The Horror Chambers of Jules de Grandin

Jules de Grandin #6

by Seabury Quinn

9 • The Gods of East and West • [Jules de Grandin] • (1928) • novelette by Seabury Quinn
45 • The Poltergeist • [Jules de Grandin] • (1927) • novelette by Seabury Quinn
69 • The House of Golden Masks • [Jules de Grandin] • (1929) • novelette by Seabury Quinn
101 • The Jest of Warburg Tantavul • [Jules de Grandin] • (1934) • novelette by Seabury Quinn
133 • Stealthy Death • [Jules de Grandin] • (1930) • novelette by Seabury Quinn
177 • A Gamble in Souls • [Jules de Grandin] • (1933) • novelette by Seabury Quinn
221 • Afterword (The Horror Chambers of Jules de Grandin) • essay by Robert Weinberg

Genres: Horror, Occult Detective, Pulp

224 pages, Mass Market Paperback

Published January 1, 1977

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

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Few surprises here, if you are familiar with Quinn and his hero. De Grandin battles: 1) an Eastern spirit dwelling in a black statue, which can only be exorcised with the help of Dr. Wolf (aka "Johnny Curly Wolf"), a Dakota medicine man, 2) the stalker ghost of a lesbian vampire, 3) the Hindu master of a House of Pleasure where beautiful Caucasian girls perform at whipcrack wearing little but their irremovable golden masks, 4) the ectoplasmic emanation of an evil patriarch, thwarted by electricity and a copper wire screen, 5) a devotee of Kali seeking revenge on a Christian missionary for despoiling both the family fortune and his sister, and 6) an evil twin whose brother has been condemned to death for his sibling's crimes.

The only thing I find remarkable here is De Grandin's tolerant attitude toward brother-and-sister incest, which he exhibits in one of these tales. But, then again, he's French. Maybe that accounts for it.

This is the last of the six paperback volumes of the 1970's "Popular Library" reprint series of the occult exploits of Jules de Grandin, comprising about 1/3 of the total tales plus the only De Grandin novel, "The Devil's Bride". I hear there's a really cool hardbound, three-volume edition of "The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin," complete with colorful "Weird Tales" covers, and which is theoretically available (if you can track it down and are willing to pay $250 a volume), but . . . no thanks, I think I've had enough.

All in all, I found the series very entertaining, and I think you will too--if you like 30's pulp fiction. These stories are crammed with enough gratuitous violence, scantily clad women, and race-fear (particularly of peoples of the Far East and the Indian subcontinent) to satisfy the jaded soul of any twelve-year old white boy looking for a few cheap thrills during the days of the Great Depression. If you like Nayland Smith (Fu Manchu's arch-enemy), you'll love Jules de Grandin!

[Oliver Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining and, at times, deeply messed up

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Occult investigator Jules de Grandin was the creation of Seabury Quinn and was the hero of over ninety stories published in the early half of the last century, most of them in Weird Tales magazine. I was surprised to learn that Quinn was both the most popular and most prolific writer in the history of the magazine; I'm sure most people would guess H.P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard. (I would have said Clark Ashton Smith.) Popular Library released a half-dozen de Grandin books in the 1970s, and this is the final one in that set. The back cover bills him as "The Occult Hercule Poirot," but I think he is much more derived from Algernon Blackwood's John Silence or William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki, as well, of course, as Denis Nayland Smith and Sherlock Holmes. (De Grandin is French, and does speak in a charming and consistent patois, with frequent exclamations like "By damn sixty green monkeys!") The stories are good pulp fiction, and are much better written than most other such stories, and have a surprisingly liberal erotic content for the time. This volume contains six stories, and some of the themes covered include incest, Lesbians, and women kidnapped and forced into slavery. In one story de Grandin is aided by a Native American mystic and by Dr. Hussein Obeyid, who's identified as one of the world's ten greatest philosophers. Not all of his opponents or solutions are supernatural in nature; in one, for example, he protects a victimized woman by installing a copper screen over her window and electrifying it. His companion is Dr. Trowbridge, who narrates the stories as de Grandin's Watson. I was pleasantly surprised by both the quality of the writing and the stories themselves and will look to read more of the series.

[Darryl Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jules de Grandin was a big star in the pulps, though not as big as The Shadow. The blurb on the back cover proclaims de Grandin `the occult Hercule Poirot.' This is grandstanding on behalf of Popular Library. I owned five of their six reprints for years and finally decided to complete my collection with THE HORROR CHAMBERS OF JULES DE GRANDIN by Seabury Quinn. Popular Library published the six book series in 1976, reprinting the only de Grandin novel and 32 other stories from the original 93 published in Weird Tales. Everyone knows Weird Tales was the same pulp magazine that was also home to Conan, whose popularity paled to de Grandin's in readers' polls conducted by editor Farnsworth Wright in the thirties. The irony is Howard's Conan has weathered better than Quinn's de Grandin, who proved not to have the universally wide appeal of the Cimmerian.

The Conan premise of REH bristled with originality and few apparent influences; Seabury had a strong adventurous premise too but, in the long haul, nowhere as vibrant and exciting as Howard's vision. The clichés start piling up quickly. All the tales are narrated by Dr. Trowbridge duplicating the Sherlock Holmes fashion. Trowbridge is the bumbling sidekick raconteur of yet another fictional deductive genius, in this case the brilliant but short-statured Frenchman Jules de Grandin. Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is fastidious and fussy, de Grandin can be fussy himself but he reminds me more of the Continental Op, a man unafraid to get his hands dirty and then enjoy a good cigar and strong alcoholic beverage.

Our Frenchman is an archetype from which today's ghostbuster and occult detective derives, i.e. Harry Dresden, Morris Klaw, Harry D'Amour, et al. Jules de Grandin fought battalions of monsters in Weird Tales between Oct. 1925 and Sept. 1951. After 1939 the series slowed its steady pace of seven to ten appearances a year in Weird Tales---the final 15 stories appeared over a leisurely 12 year span.

Today the de Grandin stories read as hackneyed, unrealistic and unsuspenseful. 90 years ago I'm sure they were very breezy although not as racy or entertaining as Conan, or even Dan Turner. Seabury Quinn's occult detective maintains a certain whimsical pulp appeal, but de Grandin's reputation is larger than the quality of his stories.