The Phantom Fighter

by Seabury Quinn

Seabury Quinn. The Phantom-Fighter. Sauk City: Mycroft and Moran, 1966. First edition, first printing. Octavo. 263 pages. Publisher's binding and dust jacket.

The Phantom-Fighter is a collection of supernatural detective short stories by author Seabury Quinn. It was released in 1966 by Mycroft & Moran in an edition of 2,022 copies. The stories are about Quinn's detective Jules de Grandin and were originall published in the magazine Weird Tales.

The Phantom-Fighter contains the following tales:

"Terror on the Links"
"The Dead Hand"
"Children of Ubasti"
"The Jest of Warburg Tantavul"
"The Corpse-Master"
"The Poltergeist"
"The Wolf of Saint Bonnet"
"Restless Souls"
"The Silver Countess"
"The Doom of the House of Phipps"

Genres: Horror

263 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Best know as an American pulp author for Weird Tales, for which he wrote a series of stories about occult detective Jules de Grandin. He was the author of non-fiction legal and medical texts and editor of Casket & Sunnyside, a trade journal for mortuary jurisprudence. He also published fiction for Embalming Magazine, another mortuary periodical.

Reviews

[Bruce Nordstrom · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started to read “The Phantom Fighter,” by Seabury Quinn after reading some pretty encouraging reviews about them on Amazon, and around on the Internet. I am a fan of the old pulp fiction and I thought this was quite a find. But I was disappointed.
I read all of the collected short stories except the last two. By that time I was just tired of all the stories being just variations on a theme. The stories are set in Harrisburg, New Jersey early in the twentieth century. A murder occurs. The police are baffled, and they call in the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, who just happens to be visiting the area. And because of his knowledge of the supernatural, the good doctor is able to capture—or destroy the killer.
I found this a very receptive theme. A different monster every month. And predictable. The creature in question is always someone else who just happens to be visiting Harrisburg.
As I said, the last two stories were of no interest for me.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

These stories read like stripped-down, pulp versions William Hope Hodgson's "Carnaki, the Ghost Finder" series. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Quinn's supernatural threats reveal themselves quickly and murderously within the first few pages, and Quinn's workman-like approach somehow makes them more visceral and less romantic than any bump in the night, real or imagined, that Carnaki ever faced. The drawback of this collection is that every tale unfolds in the same formulaic manner. Eventually, it begins to feel like a Mad-lib book in which "Mummy" could just as easily be swapped for "Vampire" without missing a beat. That these were all written as a series for Weird Tales, however, forgives some of the repetition. Lovers of supernatural detectives and "monster of the week" strangeness will find much to enjoy here.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great stories, but the author makes all the secondary characters so dumb.