Weird Tales Oct. 1925 |
Also in 1925, a new writer appeared in the
Unique Magazine: Robert E.
Howard’s “Spear and Fang” appeared in the July
issue, which it shared with one of Quinn’s “Servants of Satan” articles; so did
“In the Forest of Villefere” which appeared in the August Weird Tales. The two men never met, nor is there any record of
their correspondence, yet it was impossible for them not to have noticed and
formed an opinion of one another. Quinn, writing from Brooklyn, and Howard,
writing from Cross Plains, were from that moment on in constant, if polite
competition—for sales, for the cover spot, and for first place among the
affections of Weird Tales readers.
Yet Quinn would also, in many ways, be a formative influence on Howard.
Lovecraft, who was one of the few to correspond with both men, compared them
once:
Weird Tales July 1925 |
It is, therefore, piquant & enjoyable to exchange ideas with Two-Gun or to read his stories. He is of about the same intelligence as Seabury Quinn—but Yuggoth, what a difference! (LRB 256-257)
Seabury Quinn was born in Washington, D.C. in
1889, attended Washington National University, and had graduated with a degree
in law. He practiced law only for a short time, and joined the army for World
War I. After his discharge he returned to practicing law and handled a libel
case involving mortuary jurisprudence. He won the case, and they took him on as
legal advisor—and so he got his start for The
Casket, a trade journal for morticians. Quinn was given progressively more
work with The Casket until he became
its managing editor; and in 1921 Quinn married his first wife, Mary Helen
Molster. In January 1925, The Casket merged
with the mortuary journal Sunnyside, and Quinn became editor of the combined
magazine The Casket & Sunnyside,
which job necessitated moving to New York. (Schwartz & Weisinger 1-2, Ruber
336, Ruber & Wyrzos ix)
Seabury Quinn (1889-1969) |
One evening in the spring
of 1925, I was in that state that every writer knows and dreads; a story was
due my publisher, and there didn’t seem to be a plot in the world. Accordingly,
with nothing particular in mind, I picked up my pen and literally making it up
as I went along—wrote the first story [...] As with The Horror on the Links, so with all other adventures of de
Grandin. (CA 1.xxi)
Quinn may have been fudging a little; the
French occult detective with his more incredulous counterpart Dr. Samuel
Trowbridge probably owes something to Agatha Christie and her Belgian
investigator Hercule Poirot and companion Arthur Hastings, who first appeared
in The Murder on the Links (1923),
but both were patently working in the same mold as Arthur Conan Doyle’s Watson
& Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. Whatever the case, “The
Horror on the Links” was quickly followed by “The Tenants of Broussac” (WT Dec 1925) and “The Isle of Missing Ships”
(WT Feb 1926)...and a fan letter in
“The Eyrie”:
Robert E. Howard, of
Cross Plains, Texas, writes concerning Mr. Quinn’s stories of Jules de Grandin:
“These are sheer masterpieces. The little Frenchman is one of those characters
who live in fiction. I look forward with pleasurable anticipation to further
meetings with him.” (CL 1.75)
Quinn was a regular with Weird Tales over the next few years, and de Grandin’s adventures in
its pages were many, and received considerable praise. Howard was still finding
his way with the magazine, his stories and poems published sporadically, but
beginning in 1929 he began to make sales more regularly, and “The Eyrie” took
notice of series characters like Solomon Kane and King Kull:
I think a book of Seabury
Quinn's stories would go over big [...] also Otis Adelbert Kline, Lovecraft and
Howard. Why can't we have their best stores in book form? (WT Feb 1929)
Seabury Quinn, Gaston
Leroux and Robert E. Howard certainly wield charmed and facile pens. (WT Mar 1930)
Such stories as those
about Jules de Grandin, King Kull, the Overlord of Cornwall and the Werewolf of
Ponkert are always sure to hit the mark. (WT
Jan 1931)
Bread lines during The Great Depression |
I’ve a hunch they’ll get
back where they were in 1928-9, that your drawings will finally bring you what
they’re worth, and that I’ll once more enjoy the rate they used to pay me---
and I did enjoy it, too, don’t let ‘em tell you different. It was rather
something to be able to set your watch by the regularity with which the checks
arrived, and to be able to say when you saw an Oriental rug, a bit of Georgian
mahogany or a piece of Victorian silver, “Wrapt it up!” (Quinn 1974, 29)
However, there are signs that favoritism
aside, Quinn managed his affairs with some foresight. H. P. Lovecraft remarked:
Wright surely is a
provoking cuss—& I don't feel any kindlier toward him since learning that
he pays Seabury Quinn for reprints
(which he isn't legally compelled to do) without extending a similar mark of
regard to Grandpa! He obviously exercises favouritism toward those (like Quinn
& Kline) from whom he has reason to expect much catchily popular material.
