Q

QUINN, SEABURY (1889–1969)

Born in the nation’s capital during America’s Gilded Age, and infamous today as the creator of the supernatural sleuth Jules de Grandin, Seabury Grandin Quinn was more than a prolific pulpsmith. He also led a varied career as a soldier during World War I, processed secret documents for military intelligence during World War II, acted as legal consultant to various chemical and mortuary concerns, and contributed extensively to the funeral trade through his skills in teaching, writing, and editing.

Quinn’s first professional fiction sale, “The Stone Image,” appeared in the May 1, 1919, issue of The Thrill Book followed by a prodigious amount of fiction throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s, with 146 tales in Weird Tales alone. Although his output slowed with the impact of the paper shortage on magazine publication during World War II, he continued to write for a variety of markets, contributing to Robert A. W. Lowndes’s Magazine of Horror in 1965.

Conventional wisdom denigrates Quinn for earning more money as a writer for Weird Tales than H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith combined by cranking out one formulaic tale after another, mindful only of word-count and the obligatory nude scene; but even the fastidious Lovecraft acknowledged in a 1936 letter to fellow fantasist Catherine L. Moore that Quinn was one of several “brilliant figures” while lamenting his “literary ruin” through the “effect of commerce on the writer” (Lovecraft 1976, 327).

It is true that works like the ambitious de Grandin novel The Devil’s Bride (1932) fail to gel and have more than their share of faults despite episodes of great imagination and the high quality of some of their intercalated narratives. Nonetheless, two collections with overlapping contents, Is the Devil a Gentleman? (1970) and Night Creatures (2003), demonstrate just how brilliant Quinn could be in top form. The former contains four stories that are not shared with its 2003 counterpart, and these are quite interesting in idea. However, they are not developed with particular finesse. For instance, in spite of the enthusiasm Quinn and Virgil Finlay expressed for “The Globe of Memories” (1937) while Finlay was creating its Weird Tales cover art, the stilted antique dialogue compromises the shifts between medieval Italy and contemporary New York it is meant to reinforce. Night Creatures more consistently represents Quinn at his best. That he treated lycanthropy with rare sympathy and an unusual variety of approaches is evinced by the first of its six unshared stories, the simultaneously moving and unnerving “The Phantom Farmhouse” (1923)—filmed as part of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery in 1971—and the contrast it presents with the malevolent lycanthrope engaged in a battle of wits with the doughty Jules de Grandin in “The Thing in the Fog” (1933) a decade later. “Mortmain” (1940) revolves around issues the author would have encountered under less perilous circumstances while offering advice about mortuary law. Sympathy for the victims of social injustice appears repeatedly in his work and manifests here in two quite different stories from 1941, “There Are Such Things” and “Two Shall Be Born.” Particularly impressive among the less familiar stories is “The Golden Spider” (1940), a supernatural tour de force in a medieval French setting reminiscent of Clark Ashton Smith’s Averoigne, with mythic undertones and a measure of sweetness that brings it closer to the fairy tale. If, when compared to the rest of these, “The Gentle Werewolf” (1940) is enjoyable but unremarkable in its convoluted plot and its transplantation of common fairytale motifs to a thirteenth-century Asian setting, the other four among the shared stories show Quinn adept at weaving plot and character into a setting that seems natural to both. “Glamour” (1939) is a superior specimen of the type of rural supernaturalism best known today from Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936) and the work of Quinn’s friend Manly Wade Wellman. “Uncanonized” (1939) tells the love story of a suicide turned werewolf, with an odd ecclesiastical twist again worthy of Averoigne. “Is the Devil a Gentleman?” (1942) revolves around the moral dilemma of accepting supernatural aid from dubious forces or submitting to persecution and death from the superstitions of colonial New England. Another paradox faces attendees at the “Masked Ball” (1947), who discover that the dead fear the living at least as intensely as the living fear them.

It is this yoking of the conventional with surprising ethical or mythical twists that makes Quinn’s best work a continued pleasure to read, so that even a novella as sentimental as the 1938 Christmas trilogy Roads entertains precisely because the legend he creates to account for the figure of Santa Claus through the unusual mixture of Norse mythology with court intrigue and the life of Christ from infancy to crucifixion is handled with such conviction.

The ninety-three case studies of Jules de Grandin present an interesting, if not always entirely successful, succession of crime stories and supernatural adventures, while also offering a fascinating view of American society during the years in which they were written. The predominant setting, Harrisonville and its environs, encompasses aspects of the idyllic small town and the bright, cold city of the hard-boiled school; the dark, superstitious forests of the Old World and a wide assortment of immigrant peoples and supernatural forces from every portion of Europe and Asia. As a result the tone of the tales is not as uniform as Quinn’s detractors claim. Tales such as “The Devil People” (1929) have a gritty, hard-boiled quality. Others, such as “The House of Three Corpses” (1939), mix elements of traditional and hard-boiled detection with a strong dose of humor. “Ancient Fires” (1926) has a dreamlike quality, as does “Pledged to the Dead” (1937).

