The Man Who Cast No Shadow and Other Stories by Seabury Quinn

Book Details

The Man Who Cast No Shadow and Other Stories by Seabury Quinn – three stories of the occult detective Jules de Grandin.

“What!” he demanded. “And leave her evil spirit, freed from the bonds of flesh, to walk the earth by night? Not I, my friend.”

The Dead Hand (1926) – Eery tale of Jules de Grandin—Bodiless Hand Floats Through the Window and Seizes a Millionaire by the Throat

The Man Who Cast No Shadow (1927) – A grisly terror of ancient legend creeps into the life of a New Jersey city—a tale of Jules de Grandin

The Veiled Prophetess (1927) – The intrepid ghost-breaker, Jules de Grandin, is drawn into an adventure of dark intrigue and occult danger.

Seabury Grandin Quinn (1889 – 1969) was a lawyer specializing in mortuary jurisprudence. However he was much more famous for his stories of the occult detective Jules de Grandin. He wrote over 90 de Grandin stories from 1925 to 1951, most of which were published in Weird Tales.

The Man Who Cast No Shadow and Other Stories has 4 illustrations.

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1. manWhoCastNoShadow.epub

Excerpt: The Man Who Cast No Shadow

1

“BUT no, my friend,” Jules de Grandin shook his sleek, blond head decidedly and grinned across the breakfast table at me, “we will go to this so kind Madame Norman’s tea, of a certainty. Yes.”

“But hang it all,” I replied, giving Mrs. Norman’s note an irritable shove with my coffee spoon, “I don’t want to go to a confounded party! I’m too old and too sensible to dress up in a tall hat and a long coat and listen to the vaporings of a flock of silly flappers. I——”

“Mordeiu, hear the savage!” de Grandin chuckled delightedly. “Always does he find excuses for not giving pleasure to others, and always does he frame those excuses to make him more important in his own eyes. Enough of this, Friend Trowbridge; let us go to the kind Madame Norman’s party. Always there is something of interest to be seen if one but knows where to look for it,”

“H’m, maybe,” I replied grudgingly, “but you’ve better sight than I think you can if you can find anything worth seeing at an afternoon reception.”

THE reception was in full blast when we arrived at the Norman mansion in Tuscarora Avenue that afternoon. The air was heavy with the commingled odors of half a hundred different perfumes and the scent of hot-poured jasmine tea, while the clatter of cup on saucer, laughter, and buzzing conversation tilled the wide hall and dining room. In the long double parlors the rugs had been rolled back and young men in frock costs glided over the polished parquetry in company with girls in provocatively short skirts to the belching melody of a saxophone and the drumming rhythm of a piano.

“Pardieu,” de Grandin murmured as he viewed the dancers a moment, “your American youth take their pleasures with seriousness, Friend Trowbridge. Behold their faces. Never a smile, never a laugh. They might be recruits on their first parade for all the joy they show— ah!” He broke off abruptly, gazing with startled, almost horrified, eyes after a couple whirling in the mazes of a foxtrot at the farther end of the room. “Nom d’un fromage,” he murmured softly to himself, “this matter will bear investigating, I think!”

“Eh, what’s that?” I asked, piloting him toward our hostess.

“Nothing; nothing. I do assure you,” he answered as we greeted Mrs. Norman and passed toward the dining room. But I noticed his round, blue eyes strayed more than once toward the parlors as we drank our tea and exchanged amiable nothings with a pair of elderly ladies.

“Pardon,” de Grandin bowed stiffly from the hips to his conversational partner and turned toward the rear drawing room, “there is a gentlemen here I desire to meet, if you do not mind—that tall, distinguished one, with the young girl in pink.”

“Oh, I guess you mean Count Czerny, a young man laden with an ice in one hand and a glass of non-Volstead punch in the other paused on his way from the dining room.

“He’s a rare bird, all right. I knew him back in ’13 when the Balkan Allies were polishing off the Turks. Queer-lookin’ duck, ain’t he? First class fightin’ man, though. Why, I saw him lead a bayonet charge right into the Turkish lines one day, and when he’d shot his pistol empty he went at the enemy with his teeth! Yes, sir, he grabbed a Turk with both hands and bit his throat out, hanged if he didn’t.”

“Czerny,” de Grandin repeated musingly. “He is a Pole, perhaps?”

His informant laughed a bit shamefacedly. “Can’t say,” he confessed. “The Serbs weren’t asking embarrassing questions about volunteers’ nationalities those days, and it wasn’t considered healthful for any of us to do so, either. I got the impression he was a Hungarian refugee from Austrian vengeance; but that’s only hearsay. Come along, I’ll introduce yon, if you wish.”

I saw de Grandin clasp hands with the foreigner and stand talking with him for a time, and, in spite of myself, I could not forbear a smile at the contrast they made.

The Frenchman was a bare five feet four inches in height, slender as a girl, and, like a girl, possessed of almost laughably small hands and feet. His light hair and fair skin, coupled with his trimly waxed diminutive blond mustache and round, unwinking blue eyes, gave him a curiously misleading appearance of mildness. His companion was at least six feet tall, swarthy-skinned and black-haired, with bristling black mustaches and fierce, slate-gray eyes set beneath beetling black brows. His large nose was like the predatory beak of some bird of prey, and the tilt of his long, pointed jaw bore out the uncompromising ferocity of the rest of his visage. Across his left cheek, extending upward over the temple and into his hair, was a knife- or saber-scar, a streak of white showing the trail of the steel in his scalp, and shining like silver inlaid in onyx against the blue-black of his smoothly pomaded locks.

What they said was, of course, beyond reach of my ears, but I saw de Grandin’s quick, impish smile flicker across his keen face more than once, to be answered by a slow, languorous smile on the other’s dark countenance.

At length the count bowed formally to my friend and whirled away with a wisp of a girl, while de Grandin returned to me. At the door he paused a moment, inclining his shoulders in a salute as a couple of debutantes brushed past him. Something—I know not what—drew my attention to the tall foreigner a moment, and a sudden chill rippled up my spine at what I saw. Above the georgette-clod shoulder of his dancing partner the count’s slate-gray eyes were fixed on de Grandin’s trim back, and in them I read all the cold, malevolent fury with which a caged tiger regards its keeper as he passes the bars.

Excerpt From: Seabury Quinn. “The Man Who Cast No Shadow and Other Stories.”