(ES 1.397)
“Weird Tales Reprints” were a long-running
feature of the pulp magazine, usually some classical or foreign language weird
story, but in January 1929 editor Farnworth Wright began reprinting stories
from Weird Tales earlier issues,
including Quinn’s “The Phantom Farmhouse” (rpt. WT Mar 1929). (Silverberg 32) Most pulps bought all the rights to a
story, which made reprinting old stories an attractive option from an
economical point of view; but Quinn appears to have had the foresight to sell
“first serial rights only”—meaning if Wright wanted to reprint a Quinn story,
he’d have to pay for it; Howard wouldn’t become quite as savvy about the rights
he was selling until about 1933 (CL 3.57-58).
Lovecraft acknowledged this:
But possibly astute
Sequin did reserve his rights from the first—being an attorney, he naturally
would have his eyes open for such points. (ES 1.400)
H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard would
begin their correspondence in 1930, and through Lovecraft the Texan was put in
contact with many in the Weird Tales
circle, discussed new issues of their “old standby” as it came out, and shared
gossip. One of Lovecraft and Howard’s mutual correspondents was fellow pulpster
Wilfred Blanch Talman; Howard wrote to Talman in July 1931:
I notice you mention having
met Quinn, the king-favorite of Weird
Tale fans. I’d be interested in your impressions of him; for some unknown
reason, I’ve always pictured him as a tall, powerfully built man with a leonine
head and a full beard. (CL 2.220)
Talman had met Quinn in March of 1931 (ES 1.325-236), and described him to
Howard, to which the Texan replied: “I’m very interested in your account of
Quinn. He must be a fascinating character.” (CL 2.250) While we don’t have Talman’s description of Seabury Quinn,
Howard did write to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith about Talman:
He’s met Quinn, (alias
Jules de Grandin) and says he’s a courteous gent of middle age, with a Southern
accent. He says Quinn is independent and knows how to twist the editors. Says
he recently turned down a big contract from Street & Smith, reported valued
at $10,000. A gent can afford to be independent when he already has jack. (CL 2.246)
Lovecraft also met Quinn in July 1931 (ES 1.350-351), which might fill out the
sketch:
I met Quinn twice
during my stay in N Y, & find him exceedingly intelligent & likeable.
He is 44 years old, but looks rather less than that. Increasingly stocky, dark,
& with a closely clipped moustache. He is first of all a shrewd business
man, & freely affirms that he manufactures hokum to order for market
demands—in contrast to the artist, who seeks sincere expression as the result
of an obscure inward necessity. (LJS 27)
Lovecraft’s take on Quinn was biased by his
own sensibilities; Howard, while not neglecting the aesthetics of his work, was
more pragmatic. Still, it is clear that the Texan studied Quinn’s stories, as
he wrote in a letter to Lovecraft dated 9 Aug 1932:
Their capacity for
grisly details seems unlimited, when the cruelty is the torturing of some naked
girl, such as Quinn’s stories abound in—no reflection intended on Quinn; he
knows what they want and gives it to them. The torture of a naked writhing
wretch, utterly helpless—and especially when of the feminine sex amid
voluptuous surroundings—seems to excite keen pleasure in some people who have a
distaste for wholesale butchery in the heat and fury of a battlefield. (CL 2.411, MF 1.353)
Lovecraft replied:
As for the scenes of
individual torture such as appear in the work of Quinn, Capt. Meek, and other
pulp idols—I think most of them are in rather doubtful taste. (MF 1.372)
Weird Tales July 1926 |
Quinn’s work was all
right but I liked Howard’s much better. Quinn was smart, though. He realized
immediately that Wright was having me do a nude for every cover. So he made
sure that each de Grandin story had at least one sequence where the heroine
shed all her clothes. Wright then picked Quinn’s stories to be the cover story.