Many of the tales are also interesting ethically. In “The Isle of Missing Ships” (1926) and “Stealthy Death” (1930) hypocritical missionaries preying on the wealth and women of the foreign peoples they have been sent to assist precipitate horrendous events off the coast of Malaysia and present-day Harrisonville. The history behind the murders in the latter tale is even more horrible than the murders themselves. In “The Devil’s Rosary” (1929), not only is the protagonist to blame for the assassinations launched against his family, but de Grandin sympathizes with the “villains” sufficiently to return their lost treasure to them and set the latest would-be assassin free. Sometimes Quinn repeats situations to explore a theme from more than one perspective, as when he deals sympathetically with the supplantation of personality in “Ancient Fires” and “A Gamble in Souls” (1933), but handles it with horror in “Trespassing Souls” (1929) and “The Brain-Thief” (1930), often revealing what is happening not only from the victims’ viewpoint, but from the miscreant’s viewpoint as well. The creation of de Grandin allowed Quinn to rail against the puritans, hypocrites, bigots, bullies, and snobs in a world in which he was outwardly comfortable, defending the rights of the individual regardless of their social status, race, or sins. Flying against convention, de Grandin has no more concern about burying a black woman in a white cemetery or an unshriven strumpet whose body had been the altar for the Black Mass in consecrated ground than he has in slitting the throat of a man who treated him treacherously or spilling down the stairs to his death an old man he knows will otherwise get away with murder.

Another remarkable feature of de Grandin’s adventures is Quinn’s talent for creating tableaux described with such care that they live in the memory long afterward. They are too numerous to list here, but the girl enwrapped and enraptured by the deadly embrace of a titanic snake in “The Tenants of Broussac” (1926), the butchering of the shipwrecked survivors in “The Isle of Missing Ships” (1926), the mummy standing silently in the room of death with its lips and staff smeared with blood in “The Grinning Mummy” (1926), the flight from death by supernatural winds along the Himalayas in “The Devil’s Rosary” (1929), the ghost jeering through the nursery skylight in “The Jest of Warburg Tantavul” (1943), Amelie awaiting her lover beside her lonely tomb in “Pledged to the Dead” (1937), the statue’s final appearance in the courtyard in “Stoneman’s Memorial” (1942), and the mummy tracking its prey by sound alone in “The Man in Crescent Terrace” (1946) are all worthy examples that give the lie to any notion that the de Grandin corpus, let alone Quinn’s work as a whole, is uniformly bland or carelessly written.

Jim Rockhill

See also: Mummies; Occult Detectives; Pulp Horror; Weird Tales.

Further Reading

Hoppenstand, Gary. 2013. “Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin: The Supernatural Sleuth in Weird Tales.” In Critical Insights: Pulp Fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, edited by Gary Hoppenstand, 166–178. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press.

Lovecraft, H. P. 1976. Selected Letters, Vol. V: 1934–1937. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

Quinn, Seabury. 1966. “By Way of Explanation.” In The Phantom Fighter. Sauk City, WI: Mycroft & Moran. Reprinted in The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin, Volume 1 by Seabury Quinn, xxi. Shelburne, Ontario: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box.

Quinn, Seabury, Jr. 2001. “My Father and I.” In The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin, Volume 2 by Seabury Quinn, v. Shelburne, Ontario: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box.

Ruber, Peter, and Joseph Wrzos. 2003. “Introduction.” In Night Creatures by Seabury Quinn, ix–xiii. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press.

Weinberg, Robert W. 2001. “My Life with Jules de Grandin.” In The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin, Volume 1 by Seabury Quinn, ix–xi. Shelburne, Ontario: Battered Silicon Dispatch Box.

QUIROGA, HORACIO (1878–1937)

Horacio Quiroga was a Uruguayan author who pioneered a breed of magical realism that would flower in Latin American fiction in the late twentieth century. An avid reader of Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant, Quiroga was drawn to literature that explored humanity’s dark unconscious, a landscape that took form for him in the tropical rainforests of Argentina, where he briefly operated a failing plantation. His Jungle Tales (1918), crafted in imitation of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894), featured a magical world of human-animal communication, a realm of dreamy fantasy whose obverse, darker side were the stories gathered in Tales of Love, Madness, and Death (1917). Deeply indebted to Poe, these were strikingly brutal and hallucinatory explorations of psychic extremity and graphic physical horror. “The Feather Pillow,” for example, relates the tale of a vampiric parasite inhabiting the eponymous object, which slowly drains the life from a beautiful young woman, while “The Decapitated Chicken” is a conte cruel (a tale of cynicism and cruelty) in which a degenerate family is riven by an act of grisly violence.

This latter story was included, along with numerous others from the author’s brief but prolific career, in a retrospective volume of English translations, The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories (1976). Not included in this collection is the 1927 tale “The Vampire,” a pioneering work about the predatory nature of cinema and its seeming ability to revivify the dead, which has spawned a minor tradition of what might be called “celluloid horror” stories (as in, for example, the works gathered in David J. Schow’s 1988 anthology Silver Scream). The best compilation of Quiroga’s horror-inflected tales is the Spanish-language collection Cunetos de Horror, published in 2012 by Ediciones Traspiés in Grenada, Spain.

Quiroga’s two novels, History of a Troubled Love (1908) and Past Love (1929), while less overtly fantastic, explore themes of obsessive desire in a way that continued his fascination with morbid psychology, but it is his short fiction that has contributed most to the genre. Grim and pitiless, yet with a streak of macabre irony, his horror stories illuminate a world devoid of beauty and hope, yet whose denizens, driven by perverse obsessions, refuse to recognize that they are damned. Along with fellow modernist Kafka, he contributed to the development of an absurdist strain of modern horror fiction, counterpoised, in its matter-of-fact grotesquery, with the more extravagant cosmic horrors of the Lovecraft school. A haunted and sickly man, Quiroga committed suicide in 1937.

Rob Latham

See also: Body Horror; The Grotesque; de Maupassant, Guy; Kafka, Franz; Lovecraftian Horror; Poe, Edgar Allan; Surrealism.