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ADVENTURE TALES INTERVIEWS HUGH B. CAVE

Hugh B. Cave surely needs little in the way of introduction to any fan of pulp fiction. Under his own name and pseudonyms such as “Justin Case” he wrote more than a thousand stories for magazines, before turning his attention to books. We were pleased when he accepted our invitation to be the Featured Author in the first issue of Adventure Tales, and he consented to this interview.

Adventure Tales: How and when did you enter the pulp field as a writer?

Hugh B. Cave: While still a student at Brookline, Massachusetts High School, I sold poetry and crossword puzzles to Boston newspapers and other publications, stories to Sunday School magazines, and did cartoons for the Boston YMCA News. One such poem, called “Men,” originally published in Sunset Magazine on the West Coast, was set to music by Carlyle Davis, sung by him in Carnegie Hall, and published by the Oliver Ditson Company.

After high school I worked for a Boston publishing company for a year or so. One book of poetry that I had a hand in designing was by W. Adolph Roberts, editor of a pulp magazine called Brief Stories. He suggested I try a short story for Brief Stories, and the suggestion resulted in “Island Ordeal,” my first pulp sale, which was published in July, 1929, when I had just turned 19.

There were more than a hundred pulp magazines being published at that time—so-called because they were printed on rough wood-pulp paper. I eventually sold a total of some 800 to 95 of them, then moved on into the higher-paying slick-paper magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post (to which I sold 46 stories), Good Housekeeping (41), American, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, Collier’s, Liberty, Esquire, etc. etc. Three hundred fifty stories in all. And my next two books, due out this year, will be Number 49 and Number 50 on my list of books published. Five of these are World War II books written as a correspondent. Two are books on Haiti and Jamaica. Twenty are novels. The others are hardcover collections of my pulp and slick-paper magazine stories. Some of these books and many of my shorter works have been reprinted in foreign countries. About a dozen of my books have been reprinted by John Betancourt’s Wildside Press.

And along the way, two books have been written about me. These are Pulp Man’s Odyssey: The Hugh B. Cave Story by Audrey Parente, published by Starmont House in 1988, and a brand new one, Cave of a Thousand Tales by Milt Thomas, due out this year, 2004, from Arkham House.

AT: Of all those stories, do you have any favorites?

Hugh B. Cave: Two favorites come to mind quickly. The first is a very short story called Two Were Left, which was originally published in American Magazine in June, 1942. It’s about an Eskimo boy and his beloved sled dog who are marooned on a drifting ice floe and, when hungry enough, one of them will have to eat the other to survive. The story has been reprinted more than one hundred times in school books and anthologies.

The other is one of many tales I have written about Haiti after having lived there for five winters. I note there is a question about Haiti coming up in this interview, so I won’t go into my adventures there now, but this story, called The Mission, first appeared in the old Saturday Evening Post of March 14, 1959 and was reprinted in The Best Post Stories of that year, in the first issue of the new Saturday Evening Post, and in seven foreign magazines. Just recently, when Haiti was in turmoil over its president, a group that wanted the world to have a better opinion of that country requeted permission to feature the story on a web-site. It’s about a six-year-old country girl who, after the tragic death of her mother in a landslide, walks miles to Port-au-Prince, the capital, to find her “famous artist” father who actually existed only in her mother’s imagination. After the Post printed it, Doubleday did it as a handsome gift book, calling it “a little classic of the spirit.”

The Post, by the way, reported that this story had received more reader mail than any story ever published in the magazine. Part of the story’s success was due, I’m sure, to the portrait of little Yolande by artist Peter Stevens, which was featured in the Doubleday book also.

AT: For the collector, would you care to talk about some of your pseudonyms and their histories?

Hugh B. Cave: My brother Geoffrey Cave, four years older than I, was editor of his school paper when he attended a high school in Boston, Mass. But he didn’t plan to make writing his career. Instead, he went on to business school and became an accountant.

Still, Geoff tried his hand at writing some pulp stories, using the name Geoffrey Vace, and sold some to Farnsworth Wright, famous editor of Weird Tales, for such magazines as Oriental Stories and Magic Carpet. So for a while, whenever I had two stories in any issue of any pulp, I would use his writing name, Geoffrey Vace, on one of them to win him more exposure.

In 1998 Tom Roberts, publisher of Black Dog Books, put out a neat booklet that he called The Death-Head’s March and Others: The Geoffrey Vace Collection, by Geoffrey Cave and Hugh B. Cave.” But Geoff didn’t continue as a writer, the way I did. He gave it up to be an accountant.

Another pseudonym I used—and used much more often—was Justin Case. This was a name I developed for the Spicy pulps—Spicy Mystery, Spicy Detective and Spicy Adventure—because they paid me as high as six cents a word but I was aiming at the slicks and didn’t want to use my real name. (I wonder if any real people named Case ever named a son Justin!) Black Dog reprinted some Justin Case tales as well, calling the booklets Dark Door of Doom and White Star of Egypt after two of the stories in them. And in 1997 Tattered Pages Press of Chicago published a handsome paperback collection of my Justin Case tales featuring a character I called “The Eel,” calling it Escapades of The Eel.

