INTRODUCTION, by Alexander Kreitner

Welcome to E. Hoffmann Price’s Pierre d’Artois: Occult Detective & Associates MEGAPACK®! Wildside Press, in association with Mr. Price’s heirs, are dedicated to making the extensive body of work of this pulpsmith extraordinaire accessible once again to the public through our line of MEGAPACK® collections.

Edgar Hoffman Price (July 3, 1898–June 18, 1988) was a prolific pulp writer who got his start writing for Weird Tales and became a peripheral member of the Lovecraft Circle of weird fiction writers. He served in the military during World War I and his time overseas and love of adventure and martial feats flavored his later pulp writings; an interest that was not at all hypothetical as his life story can attest. He started out as a hobbyist, selling two stories to Weird Tales in 1924, but after leaving his job at the Union Carbide Corporation in 1932, Price became a professional “fictioneer” as he called it, writing extensively for the pulps until they began to fold in the early 1950s. His biggest claim to fame was being the only individual who personally met the “triumvirate” of Weird Tales authors: H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith, all of whom he corresponded with for many years.

This collection contains all the stories featuring Price’s swashbuckling, French occult detective Pierre d’Artois, as well as the adventures of Glenn Farrell, a character who is a compatriot of d’Artois. Price patterned his d’Artois character after a fencing instructor he knew (real name withheld to avoid comparisons to Price’s creation). Sadly, because Pierre d’Artois and Jules de Grandin—Seabury Quinn’s own French occult detective—premiered in Weird Tales at almost the same time, many came to believe that Price had copied Quinn’s character. In order to avoid that impression, Price withdrew his character after only nine stories were published. As an interesting side note, the d’Artois story “Lord of the Fourth Axis” (not included here due to copyright issues) inspired Price’s fourth-dimensional ideas that went into his initial draft of what became his collaboration with Lovecraft, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (available in The 11th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: E. Hoffmann Price). Also of note, this package contains the story “One Arabian Night,” wherein d’Artois & Farrell enter another of Price’s series milieu, the world of Ismeddin (if you enjoy that story, check out E. Hoffmann Price’s Fables of Ismeddin MEGAPACK® for more of the series.)

It would be fair to say that Price’s character Glenn Farrell is a fictional stand-in for Price himself: a world-wise, rough-and-tumble lover of exotic women. He also visits many of the foreign lands that Price was so fascinated with and, in the case of Bayonne, France (where d’Artois lives), Price actually served there in the military (along with a brief stint in the Phillipines, another of Price’s favorite locales). Many of Price’s later detective, adventure, and “spicy pulp” heroes bear a striking resemblance to Farrell and take place in similar locales and this pulp-friendly personality is what kept Price in business for so many years, eventually publishing—by his own calculations—over 500 stories for various pulp and slick magazines. Wildside Press is proud to make his work available again to readers. Due to the inaccessibility of much of Price’s work (he kept no manuscript archive and so we must resort to those original publication copies we can track down) we have decided to package the material into themed Megapacks, highlighting specific genres he worked in. Later volumes will be released as we gather further material (any collectors interested in aiding our endeavors by supplying photocopies from their collections are urged to contact Wildside through our website: http://wildsidepress.com/).

We hope you enjoy these occult adventures. Here is a list of other collections of Price’s work in the MEGAPACK® series (some already available, others out shortly):

E. Hoffmann Price’s Two-Fisted Detective MEGAPACK®

E. Hoffmann Price’s War And Western Action MEGAPACK®

E. Hoffmann Price’s Exotic Adventures MEGAPACK®

The 11th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: E. Hoffmann Price

E. Hoffmann Price’s Fables of Ismeddin MEGAPACK®

E. Hoffmann Price’s Pierre d’Artois: Occult Detective & Associates MEGAPACK®

The E. Hoffmann Price Spicy-Adventure MEGAPACK®