Seabury Grandin Quinn (also known as Jerome Burke; January 1, 1889 – December 24, 1969) was an American government lawyer, journalist, and pulp magazine author, most famous for his stories of the occult detective Jules de Grandin, published in Weird Tales.

Biography

Seabury Quinn was born January 1, 1889, in Washington, D.C. In 1910 Quinn graduated from the law school of the National University and was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar.

Quinn served in the Army in World War I. After his service he became editor of a group of trade papers in New York, where he taught medical jurisprudence and wrote technical articles and pulp magazine fiction.

His first published work was "The Law of the Movies", in The Motion Picture Magazine, December 1917. (His story "Painted Gold" may have been written earlier.) "Demons of the Night" was published in Detective Story Magazine on March 19, 1918, followed by "Was She Mad?" on March 25, 1918. He published "The Stone Image" in 1919. He introduced Jules de Grandin as a character in 1925 (taking the character's surname from his own middle name), and continued writing stories about him until 1951.

Although the De Grandin stories were enormously popular on their initial publication, modern critics tend to regard them as the weakest part of Quinn's work, with Brian Stableford describing the De Grandin stories "as indeed rather undistinguished", claiming they are full of stereotyped characters and poorly resolved plots.

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.

Recent publications

Night Creatures, a collection of stories by Quinn, edited by Peter Ruber and Joseph Wrzos for Ash-Tree Press appeared in (2003).

Demons of the Night, another collection of his stories, was published by Black Dog Books, of Normal, Illinois. Edited by Gene Christie, it contains his early stories. It has two of the "Major Sturdevant and his Washington Nights' Entertainment series", subtitled "Stories of the Secret Service", and two more featuring Professor Forrester, another amateur detector of crimes. It also contains one of the most complete bibliographies of Quinn yet published.

Someday I'll Kill You!, was published by Black Dog Books, of Normal, Illinois. Edited by Gene Christie, it contains all of Quinn's non-series stories published outside of Weird Tales between 1925 and 1963.

All of the Jules deGrandin stories were reprinted in 5 hardcover volumes in 2018 & 2019 by Night Shade Books.

A facsimile of the 1948 Arkham House edition of "Roads" was published 2017 by Shadowridge Press.

References

  • Biographical information