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THE PULP REPRINTS OF HUGH B. CAVE, by Michael Chomko

Hugh Barnett Cave was born in 1910 and seemingly began writing as soon as he could lift pencil to paper. While still in high school he was a published author, having sold a few stories to Sunday School papers and poetry to newspapers. Not long after obtaining his first and only job with a Boston vanity publisher, Cave made his first sale to the pulps. “Island Ordeal” was published in the July 1929 issue of Brief Stories. It was quickly followed by others sold to a variety of magazines. Action Stories, Short Stories, Astounding Stories, Wide World Adventures, Outlaws of the West, and High Spot Magazine all published stories by Cave during the next year. He was soon able to give up his day job and survive as a full-time author. By 1933, he had established markets with many of the leading publishers of the pulp industry, including Popular Publications and Street & Smith. According to his records, Cave published about eight hundred stories in the pulps, the bulk of them appearing prior to 1942. By then he was writing predominantly for the book trade and “slick” magazines, selling stories to such mainstream publications as Colliers, Country Gentleman, Good Housekeeping, Liberty, Redbook, and The Saturday Evening Post.

Although other prolific pulpsters such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lester Dent, Frederick Faust, Walter B. Gibson, and Robert E. Howard had found their way back into print by the late sixties, it was not until 1977 that the pulp work of Hugh Cave would begin to reappear. It was then that the late author and editor, Karl Edward Wagner, hoping to preserve the work of writers he felt had been unjustly neglected, released Murgunstrumm and Others. This long out-of-print collection, published by Wagner’s Carcosa House and illustrated by the great Lee Brown Coye, went on to win a 1978 World Fantasy Award. It’s best described using the language found on the inside flap of its dust jacket:

Murgunstrumm and Others abounds with haunted houses, ravenous vampires, slobbering monsters, fiends human and inhuman, nights dark and stormy, corpses fresh and rotting. These stories exemplify the gothic horror thrillers of the 1930s—no-holds-barred lurid chillers of violent action and scream-in-the-night terror…savored best on a stormy, lonely, night.

Largely drawn from the pages of Strange Tales, Spicy Mystery Stories (where Cave’s tales originally appeared under the pseudonym Justin Case), and Weird Tales, Murgunstrumm and Others has been reissued by Wildside Press in both hardcover and trade paperback.

Although Wagner’s collection helped to reëstablish Hugh Cave as an author of dark fantasy—his short novel, The Mountains of Madness, was released earlier this year in a limited, signed edition by Cemetery Dance Publications—it would be another ten years before the next collection of Cave’s pulp work would see the light of day. Spicy Detective Encores No. 2, one of a series of six tiny volumes, each about the size of a “Big-Little Book,” reprinted three of Cave’s “Eel” stories. Cave had introduced this character in the June 1936 issue of Culture Publications’ Spicy Adventure Stories. Urged by his editors at Culture to supply them with more tales of the “Eel,” Cave went on to produce about twenty stories featuring the character, all of them credited to Justin Case.

Published by Winds of the World Press in card-stock covers, Spicy Detective Encores No. 2 is a collectible rarely seen on today’s used book market. However, the three stories it reprinted are available in a more recent and extensive collection of “Eel” yarns. Escapades of the Eel, published in 1997 by Tattered Pages Press of Chicago, assembled fifteen of the best stories featuring the “gentleman correspondent” of Spicy Adventure Stories and private dick of Spicy Detective and Spicy Mystery Stories. Told in the first person using the tongue-in-cheek style of the spicy pulps, the “Eel” stories range from the wilds of Borneo to the urban jungles of Depression-age and World War II-era America.

In 1988, the next Cave collection saw the light of day—The Corpse Maker. Assembled by Sheldon Jaffery for the now-defunct Starmont House, it was a short, paperbound collection of seven stories drawn largely from the pages of such weird-menace pulps as Dime Mystery Magazine and Terror Tales. Jaffery’s collection reproduces its stories directly from the pages of the pulps and features personable, yet informative introductions to each story. The title yarn was originally published in the second of the “weird-menace” issues of Dime Mystery, the magazine that introduced the genre to pulp readers. Like Spicy Detective Encores No. 2, The Corpse Maker is now a difficult book to find.