(Korshak & Spurlock 19)
In stories like “The Black Stone” (WT Nov 1931), Howard had begun to
include more scenes of naked women, and sometimes flagellation. Whether this
was directly in imitation of or inspired by Quinn’s success at using these
elements is difficult to say; but the it seems to have worked for stories like
“Black Colossus” (WT Jun 1933), “The
Slithering Shadow” (WT Sep 1933), “A
Witch Shall Be Born” (WT Dec 1934),
and “Red Nails” (WT Jul 1936), among
others, and even Lovecraft noted in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith:
He certainly is a pip for
consistency—to howl about excessive eroticism after deliberately adopting a
policy of ha’penny satyr-tickling in his damn cover-designs …. A policy which
amusingly causes his more subservient writers (not excluding the illustrious
Quinn &—at times—even the sanguinary Two-Gun Bob) to go miles out of their
way to drag in a costumeless wench! (DS
440-441)
Despite this gentle admonishment, even as he
recognized that the Texan was writing to make sales, just as Quinn was,
Lovecraft assured Howard that:
Your stories are really
vastly different from the pallid hack work of systematically mercenary writers
like Otis Adelbert Kline, Hugh B. Cave, the later Seabury Quinn, and (alas!)
the future E. Hoffmann Price if he doesn't want his step and cling to his old
non-professional standards. (MF2.560)
Howard, for his part, continued to consider
Quinn one of the top writers at Weird
Tales, as he mentioned in a letter in “The Eyrie” published in the March
1932 issue:
Yes, I consider the
current magazine uniformly fine, of an excellence surprizing considering the
fact that neither Lovecraft, Quinn, Hamilton, Whitehead, Kline nor Price was represented.
(CL2.302)
Quinn and his creation Jules de Grandin had
become something of a standard among Weird
Tales readers, even as the Necronomicon
or Conan the Cimmerian would become, and Howard privately worked de Grandin
into a verse of his “Weird Ballad,” included in an April 1932 letter to Tevis
Clyde Smith:
The bale-fire burned, and
the pot smoked blue,
—Eerily wind, sing eerily—
And Jules de Grandin rose
from the brew.
And the
wind was blowing eerily.
Eerily,
eerily, blow, wind, blow,
With a
heave and hey, so eerily. (CL2.324)
Oriental Stories Vol 1. No. 2 Dec. 1930 - Jan. 1931 |
Economic difficulties continued, however.
Normally, Weird Tales paid upon
publication, but beginning in late 1932 checks were delayed—and in 1933, due to
a bank holiday, occasionally bounced. The editor continued to accept stories
for publication, albeit at reduced rates (for most authors) and with gradually
increasing delays in payment, so that regulars like August Derleth, Clark
Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard began to be owed considerable amounts of
money, which were sometimes paid off in installments and half-payments. (Connor
166-167) By 1935, Weird Tales owed
Howard over $800. Scott Connor reports:
It is rumored that
Seabury Quinn [...] boasted that he always received his money up front,
although in the opinion of Weird Tales historian
Robert Weinberg this may have been just so much hot air. (Connor 169)
Up to 1933 Howard and Quinn did not directly
compete for any pulp markets besides Weird
Tales. Quinn’s sales from 1925 on outside WT were predominantly to Real
Detective Tales and Mystery Stories, Grit Magazine, Detective Book Magazine, and
Detective Classics, while Howard was
selling mostly to Action Stories, Fight
Stories, Oriental Stories, Sports Story, and Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror. Then with the January 1933
issue Oriental Stories became The Magic Carpet Magazine—and Howard and
Quinn found themselves competing in a second market. The retitled magazine
would only last for five issues, but Quinn managed to land stories and
novelettes in four of them; Howard only managed two. Yet the fan response for
both men was generally positive, and several times both men or their creations
were mentioned in the same breath:
The stories are of a high
caliber, and with four Aces of WEIRD TALES represented in Howard, Quinn, Kline
and Smith, the issue is very good.
