Happy Monday once again, fellow lovers of the Macabre! For my dedication note this week, I would like to talk briefly about the late great Seabury Quinn.

Though this may not be a name you’ve heard before, Seabury Quinn was one of the reigning titans of the pulp magazine scene throughout the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s; often being the headliner darling of Weird Tales along the likes of Robert E. Howard and H.P Lovecraft. Sadly, unlike these two fellow authors, Quinn has vanished into obscurity, with most of his novels long being out-of-print and several short stories only being accessible in scanned/archived copies of old pulps.

Quinn was known most for his serialized tales of occult detective Jules de Grandin, who featured in over 90 short stories over a thirty-year period in Weird Tales. De Grandin, like Sherlock Holmes, was known for his deductive reasoning and keen eye on human behavior, however unlike Holmes, Grandin’s foes were less thieves, murderers, and liars and more along the lines of werewolves, satanists, zombies, and sentient Egyptian mummies (lol). Though the plots are often campy, Quinn is an absolute page-turner of a macabre writer, knowing how to keep the reader engaged and how to leave on a cliffhanger, enticing you for more. If you ever wondered what it would be like if you mixed Hercule Poirot with 1930’s Universal Classic Monsters, then Quinn is absolutely the author for you.

Due to a significant decline in pulp magazine readership by the 1950’s, Quinn would retire writing de Grandin tales and focus on penning novels, whom he would publish through Arkham House. Unlike many of his Weird Tales companions, Quinn would have a successful career outside of his writing, as a lawyer, and would live to the ripe old age of 80 years old. Ironically, unlike the now well-known contemporaries who would die off in their 30’s-50’s, very little is known about Quinn’s life, and most of the letters he penned have long been lost.

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