Seabury Quinn
(January 1, 1889 – December 24, 1969)
Seabury Grandin Quinn was an attorney, editor, and pulp magazine author, most famous for his stories of the occult detective Jules de Grandin, published in Weird Tales. Quinn also wrote as Hans Lugar, Rob Norman, Luke Paradise, Snip Taylor and Leonard White.
His first published work was "The Law of the Movies," in The Motion Picture Magazine (December 1917). "Demons of the Night" was published in Detective Story Magazine on March 19, 1918, followed by "Was She Mad?" on March 25, 1918. Quinn's first book, Roads, was published in 1938, and then reissuied in a revised edition by Arkham House in 1948.
One collection of his stories is Demons of the Night, edited by Gene Christie.
Quinn was a contemporary of Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. Mary Elizabeth Counselman was a close friend of Quinn's and wrote a tribute to him after he died.
He was born and lived in Washington, D.C. In 1910, he graduated from the law school of the National University and admitted to the District of Columbia Bar. He served in World War I; after his Army service, he became editor of a group of trade papers in New York, where he taught medical jurisprudence.
Awards, Honors and GoHships:
Jules de Grandin[edit]
Jules de Grandin is a fictional occult detective created by Quinn for Weird Tales. He fought ghosts, werewolves, and satanists in over 90 stories, and one novel, between 1925 and 1951, assisted by Dr. Trowbridge. De Grandin and Trowbridge lived in Harrisonville, New Jersey. De Grandin, a French physician and expert on the occult, was a former member of the French Sûreté.
The longest of the de Grandin stories is the 1932 story "The Devil's Bride", strongly influenced by Robert W. Chambers' 1920 novel The Slayer of Souls.
Ten of the Jules de Grandin stories were collected in The Phantom Fighter (Mycroft & Moran, 1966). The Horror Chambers of Jules de Grandin appeared in paperback from Popular Library in 1977, edited by Robert Weinberg. Three coffee-table size hardcover volumes, The Compleat Adventures of Jules de Grandin (The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box), appeared in 2001 with a whopping $250 list price.
The Jules de Grandin Chronology.
Gender and transformation in Quinn's fiction[edit]
Quinn's posthumously published novel Alien Flesh (1977) is a sexually explicit erotic fantasy about a male Egyptologist who has a magical sex-change into a beautiful young woman. It was illustrated by SF artist Stephen Fabian and was originally slated for publication in 1951 as an expansion of a less explicit short story, "Lynne Foster is Dead!" (1938). Quinn's short story "Strange Interval" (1936) also featured a sex change and feminization. Stephanie Claudio argued in "Seabury Quinn: A Weird Tales View of Gender and Sexuality" (2015) that Quinn's work showed a view of masculinity more common in the interwar period: that what makes a man is his "inner masculine qualities" and not how he looks or dresses.
| Person | 1889—1969 |
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