Nearly another decade passed before the Hugh Cave floodgates opened. It began with a collection that Carcosa House had intended to be the sequel to Murgunstrumm and Others. Fortunately, in 1995, following their success with collections of pulp fiction by Robert Bloch, Carl Jacobi, and Donald Wandrei, Minnesota-based Fedogan & Bremer rode to the rescue and released the long-delayed collection of Cave’s best tales of weird menace, Death Stalks the Night. Featuring seventeen tales from shudder pulps like Dime Mystery, Horror Stories, and New Mystery Adventures, Death Stalks the Night like its predecessor, Murgunstrumm, was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award.

According to editor Karl Edward Wagner, weird-menace stories “were calculatedly gothic and grisly…(with) no pretensions of art—just go for the throat…(and) the wildest and weirdest menacer of them all was Hugh B. Cave.… Cave’s weird-menace stories still have the power to chill and thrill.… This really is a curl-up on a dark and stormy night book.” And you know, he was right!

In 1997, Fedogan & Bremer dipped again into the shudder pulps to harvest ten more stories by “the wildest and weirdest menacer of them all.” Compiled by the author himself, The Door Below featured stories selected from throughout the author’s career. Alongside such pulp stories as “Servant of Satan” and “The Thing from the Swamp,” were tales written during the last three decades of the twentieth century, fiction “written most often for magazines published by people who fondly remembered the pulps and sought to keep those memories alive by recreating them.” Thus, although “From the Lower Deep” and “Damsels for the Damned” could very well have been titles for stories featured in Strange Tales and Spicy Mystery Stories, both yarns missed those magazines by half a century.

Two paperbound collections from Tattered Pages Press—the previously discussed Escapades of the Eel and a companion volume entitled The Dagger of Tsiang and Other Tales of Adventure—joined The Door Below to make 1997 a banner year for Cave reprints. Assembled by Doug Ellis from the pages of Short Stories, Top-Notch Magazine, and other periodicals of the early thirties, The Dagger of Tsiang collects eleven “colorful tales of Tsiang House, a British outpost deep in the jungles of Borneo…adventure at its finest, written by a master of the craft.” Both of the Tattered Pages books are entertaining packages, assembled and published by a small press devoted to reproducing some of the best stories of the pulp era.

Another small press was next to reprint the work of the man sometimes known as Justin Case. In 1998, Black Dog Books, headed by artist, designer, and pulp fan Tom Roberts, published the first of its five Cave collections—The Death-Head’s March and Others. Subtitled The Geoffrey Vace Collection, three of the four stories included were written by Cave’s older brother, Geoffrey. Along the lines of Talbot Mundy’s tales of India, the Vace stories were originally published in Oriental Stories and Magic Carpet Magazine, the adventure-oriented companions to Weird Tales. The fourth story of the collection, “Step Softly, Sahib!” was written by Hugh Cave, using his brother’s pseudonym. “I did my best to keep that Nom-de-plume alive for him with stories in many different pulps…always hoping he would one day return to his typewriter.”

Other Cave collections from Black Dog Books include White Star of Egypt, which reprints a pair of tales from Spicy Adventure Stories; The Desert Host, the sole “sword-and-sorcery” story that Cave contributed to the pulps, written for Magic Carpet; Dark Doors of Doom, a trio of weird-menace yarns from the pages of the spicy pulps, all originally credited to Justin Case; and The Stinging ’Nting and Other Stories, four adventure yarns first published in 1931 in two pulps rarely seen today—Far East Adventure Stories and Man Stories. Black Dog’s Cave collections are digest-sized books with card-stock covers, available from the publisher for between five and nine dollars.