(WT Jan 1933)
(WT Jan 1933)
I vote first place to
Seabury Quinn for the superb Jules de Grandin tale, The Door to Yesterday. Second place, and a close to first, goes to
Robert Howard for The Phoenix on the
Sword. [...] Always like any of Robert E. Howard's or Seabury Quinn's
stories very much, but don't care for those 'space' stories…
(WT Feb 1933)
If you will just put
ADDLEBRAIN and a few more hopeless nuts to work laying bricks or digging
ditches, and publish one more issue of all-weird stories, including stories by
Clark Ashton Smith, Seabury Quinn, Robert E. Howard, and Paul Ernst, I think
the opinion we fellers of the South formerly had of your magazine will rise to
the top again. (WT May 1933)
Let me hand a great big
orchid or something of the sort to Robert E. Howard and Seabury Quinn.
(WT Aug 1933)
Solomon Kane, next to
Jules De Grandin, is my favorite character in WEIRD TALES. (WT Oct 1933)
Church orchids, as Walter
Winchell would say, to Seabury Quinn for his mystery tale, The Bride of the God, which in my opinion is the best story in the
July issue. But Howard's The Lion of
Tiberias is a close second, and is the best story from the pen of this
great writer that I have ever read.
(The Magic Carpet Magazine Oct 1933)
I have an insatiable
appetite for Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan the Cimmerian. The Slithering Shadow was a gem. May I
also toss an orchid to Seabury Quinn for his inimitable, lovable Jules de
Grandin? There's a sentient fiction-character, if ever there was one. (WT Nov 1933)
Howard and Quinn never shared space in
anthology during their lifetimes, though this was more by chance than a mark of
competition. Both saw reprints in the Not
At Night series edited by Christine Campbell Thompson, but never at the
same time. Yet they might well have done so. Robert E. Howard wrote to
Lovecraft in August 1931:
By the way, E. Hoffmann
Price writes me that he and Mashburn are attempting to promote a sort of
anthology of weird tales — or rather a collection of ten selected stories,
which includes your “Pickman’s Model” and my “Kings of the Night.” I’m all for
it, myself. Have they mentioned anything about it to you? I think it would be
great. (CL 2.240)
“Mashburn” would be Wallace Kirkpatrick
(“Kirk”) Mashburn, a fellow Weird Tales writer
who was a regular friend of Price’s in New Orleans. Lovecraft spread the news:
As to anthologies—Howard
tells me that E. Hoffmann Price & W. K. Mashburn are planning in anthology
which will include my “Pickman’s Model”—though they haven’t said anything to me
about it. (ES 1.381)
No further news of the
Price-Mashburn anthology [...] (ES 1.384)
Did I mention, by the
way, that (according to Robert E. Howard) a small weird anthology is
contemplated by two veteran W.T. contributors—E. Hoffmann Price & W. K.
Mashburn. (DS 324)
Unfortunately, Howard later replied that the
anthology was sidelined:
Price said in his last
letter that he and Mashburn had not had an opportunity to go further into the
business of getting the anthology going, but that they intended to see about it
eventually. (CL 2.269)
The idea was apparently picked up again in
early 1932, as Howard mentions it in a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith:
I’ve drifted into
correspondence with some more Weird Tailors (as Lovecraft calls them) and
Mashburn tells me that there seems to be a good chance of getting that weird
anthology published. I hope so, ye gods. (CL 2.315)
Yet the matter seemed to stutter out again.
Two letters dated February and March 1933 survive from Howard to August
Lenniger, who was Price’s agent, concerning copyrights for reprints to one of
his Weird Tales stories for an
anthology, but nothing happens. (CL 3.14,
41) The sticking point, at least according to Price, was Seabury Quinn:
We forgot to discuss that
anthology which was to include stories by Quinn, Howard, Mashburn, Kline,
Whitehead, and others. Probably against his better judgment, and to humor a
client who might some day be profitable, my agent had accepted my proposal on
an anthology of weird fiction. After reading the scripts, he decided that the
Quinn and the Whitehead selections should be cut, as they went to much greater
wordage than the stories warranted. Whitehead readily conceded that there was
rarely a story which wouldn't be improved by cutting. Quinn, like Lovecraft,
would not change as much as a comma, or delete even a word. The anthology never
got into orbit. (BOD 156-157)
Almost certainly, it was
prior to this June-July 1933 meeting that Quinn and I had corresponded
concerning an anthology of weird stories---one of his, one by HPL, one by
Robert E. Howard. Never got into orbit. My agent suggested some of the selected
stories should be cut. Seabury Quinn, like H. P. Lovecraft, would no more cut a
word than he'd chop off his own head. (Price 1969, 66)
This was too bad, as at least one Weird Tales fan would have clamored for
such a volume:
I would buy a Quinn or
Howard book 'on faith,' feeling that I was going to get my money's worth in
pure enjoyment when I got around to the reading of it.
