H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) and Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) are two pillars in the New World Gothic castle of fantastic fiction. They are especially interesting in their surprising aspects. They both died young, they both lived sheltered and geographically-constricted lives, they both absorbed influences from wide and deep sources which they then used to create wonderfully complex and vast universes that they have shared with writers long after their passing, and they both lived for sharing their creative energies with other writers through letters and encouraging words, including each other.
Lovecraft the New Englander drew from Poe, Machen, and Dunsany to fashion the crucible from which his Cthulhu Mythos emerged, the indifferent and destructive universe of what humans would call monsters from beyond space and time. He was a master at delineating the gulf between what terrible fate was suggested and why it could not be described in all its horror.
Robert E. Howard the Texan connected to semi-mythic history and the existential journey of one determined man through all the dangers of men and beasts. He is the father of an American sword and sorcery, a juxtaposition of power that seems illogical but also somehow inevitable, almost an allegory of the wars of the 20th Century -- what you cannot see may kill you from afar, and what you can see may kill you up close. The survivor must be ready and skilled and wary at all times.
The legacies of these two writers last and grow to this day in literature, art, and film, even language. We stock their writings and associated contemporary writers as well as some of the more interesting and provocative writers working with the generous heritage that Lovecraft and Howard bequeathed to an increasingly uneasy world.
The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin vol. 5: Black Moon
The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin vol. 5: Black Moon
The concluding volume in a series collecting the stories of Jules de Grandin, the supernatural detective made famous in the classic pulp magazine Weird Tales.
Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.
Quinn’s short stories were featured in well over half of Weird Tales’s original publication run. His most famous character, the French supernatural detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin’s knack for solving mysteries—and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (Grand Dieu!)—captivated readers for nearly three decades.
Available for the first time in trade editions, The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin collects all ninety-three published works featuring the supernatural detective. Presented in chronological order over five volumes, this is the definitive collection of an iconic pulp hero.
The fifth volume, Black Moon, includes all the stories from “Suicide Chapel” (1938) to “The Ring of Bastet” (1951), as well as an introduction by George Vanderburgh and Robert Weinberg and a foreword by Stephen Jones.
Seabury Quinn was a pulp magazine author whose popular stories of the occult detective Jules de Grandin were published in Weird Tales between 1925 and 1951. Quinn penned ninety-two short stories and one full-length novel featuring “the occult Hercule Poirot,” which were enormously popular with readers. Quinn lived in Washington, D.C., MD, United States, and died in 1969.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction—George A. Vanderburgh and Robert E. Weinberg
Foreword—Stephen Jones
1938
Suicide Chapel (Weird Tales, June 1938*)
The Venomed Breath of Vengeance (Weird Tales, August 1938)
Black Moon (Weird Tales, October 1938)
1939
The Poltergeist of Swan Upping (Weird Tales, February 1939)
The House Where Time Stood Still (Weird Tales, March 1939)
Mansions in the Sky (Weird Tales, June-July 1939)
The House of the Three Corpses (Weird Tales, August 1939)
1942–1945
Stoneman’s Memorial (Weird Tales, May 1942)
Death’s Bookkeeper (Weird Tales, July 1944^)
The Green God’s Ring (Weird Tales, January 1945)
Lords of the Ghostlands (Weird Tales, March 1945^)
1946
Kurban (Weird Tales, January 1946^)
The Man in Crescent Terrace (Weird Tales, March 1946)
Three in Chains (Weird Tales, May 1946)
Catspaws (Weird Tales, July 1946+)
Lottë (Weird Tales, September 1946)
Eyes in the Dark (Weird Tales, November 1946)
1947-1951
Clair de Lune (Weird Tales, November 1947)
Vampire Kith and Kin (Weird Tales, May 1949)
Conscience Maketh Cowards (Weird Tales, November 1949)
The Body Snatchers (Weird Tales, November 1950)
The Ring of Bastet (Weird Tales, September 1951)
*Cover by Margaret Brundage
^Cover by A.R. Tilburne
+Cover by Matt Fox