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Seabury Grandin Quinn (also known as Jerome Burke; December 1889 – 24 December 1969) was a government lawyer, journalist, and an American pulp magazine author, most famous for his stories of the occult detective Jules de Grandin, published in Weird Tales.
Biography[]
He was born and lived in Washington, D.C. In 1910. He graduated from the law school of the National University and admitted to the District of Columbia Bar.
He served in World War I. After his Army 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. The longest of the de Grandin stories is the 1932 novel-length story The Devil's Bride, strongly influenced by Robert W. Chambers' 1920 novel The Slayer of Souls.
In 1937, he returned to Washington to represent a chain of trade journals, and there subsequently became a government lawyer for the duration of World War II. He alternated between law and journalism all his life. He published over five hundred short stories.
His first book, Roads (a surprising new origin for Santa Claus, drawn from the original Christian legends), was published by Arkham House in 1948.
Ten of the Jules de Grandin stories were collected in The Phantom Fighter (Mycroft & Moran, an imprint of Arkham House; 1966). A broader selection of the stories, including the novel The Devil's Bride, was issued in a six-volume Popular Library paperback edition in 1967–77. A three-volume omnibus reportedly including all the de Grandin stories was issued by Battered Silicon Dispatch Box in 2001.
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 wrote several non-De Grandin tales in the 1940s and 1950s; Stableford states Quinn's "best stories here are ironically perverted love stories", such as "The Globe of Memories" (1937) and "Glamour" (1939).
His writing was secondary to his career as a lawyer specializing in mortuary jurisprudence. He taught this subject at mortuary schools for many years, and for some 15 years was the editor of Casket & Sunnyside, a leading trade journal. Quinn wrote articles for The American Funeral Director and other trade journals.
Quinn was a contemporary of Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. Mary Elizabeth Counselman was a friend of Quinn's and wrote a tribute to him after he died.
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. It has been described as a "bold and striking celebration of sexual confusion" in the style of Pierre Louÿs. It was illustrated by Stephen Fabian.