![]() ![]() However, the very next novel in the series, THE DEVIL RIDES OUT, introduces the idea that the Duc- an older man who serves as mentor to the others- is an expert in the occult. ![]() The first novel to feature the four heroes- American Rex Van Rijn, Britishers Simon Aron and Richard Eaton, and the French aristocrat Duc de Richleau (unquestionably named for the Dumas character)- is a realistic suspense novel, published in 1933. But De Grandin's violent little Frenchman was crafted with the pulp-readers of WEIRD TALES in mind, and so the stories I've read are all characterized by sex and sensation without much subtlety.īritish writer Dennis Wheatley, like many other English writers renowned for supernatural stories, didn't deal exclusively with occult subject matter. ![]() At the time Wheatley began his series of novels featuring this group of crusaders, a lot of the occult detectives in both America and Europe tended to be rather low-wattage in their adventures- some examples being Algernon Blackwood's "John Silence" and Sax Rohmer's "Moris Klaw." One of the few rip-roaring occult adventurers, Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin, enjoyed almost twenty years of adventures starting in 1925. ![]()
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