A Rival from the Grave

The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, Volume Four

De: Seabury Quinn

Narrado por: Paul Woodson

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 and listeners 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 more than half of Weird Tales's original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French 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 captivated readers for nearly three decades.

The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin presents all ninety-three published works featuring the supernatural detective. The fourth volume, A Rival from the Grave, includes all the stories from "The Chosen of Vishnu" (1933) to "Incense of Abomination" (1938).

©2018 the Estate of Seabury Quinn (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

JULES de GRANDIN IS BACK!

JULES de GRANDIN is back in A RIVAL FROM THE GRAVE. With another collection of strange tales DeGrandin and Dr.Trowbridge or rather SEABURY QUINN, entertain the listeners with more of his pulp paranormal stories. Paul Woodson does the narration and does a great job bringing us all the familiar characters.

This May be Au revior for Me

I loved, loved, loved Vol One. I skipped V Two because there was different narrator. I passed on Vol Three due to the reviews of being extremely racist.

Vol Four, is probably just a racist as Vol Three, which I found annoying. My biggest issues with this volume are 1) with a few exceptions, all the stories felt overly long; and 2) a majority of the stories were spent on the backstory/legend/mythos/history of the afflicted person(s). Really you could jump to the last 10 mins of any of these stories and get your Jules de Gradin fix. I do understand the time period these were written in but in this volume, to me, the stories were overly and unnecessarily descriptive. I felt none of things with Vol One.

Thoroughly Entertaining

This installment is rather better than each of the previous ones, save for perhaps the first. The only real drawback is how incredibly wrong Seabury Quinn gets all the religion stuff. Everything not of Anglo-European Christian origins is "Satanic" and "Evil", nor does he understand a single thing about even one of the non-Christian (and specifically non-Anglican Christian) traditions featuring in these tales. If nothing else, these stories remain a fascinating repository of turn of the century American attitudes towards immigrants and other outsiders to Anglo-European culture. Namely, they serve as a clearly illustrative index of American jingoism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

always fun

Jules de Grandin never fails to entertain. He and Trowbridge are the pulpy ghost hunting equivalent of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. it's great. recommended.