the proof was in the reader poll tallies. “The Eyrie” had been in existence in Weird Tales since its first issue was published in March 1923, but it wasn’t until the end of 1925 that the magazine began encouraging readers to write in and name their favorite story. That this editorial policy coincides with readers becoming openly vocal in their support of the de Grandin stories in “The Eyrie” seems far from coincidental. The reader poll tallies were not exactly scientific. Wright usually reported the top three stories chosen by the readers, sometimes only the number-one pick, and he occasionally diplomatically reported that two, three, or even four stories were in a dead heat for first place. Regardless, more that fifty Jules de Grandin stories made the top three reader picks, and more than thirty placed or tied for first. In the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales, the readers went one better. Quinn was one of several top writers for the magazine whose stories the readers urged the magazine to publish in a hardcover collection. They went to so far as to propose a title for the book: The Phantom Fighter. Thirty-seven years later, Arkham House, a publisher who regularly mined Weird Tales for the contents of its books, brought out the first collection of Jules de Grandin stories under that very title.

  In retrospect, Seabury Quinn’s tales of Jules de Grandin played a vital role in the development of weird fiction, if largely through their relationship with Weird Tales and its readers. The stories were not the best written in the magazine, but they delivered the requisite thrills and chills that readers looked for in Weird Tales stories and in the pulps in general. More importantly, perhaps, they appeared in the magazine with a satisfying regularity that made readers look forward to buying and reading the next issue. When the first Jules de Grandin story was published in 1925, Weird Tales was a magazine still feeling its way toward the greatness it would eventually come to know. Only the year before it had been rescued from financial insolvency after a disastrous first year of publication. Farnsworth Wright had been in its editor’s seat for just twelve months when Jules de Grandin made his debut. Reader response to the de Grandin stories surely seemed a gift to him and the magazine. Exploiting (in the best sense) Quinn’s prolificacy, Wright used the popularity of the de Grandin tales to forge a community of loyal readers through “The Eyrie” and keep them engaged with the magazine.

  By the 1930s, when de Grandin’s presence in the pages of Weird Tales began to wane, the magazine had by then mustered the lineup of writers that we associate with its golden age. Quinn was among them, but only infrequently with tales of Jules de Grandin: he had discovered that his non–de Grandin weird tales had begun to frequently rank as high in the reader polls as his tales of the intrepid Frenchman, and the freedom to write outside of the series must have felt liberating. We can only speculate what Weird Tales’ prospects might have been had the Jules de Grandin series not struck a chord with readers when they did. This five-volume set collecting the complete adventures of Jules de Grandin gives contemporary readers a chance to enjoy stories that were instrumental in helping Weird Tales to become the magazine it is revered as today, and to lay the foundations of modern weird fiction.

  The Black Master

  1

  JULES DE GRANDIN POURED a thimbleful of Boulogne cognac into a wide-mouthed glass and passed the goblet back and forth beneath his nose with a waving motion, inhaling the rich, fruity fumes from the amber fluid. “Eh bien, young Monsieur,” he informed our visitor as he drained the liqueur with a slow, appreciative swallow and set the empty glass on the tabouret with a scarcely suppressed smack of his lips, “this is of interest. Pirate treasure, you do say? Parbleu—c’est presque irresistible. Tell us more, if you please.”

  Eric Balderson looked from the little Frenchman to me with a half-diffident, deprecating smile. “There really isn’t much to tell,” he confessed, “and I’m not at all sure I’m not the victim of a pipe-dream, after all. You knew Father pretty well, didn’t you, Dr. Trowbridge?” he turned appealingly to me.

  “Yes,” I answered, “he and I were at Amherst together. He was an extremely levelheaded sort of chap, too, not at all given to daydreaming, and—”

  “That’s what I’m pinning my faith on,” Eric broke in. “Coming from anyone but Dad the story would be too utterly fantastic to—”

  “Mordieu, yes, Monsieur,” de Grandin interrupted testily, “we do concede your so excellent père was the ultimate word in discretion and sound judgment,
but will you, for the love of kindly heaven, have the goodness to tell us all and let us judge for ourselves the value of the communication of which you speak?”

  Eric regarded him with the slow grin he inherited from his father, then continued, quite unruffled, “Dad wasn’t exactly what you’d call credulous, but he seemed to put considerable stock in the story, judging from his diary. Here it is.” From the inside pocket of his dinner-coat he produced a small book bound in red leather and handed it to me. “Read the passages I’ve marked, will you please, Doctor,” he asked. “I’m afraid I’d fill up if I tried to read Dad’s writing aloud. He—he hasn’t been gone very long, you know.”

  Adjusting my pince-nez, I hitched a bit nearer the library lamp and looked over the age-yellowed sheets covered with the fine, angular script of my old classmate:

  8 Nov. 1898—Old Robinson is going fast. When I called to see him at the Seaman’s Snug Harbor this morning I found him considerably weaker than he had been yesterday, though still in full possession of his faculties. There’s nothing specifically wrong with the old fellow, save as any worn-out bit of machinery in time gets ready for the scrap-heap. He will probably go out sometime during the night, quite likely in his sleep, a victim of having lived too long.

  “Doctor,” he said to me when I went into his room this morning, “ye’ve been mighty good to me, a poor, worn-out old hulk with never a cent to repay all yer kindness; but I’ve that here which will make yer everlastin’ fortune, providin’ ye’re brave enough to tackle it.”

  “That’s very kind of you, John,” I answered, but the old fellow was deadly serious.