And, finally, even in the slicks I occasionally needed to use a pen-name, in which case I called myself H.C. Barnett, Barnett being my mother’s maiden name and my actual middle name. I can’t think off-hand of any others I used, but there probably were one or two more.

AT: How has your interest in Haiti and voodoo influenced your work?

Hugh B. Cave: Let’s begin with why I went to Haiti in the first place. At age 25 I married Margaret Long, a physical education teacher in the Providence, R.I. school system. We had two sons, Kenneth and Donald. When Ken was 10 and Don 5, the older boy began having some strange nightmares, and their doctor recommended we get him out of cold New England for the winter. As it happened, I knew a man who was teaching English in Haiti and asked him if he could find a house for us to rent. He found one in Petionville, and our Haitian adventure began. The boys attended an English-speaking school run by the U.S. Embassy. I began exploring the country and writing about it.

And then voodoo. We were told about a voodoo maman named Lorgina in Port-au-Prince, the capital, who was highly regarded. We obtained permission to attend one of her services, but, when we got there, found her ill with a badly swollen, painful leg. My wife, remember, was a phys. ed. teacher. “Go find me some olive oil and I’ll try to massage the pain away,” she told me.

Well, I drove all over Port-au-Prince in the middle of the night and finally found some in a little all-night eatery. Meg massaged the mambo’s pain away. And Lorgina was so grateful she said, “Anything you want from me, just ask. Anything!”

What we wanted—what I wanted, anyway—was to learn about the real voodoo so I could write about it. We spent five winters there in Haiti, and I am happy to say that the same cook, same housekeeper, and same yard boy worked for us the whole time, and our boys did well in school. I came up with some short stories for various magazines and then wrote a book called Haiti: Highroad to Adventure about which noted author Kenneth Roberts wrote to the publisher: “If there was anything printed about Haiti that I didn’t read (when I was writing Lydia Bailey) either in French or English or in diaries, I couldn’t find out about it; and Cave’s Haiti seems to me to stand head and shoulders above all of them in its vivid depiction of the land and the people. If you want a quote, I suggest ‘The most perfect depiction of present-day Haiti, the land and the people, ever drawn.’”

Then I wrote a novel, The Cross on the Drum, about the conflict between a voodoo houngan and a protestant minister (which ended with the two of them calling each other “my brother”) and it was a Doubleday Dollar Book Club selection and a Literary Guild bonus book. And I wrote many magazine short stories about Haiti which have been reprinted in a collection of my West Indies tales called The Witching Lands.

AT: Despite your success in the slick magazines, you kept coming back to fantasy and horror themes in your work. I note that many of your later novels are, in fact, horror. What’s the appeal of dark fantasy for you?

Hugh B. Cave: Well now, I have a hunch it all began when I was a kid singing in the men’s-&-boys’ choir at a church in Boston. We choir kids attended a camp for two weeks every summer near Cape Cod, as I may have mentioned before, and every night around a campfire our choir-master read us creepy stories by Poe and other such writers. I got to be very fond of them and still am. Most horror stories, it seems to me, have a touch of fantasy, and fantasy gives a writer space to expand in. I’ve done many other kinds of stories and books, but feel so “at ease” in the fantasy-horror field that I keep coming back to it.

AT: You mentioned that the “Spicy” magazines paid 6 cents a word for fiction. Wasn’t that a lot of money for a pulp magazine? How did the other pulps compare?

Hugh B. Cave: My record-books show that most pulp magazines paid from 1 to 3 cents a word. I don’t know what the “Spicies” paid other writers, but my Justin Case stories got a lot of covers and apparently were popular with the readers. Some have been reprinted in book form, as I mentioned before. I don’t know what the “Spicies” paid other writers. My old records give only the title of each story sold and when it was published. Other pulps, such as Short Stories, Adventure, Dime Mystery, and Dime Detective, paid me more than a cent a word, I seem to remember, but I can’t think of any that paid me what the “Spicies” did.

AT: When you were writing your pulp stories, what were your working hours? What was a typical day like for a writer in, say, 1935?

Hugh B. Cave: Before I married (which I did in 1935), I worked long hours at those old-style typewriters. (I remember having one whose carriage I had to lift up to see what it had typed from underneath!). Then along came electric machines and computers. When a story I’m working on grabs my interest really hard, I’m likely to work all day at it and sometimes even half the night. It has always been that way for me, even in my pulp-writing days. Now I have slowed down a bit. After all, I’m 93 as I write this. But if a great story idea comes my way, I’m still likely to work long and hard at it, and I still enjoy doing so.

AT: Is there a question you haven’t been asked in interviews before, that you would like to answer?

Hugh B. Cave: Well now, no interviewer has ever asked, “Do you ever wish you had been something other than a writer?” If anyone ever does ask that, my answer will be a resounding “No!” because it has been a fulfilling and fascinating life.

After all, I started at age 16 or thereabouts and am still writing at 93. Amen.

AT: Thank you very much for your time!