(WT Dec 1934)
While they had been in genteel companionship
(and competition) in the pages of Weird
Tales and The Magic Carpet Magazine
for nine years, public sentiment between Seabury Quinn and Robert E. Howard was
almost nil: a couple of comments of appreciation by Howard in “The Eyrie” (CL 1.75, 2.302) paid compliment to Quinn
as the magazine’s favorite, all the rest was private. Much of Quinn’s
correspondence is lost to us, so we do not know what his private feelings were
about Howard at this point, though he could hardly have missed the Texan’s
work, which vied with his own so often for both the fan’s favorite in the issue
and the coveted cover. Quinn’s first public comment on Howard was thus a high
one, published in the June 1934 issue of Fantasy
Magazine, in “Seabury Quinn: Famous Creator of Jules de Grandin”:
Robert E. Howard is his
favorite fantasy writer. He terms his work "wonderful - best man writing
for WEIRD TALES." (Schwartz & Weisinger 6)
The title of the article spoke directly to the
source of Quinn’s fame; whatever the merit to his other stories, he was best
known as the creator of Jules de Grandin. Likewise, readers identified Robert
E. Howard with his own series characters; in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, Conan and de Grandin were
lauded repeatedly (alongside E. Hoffmann Price’s Pierre d’Artois and C. L.
Moore’s Northwest Smith):
With each succeeding tale
Howard becomes better; his unique character, Conan, is the greatest brain-child
yet produced in weird fiction, even overshadowing Moore's Northwest Smith and
Quinn's dynamic little Frenchman, Jules de Grandin. [...] We also need the
services of Jules de Grandin, Pierre d'Artois and Conan the Cimmerian to stand
at all portals leading to the editor's desk and mow down all authors who come
in with stories for WT that are not weird....Here's to you for those fine
serials we have had this year, the dandy covers (except for the March), the
length of said serials (remember, no more than four installments), and for
Northwest, Jules, Conan, Pierre, and a host of others. [...] for the lovable
personality of de Grandin by Quinn; for the thrilling old barbarian Conan of
Howard [...] all those old and new writers of the genuine weird story as found
only in your magazine, WEIRD TALES.
WT "The Devil in Iron" (Conan the Cimmerian) |
WT "The Curse of the House of Phipps" (Jules de Grandin) |
I read Seabury Quinn's
pages of brisk, cheerful, up-to-date conversation (when I stop to read them at
all) with a polite yawn & an academic admiration of his cleverness in
handling the conventional technique of fiction. Of any real sense of weirdness
there is none--because nothing in the style has served to build up any
emotional reparation for the marvels or horrors so glibly stuck in toward the
end or prosaically catalogued throughout the text. Everything is sprightly,
mechanical, & puppet-like, & nothing reaches that inner region of
perception & response which gives birth to the true sense of fear. (LCM 253-254)
Howard had greater difficulty finding a
character that would “stick.” Tales with a new character would sell a couple
stories, then face rejection—in Weird
Tales he ran through the problem with Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and King
Kull of Atlantis before landing on what would become his most successful Weird Tales character, Conan the
Cimmerian—and, in fact “The Phoenix on the Sword” began its life in manuscript
as a King Kull story. Between December 1932 (“The Phoenix on the Sword”) and
October 1936 (the final part of “Red Nails”), Howard had managed to publish 17
Conan tales; in the same period, Weird
Tales published only 14 Jules de Grandin novelettes, though both men had
much other work published in other pulps. Aside from length, and possibly
playing up a nude scene in a bid for the cover, the Conan stories were
structured completely differently. The Cimmerian was a roamer, who wandered
over a prehistoric setting which Howard would develop through careful
world-building, which culminated in the long essay “The Hyborian Age”; the
adventures took place at different periods in Conan’s life, and were not
composed or published in any kind of chronological order; the stories had no
regular supporting characters.
