The occultist Hercule Poirot: Jules de Grandin and the end of a weird era

Abstract

Weird Tales is a pulp magazine with a huge publication in the first decade of the 20th century in the United States of America internationally launching known names like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, and August Derleth. Curiously, Seabury Quinn, one of the most famous pulp authors of the time, has fallen into oblivion in the contemporary world. Creator of the occult and supernatural French detective Jules de Grandin, Quinn was considered a minor short story writer, his stories were marginalized by specialized critics for being uncreative and too marketable. This paper intends to demystify Quinn as someone who, strongly influenced by World War I and its trenches of horror, created monstrous characters that between the years 1925 and 1933 haunted the American wasteland, reinforcing historian W. Scott Poole’s theory that the Great War gave rise to modern horror. The stories here analyzed show as the images of the war shape the storytelling in the wasteland, the one that did not only remain in T. S. Elliot’s imagination with its mutilated bodies, the dead coming back to life and the incessant noise of primal desires for destruction joins Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes which, in fact, was an age of horror that seems today like an insistent and feverish reenactment of the Great War that gave birth to our world.