Weird Tales, December 1925

About this issue

This issue opens with "The Tenants of Broussac," a multi-part mystery by H. Thompson Rich featuring Jules de Grandin, the physician-criminologist protagonist who recurs throughout Weird Tales fiction. De Grandin encounters an American acquaintance in Paris and involves him in investigating a Norman château plagued by successive disasters: a wealthy Argentine tenant found dismembered in its chapel, a contractor whose body was grotesquely compressed, and other tenants who suffered fatal or maddening accidents. The mystery deepens when de Grandin and his companion arrive at the château where an American oilman, Bixby, now resides with his wife and sickly daughter Adrienne—a young woman depressed over a broken engagement, seemingly under some inexplicable malaise. Additional content includes "The Valley of Spiders" by H.G. Wells (giant spiders), "The Ghost Girl" by William James Price, "Sir Rupert's Treasure" by James Cocks (involving a grandfather's ghost), "The Deadly Amanita" by Eli Colter (poisoning tale), and reprinted classics including Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Haunted Palace" and "What Was It?" by James O'Brien. Part two of W. Elwyn Backus's serial "The Waning of a World" (Martian voyage) continues.