The Horror on the Links by Seabury Quinn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I don’t know what it is about Jules de Grandin stories that I like so much. They are not usually all that inventive, edgy, or linguistically impactful. The characters don’t really develop in any meaningful ways, and the plots usually are pretty formulaic. But with all that said these stories are so endearing and fun to read.
It’s kind of like eating icing, supernaturally laced early 20th-century icing. You don’t want to make a whole meal out of it, but rather indulge in it every now and again between other pieces of fiction. Like a long-running TV series, you’ll come to enjoy the familiar set of characters and their quirks, and begin to look out for the nuances in their personalities and relish the predicaments they find themselves in each episode.
Like a B-movie mashup of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, these stories are great fun. I would recommend them to anyone who is looking for a great introduction to classic Weird Tales magazine material, or anyone who enjoys splashing around in the shallow waters of occult investigation stories.