One aspect that both sets of stories had in
common was variety: while Quinn stuck to his formula and Howard worked his own
approach, both series exhibited a considerable variation in genre. Howard took
advantage of the scale of Conan’s wanderings to set weird tales in exotic
settings: “The Pool of the Black One” (Oct 1933) and “Queen of the Black Coast”
(May 1934) are pirate stories, “The People of the Black Circle” (Sep-Nov 1934)
is an Oriental adventure, “Beyond the Black River” (May-Jun 1935) a frontier
story with Picts in place of Native Americans, “The God in the Bowl”
(unpublished during Howard’s lifetime) a police procedural. Quinn, sticking
with Harrisonville as the center of activity, was more limited in scope—but not
by much. Many of de Grandin’s adventures were, strictly speaking, not stories
of occult detection: they were shudder pulp and weird crime stories like “The
House of Horror” (Jul 1926) and “The House of the Golden Masks” (Jun 1929),
yellow peril tales such as “The Chosen of Vishnu” (Aug 1933), and weird romance
stories including “Ancient Fires”(Sep 1926); the infamous “The Jest of Arburg
Tantuval” (Sep 1934) is essentially a mystery story interrupted by a minor
haunting.
Robert E. Howard (1906 - 1936) |
What is more—of all the
repeatedly-used stock characters of the W T bunch—Jules de Grandin & so
on—it is certain that Conan, hate him as you will, has the most aesthetic
justification. He is the least wooden & artificial of all—that is, he
reflects more of his creator's actual feelings & psychology than any other.
De Grandin is merely a puppet moulded according to cheap popular demand—he
represents nothing of Quinn. But in the moods & reactions & habits of
Conan we can clearly trace the sincere emotions & aspirations &
perspectives of Howard. De Grandin always acts as a synthetic marionette, but
Conan often acts as a living & distinctive human being. [...] Actually, as
a creator of vigorously self-expressive & more or less sincere &
spontaneous fiction of a certain sort, Howard undeniably stands higher than
such absolutely [text erased] puppet-showmen & herd-caterers as Edmond
Hamilton, Quinn, Kline, & the latter-day Price. (LRB 119)
Part of the “cheap popular demand” of the de
Grandin tales was no doubt due to Quinn often resorting to familiar weird threats:
vampires, werewolves, ghosts, ancient curses, mummies, cults (Satanic or Voodoo
for preference), and witchcraft, though he often tried to resolve them in some
novel way: de Grandin was probably the first phantom fighter to defeat a ghost
with a vacuum cleaner, for example (“Red Gauntlets of Czerni” Dec 1933).
Howard’s encounters were not always more original (over half of the Conan tales
published in his lifetime involve an evil wizard or witch), but they were often
weirder; Jules de Grandin could give
sympathy to a vampire (“Restless Souls” Oct 1928), but only Conan could give
vengeance for the broken alien Yag-Kosha (“The Tower of the Elephant” Mar
1933). Like Quinn, when dealing with a “classic” Universal Monster, Howard too liked to deviate from established
methods—no stake or garlic when Conan encountered the vampire Akivasha in “The
Hour of the Dragon,” for example, nor in the non-Conan story “The Horror from
the Mound” (May 1932).
Several of Howard’s stories contain
similarities to some of Quinn’s tales, especially outside the Conan stories.
This doesn’t seem to be a direct case of borrowing ideas or images so much as
it was that both men (and many more Weird
Tales and Strange Tales writers
besides) were drawing on common source material: the multi-cultural Satanic
cults and reference to the Yazidi in Quinn’s “The Devil’s Bride” and Howard’s
“Three-Bladed Doom” and “The Brazen Peacock” (unpublished during Howard’s
lifetime) both appear to draw on Robert W. Chamber’s novel The Slayer of Souls (1920) and William Seabrook’s Adventures in Arabia (1926), for
example. Another specific image was the “Dance of the Cobras” Quinn’s “The
Chosen of Vishnu” (Aug 1933) and in Howard’s “Shadows in Zamboula” (Nov 1935).
The closest that Howard ever came to Quinn’s “de Grandin formula” was perhaps
in “The Haunter of the Ring” (Jun 1934)—an occult detective tale starring
Kirowan & O’Donnell, and which would tie in with “The Phoenix on the
Sword.”
It was through tie-ins—and worldbuilding in
general—where Quinn and Howard differed most substantially. Like H. P.
Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, Howard would tie his own stories together in
various ways: “The Hyborian Age” essay connected the Kull and Conan stories,
Kull appeared in the crossover tale “Kings of the Night” (Nov 1930) with Bran
Mak Morn, whose adventure “Worms of the Earth” (Nov 1932) contained referenced
to H. P. Lovecraft’s Mythos stories. Howard’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten and “Little People” formed a connective
tissue through many of his horror stories as well, building up an artificial
history and mythology. Quinn never quite developed anything like that;
Haddingway Ingraham Jameson Ingraham (“Hiji”) first appeared in “The Devil’s Bride,”
and would go on to have his own brief series in addition to guest-starring in a
few de Grandin adventures, and after making the acquaintance of Manly Wade
Wellman, both men made reference to each other’s occult detectives in their own
stories of de Grandin and John Thunstone, though this never led to a
collaboration or any kind of shared mythos...although readers interested in
such things would note that the Thunstone tale “The Letters of Cold Fire” (May
1944) contained the Necronomicon,
which would technically tie the de Grandin stories in with Lovecraft’s Mythos,
and through that to Howard’s part of the shared universe, albeit without any
intentional effort on the part of either Quinn or Howard.
Howard’s “Red Nails” serial finished in the
October 1936 issue of Weird Tales;
Conan would no longer compete against Jules de Grandin for a spot in their old
standby. Quinn paid his respects in a letter in “The Eyrie”:
The field of fantastic
fiction has lost one of its outstanding and recognized masters in Robert E.
Howard. His Solomon Kane stories, his tales of Kull, and latterly his Conan
sagas, all of them were superb in their own way. He was a quantity producer,
but always managed to keep his stuff fresh and vigorous. There are few who can
do this. (WT Oct 1936)
Fans of both men would sing their praises for
years to come:
In my humble opinion, the
most thoroughly enjoyable stories that appear in WT are those by such writers
as Seabury Quinn and Robert E. Howard (how I miss that boy!), in which there is
a little humanity, a little humor, a little happiness.
(WT Mar 1938)
The Horror on the Links: The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, Vol. One (9781597808934) |
Literary criticism too has not been kind to
Quinn, where critics remember to comment on his stories at all, they tend to
follow Lovecraft’s line regarding the formulaic quality of the de Grandin tales
(CA 3.v, Shea 10), or focus on his
more accessible republished works, such as Roads
(1948, Arkham House), a fantasy adventure almost in the swords &
sorcery vein, which caused occasional comparison to Howard:
Presumably his profession
influenced his literary subjects, although his natural bend in writing would
seem to have been adventure tales such as Price wrote or the kind of S & S
stuff which Robert E. Howard flourished in. (Shea 11)
This conflation of Howard and Quinn was not
uncommon among some, especially in the 1970s when Howard, Lovecraft, and to a
lesser extent Quinn and other pulp writers were undergoing a paperback boom.
When Quinn claimed in interview or introduction that...
From first to last Jules
de Grandin has seemed to say, “Friend Quinn, je suis présent. En avant, write me!” (CA 1.xxi)
. . . Robert A. W. Lowndes accepted the comment
uncritically, but felt the need to add:
I have no solid evidence,
but I certainly suspect that Robert E. Howard's stories were done this way.
(Lowndes 10)
As a critical assertion, the idea is flawed on
its face, though Lowndes may well have been been ignorant of the details and
made it in good faith. Howard is known to have done extensive research and gone
through multiple drafts of his stories; with Conan in particular, scholar
Patrice Louinet carefully chronicles the process in his essay “Hyborian
Genesis.” Quinn too obviously did some considerable research on various aspects
of the occult, for details of the stories are taken directly from reference
works; “The Corpse-Master” (Jul 1929) contains details from William Seabrook’s The Magic Island which had come out the
same year, and speaks to a professional keeping abreast of things. Yet in part,
this idea was postulated by Quinn and Howard themselves. Compare Quinn’s
statement with one from Robert E. Howard:
While I don’t go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually existent spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly denying anything) I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognized forces of the past or present — or even the future — work through the thoughts and actions of living men. This occurred to me when I was writing the first stories of the Conan series especially. I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen — or rather off my typewriter — almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowed on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowed out everything else in the way of story-writing. When I deliberately tried to write something else, I couldn’t do it. I do not attempt to explain this by esoteric or occult means, but the facts remain. I still write of Conan more powerfully and with more understanding than any of my other characters, but the time will probably come when I will suddenly find myself unable to write convincingly of him at all. That has happened in the past with nearly all my rather numerous characters; suddenly I would find myself out of contact with the conception, as if the man himself had been standing at my shoulder directing my efforts, and had suddenly turned and gone away, leaving me to search for another character. (CL 3.150-151)Quinn could no doubt have written something like that with regards to Jules de Grandin—though in his own way, not with the Texan’s style. They were alike in that they were two men who wrote earnestly, to help support themselves and their families; they were members of the same fraternity of writers that found their main break in weird fiction, and stuck with it through thick and through thin; though they never corresponded directly, they knew and appreciated each other’s fiction, and if they found fault in each other there is no record of it. They were Weird Talers.