Although Hugh B. Cave is predominantly regarded today as a writer of dark fantasy, a large portion of his pulp era work was created for the mystery genre. At least one quarter of his pulp production was aimed at the rough-paper detective market. Beginning in 2000, modern readers were reintroduced to this versatile author’s crime fiction through three reprint collections issued by the small presses.

Fedogan & Bremer celebrated the author’s ninetieth birthday with the republication of Cave’s nine “Peter Kane” stories, originally written for Popular Publication’s Dime Detective. According to Don Hutchison’s introduction to the volume, “Kane…was introduced as (the) ‘ace shamus of the Beacon Agency, chronic drunk, two-fisted, hard-headed private dick with nothing to live for except the next drink’…a man who can down three liquid meals a day, get hit on the head more often than is really healthy, and still land on his feet right side up.”

While the first half-dozen Kane stories, originally published in 1934 and 1935, owe a large debt to the weird-menace field for which Cave had then been laboring for several years, the final three tales set a more comic tone and feature rather puzzling plots.

Dime Detective was also home to another Cave hero, truant officer Nick Coffey. The protagonist of three stories contributed to the Popular magazine in 1940, Officer Coffey was a favorite of Dime Detective’s editor Ken White as well as Cave’s agent, Lurton “Count” Blassingame. The stories concern good kids, driven into trouble via circumstances beyond their control. In 2000, Subterranean Press reissued two of the three Coffey stories in a chapbook limited to 250 numbered and 26 lettered copies, all signed by the author. The Sidecar Preservation Society issued the third Coffey story separately in 2001 as a fund-raising effort.

Black Mask was the premier detective magazine of the pulp era, the periodical where the hard-boiled detective story took root and evolved. Home to such greats of the mystery genre as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner, Black Mask would also publish ten of Cave’s tales of detection, contributed to the magazine from 1934 through 1941. Ranging from the tough-guy cop of “Too Many Women,” to the greeting card executive who investigates crimes as a hobby in “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” to his last story for the magazine, the Hitchcockian “Stranger in Town,” Crippen & Landru’s Long Live the Dead amply demonstrates Cave’s versatility as an author.

Although Black Mask and Dime Detective Magazine were probably the best of the many detective pulps that were published during the pulp era, it was for Detective Fiction Weekly that Cave wrote most of his crime fiction. From 1936 through 1941, he contributed sixty-three tales of mystery and detection to the Munsey magazine. Crippen & Landru’s Come Into My Parlor collects nearly a dozen of these stories, which, according to the author, were “among the best of the pulp stories I wrote.”

“What I had, in many of my tales for Detective Fiction Weekly, were folks like you and you and you, who never wore a policeman’s uniform or were licensed to be crime fighters. These characters were just everyday people who became involved in crime-fighting more or less by ‘accident.’ And when I began writing that kind of story, with a hero who was not a professional crime-fighter, but just an ordinary Joe like most of us, the editor of Detective Fiction Weekly liked them and so did the readers.”

Both Crippen & Landru volumes were published in two states—a trade paperbound edition and a limited clothbound edition, signed and numbered by the author. Included with the latter was a separate pamphlet, reprinting an additional Cave pulp story not found in the paperbound edition of that particular book.

With over eight-hundred stories moldering away in the crumbling pages of seventy-year-old magazines never meant for permanence, these seventeen collections reprinting over 130 stories have only scratched the surface of Cave’s prodigious output. Hopefully, the appearance of Cave of a Thousand Tales, a biography of the author written by Milt Thomas and released by Arkham House in June of this year, will provide the impetus for further collections of this wonderful craftsman of the pulp era.1 After all, the Arizona Kid, Wildcat and Range Wolf, and Senor Bravo are all still having “Trouble Tamin’ Tumbleweed” in the pages of Western Story Magazine and Wild West Weekly.

1 Starmont House published a short biography of Hugh Cave, Pulp Man’s Odyssey, written by Audrey Parente, in 1988. It was followed in 1994 by Cave’s autobiographical Magazines I Remember, based on his long correspondence with fellow author Carl Jacobi and published by Tattered Pages Press.