Seabury Quinn

Seabury Grandin Quinn
Seabury Quinn, date unknown
Born	December 1889 Washington, D.C., USA
Died	24 December 1969
Other names	Jerome Burke

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

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 a specialty publisher in 2002.