31 Days of Halloween - Day 30

The Complete Tales of Jules De Grandin - Volume One: The Horror on the Links by Seabury Quinn

Night Shade Books. 2017.


Seabury Quinn wrote 92 short stories and one novel starring his paranormal adventurer, Jules De Grandin, and his "Watson," Dr. Samuel Trowbridge. Originally published in Weird Tales, these adventures of the "occult Hercule Poirot" were more popular than the stories by, now, better known authors such as Robert. E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft which were being published alongside them.

The stories range from mysteries involving giant snakes, possessed apes, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, ancient goddesses, deities, and spirits, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Despite the variety of subjects, the stories tend to follow a regularly repeated formula, which probably helped maintain their popularity when the tales were spaced out at least a month apart. It was a great way for regular readers to refamiliarize themselves with these characters and their exploits, and for new readers to be swept up in them for the first time. What this means for the modern reader though is that reading them back to back is not recommended. You really need to pace these out unless your plan is to tire of them quickly.

I've been a fan of Jules De Grandin since first encountering his exploits in a group of six slim paperbacks published by the Popular Library in the late 1970s. But these represented only a small handful of the total adventures. An expensive limited hardcover collection of all the stories was briefly available at the turn of the 21st century, which, at the time, was out of my budget. Thankfully. Night Shade books is gathering all of the stories in chronological order in five beautiful hardcover volumes, the second of which should be out by the time you read this.