_______________________
Abbreviations
BOD Book of the Dead
CA The Compleat Adventures of Jules de
Grandin (3 vols.)
CL Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard (3 vols. + Index and Addenda)
DS Dawnward Spire, Lonely Hill
ES Essential Solitude (2 vols.)
LCM Letters to C. L. Moore and Others
LJS Letters to J. Vernon Shea, Carl F.
Strauch, and Lee McBride White
LRB Letters to Robert Bloch and Others
MF A Means to Freedom (2 vols.)
Works
Cited
Connor,
Scott. (2010). “Weird Tales and the
Great Depression” in Darrell Schweitzer’s The
Robert E. Howard Reader. Borgo Press.
Howard,
Robert E. (2007-2008). Collected Letters
of Robert E. Howard. 3 vols. Edited by Rob Roehm. Robert E. Howard
Foundation Press.
Korshak,
Stephen D. and Spurlock, J. David. (2013). The
Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage. FL: Vanguard Publishing and
Shasta-Phoenix Publishers.
Lovecraft, H. P.
(2015). Letters to Robert Bloch and
Others. Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. NY: Hippocampus Press.
____________
(2016). Letters to J. Vernon Shea, Carl
F. Strauch, and Lee McBride White. Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E.
Schultz. NY: Hippocampus Press.
____________ (2017). Letters to C. L. Moore and Others.
Edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. NY: Hippocampus Press.
Lovecraft,
H. P. and Derleth, August. (2008). Essential
Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth. Edited by
David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi. NY: Hippocampus Press.
Lovecraft,
H. P. and Howard, Robert E. (2017). A
Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. 2nd
ed., 2 vols. Edited by S. T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, & Rusty Burke. NY:
Hippocampus Press.
Lovecraft,
H. P. and Smith, Clark Ashton. (2017). Dawnward
Spire, Lonely Hill: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.
Edited by David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi. NY: Hippocampus Press.
Lowndes,
Robert A. W. (1976). “Introduction” in The
Casebook of Jules de Grandin. NY: Popular Library.
Price, E. Hoffmann (1969). “Memories of Quinn”
in Sword & Fantasy #11. Jim Van
Hise.
Price,
E. Hoffmann (2001). Book of the Dead
Friends of Yesteryear: Fictioneers & Others. Sauk City, WI: Arkham
House.
Quinn,
Seabury. (1974). “Letters to Virgil Finlay” in Fantasy Collector’s Annual - 1975. Saddle River, NJ: Gerry de la
Ree.
Quinn,
Seabury. (2001). The Compleat Adventures
of Jules de Grandin. 3 volumes. Shelbourne, Ontario: The Battered Silicone
Dispatch Box.
Ruber,
Peter. Ed. (2000). Arkhams Masters of
Horror. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.
Ruber,
Peter & Wrzos, Joseph. (2003) “Introduction” in Night Creatures. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press.
Schwartz,
Julius & Weisinger, Mort. (1977) F
& SF Self Portraits 2 Seabury Quinn Creator of Jules de Grandin. West
Warwick, RI: Necronomicon Press.
Shea,
J. Vernon. (1978). “The Quintessence of Quinn” in Outre vol. II, no. 4. Esoteric Order of Dagon APA Mailing 21.
Silverberg,
Robert. (1977) The Weird Tales Story.
Gillette, NJ: Wildside Press.
Great post, Bobby. I've been intending to read some Quinn. This just adds to my motivation.
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