Long Live the Dead
Page 1
Long Live the Dead
Smashing Detective Stories
Hugh B. Cave
The Black Mask Library
Keith Alan Deutsch, Series Editor
Dedicated to my readers for the
past seventy-one years.
HUGH B. CAVE
Contents
INTRODUCTION
THE BLACK MASK INTERVIEW
TOO MANY WOMEN
DEAD DOG
SHADOW
CURTAIN CALL
LONG LIVE THE DEAD
SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES
LOST—AND FOUND
THE MISSING MR. LEE
FRONT-PAGE FRAME-UP
CHAPTER ONE: A MATTER OF MORALS
CHAPTER TWO: FOOTFALLS AFTER MIDNIGHT
CHAPTER THREE: MR. SMITH OF FLODIN STREET
CHAPTER FOUR: BACK ON THE FRONT PAGE
STRANGER IN TOWN
Introduction
Hugh B. Cave on His Ninetieth Birthday
Hugh Barnett Cave’s writing career spans all the important changes in twentieth-century American publishing:
—The invention of the terse narrative sentence pioneered in the 1920s, according to Gertrude Stein, not by Hemingway, but by Dashiell Hammett in Black Mask.
—The explosion of the pulp magazine, and the invention of all the pulp genres and sub-genres that have become staples in every medium of popular entertainment—from radio, television and movies to computer games, and web sites.
—The demise of the pulps and the reign of the slick magazines for short fiction starting in the 1940s.
—The invention of the paperback format, and the original paperback novel, which encouraged a move from short fiction to novels in the 1950s.
—The growth of formalized international publishing and film conventions in the 1960s and 1970s, which encouraged foreign sales and the export of American popular culture.
—The rise in the late 1970s and 1980s of a new mass market of fandom, with well-organized conventions, and specialized genre societies, and the creation of new genre writing awards.
—And finally in the late 1990s, the growth of the World Wide Web and cyber publishing, and web magazines, and sites devoted to single authors.
Hugh B. Cave’s Lifetime Career Achievements
Hugh B. Cave was there from the beginning, and at ninety years old (July 11, 2000) his career is still in full swing. Two new novels by Hugh Cave are about to be released, The Dawning and The Evil Returns: Mindstealer (Leisure Books, 2000) as are a number of story collections, including Bottled in Blonde, the Peter Kane stories from Dime Detective (Fedogan and Bremer, 2000) and The Lady Wore Black and Other Cat Tails (Ash-Tree Press, 2000). New websites have sections devoted to him (vintagelibrary.com). Mr. Cave will participate in cyber publishing on the new Black Mask Magazine website. In addition, awards for individual stories, story collections and many other international honors of recognition for Mr. Cave’s extraordinary career keep coming along, including Lifetime Achievement awards from the International Horror Guild, the Horror Writers Association, and the World Fantasy Association.
I want to bring to the attention of the reader the breadth and scope of Mr. Cave’s achievement. He has published thirty-seven books, many of them novels, between 1942 and 2000, with three or four currently in the hopper. His collection Murgunstrumm and Others (Carcosa, 1977) won the World Fantasy Award as Best Collection. The volume is also listed in Jones and Newman Horror: 100 Best Books. A Summer Romance & Other Stories, a collection of Mr. Cave’s romance stories published in Good Housekeeping Magazine, was published by Long-man in England and reissued in Japan by Eichosha-Longman in their Simplified English Series where it is used for teaching English in schools—and is in its twelfth printing in Japan.
According to his detailed but sadly incomplete records (fire damage), Mr. Cave published over eight hundred stories in every genre of pulp magazine. And he wrote for tough markets that were hard to crack like Black Mask (10 stories), Dime Detective (20), Street and Smith’s Western Story Magazine (20), Weird Tales (12), Argosy (9), Terror Tales (13), Detective Fiction Weekly (63), Spicy Mysteries (26), Spicy Adventure (18), Spicy Detective (16), Short Stories (41), Dime Mystery (19), and too many more to mention. Beginning in the 1950s he also wrote often-reprinted stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (4) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (7).
Starting in the late 1940s, Mr. Cave wrote at least 350 tales for the slicks like The Saturday Evening Post (43), Good Housekeeping (40), Cosmopolitan (9), Elks (16), Boy’s Life (21), Esquire, Ladies Home Journal, Scholastic, Redbook, Woman’s Home Companion, and Liberty.
From the earliest pulp days, Hugh B. Cave’s stories were of a quality to be reprinted and reprinted again in magazines in thirty-five countries, in anthologies, and in school books. Several have been adapted for radio and television. One American Magazine short story, “Two Were Left,” has been reprinted in school books, worldwide, more than one hundred times.
I can think of no other American author who has been so prolific in so many different fields. Many popular and extremely prolific authors worked primarily in one genre: for example, Frederick Faust (Max Brand) in Westerns, and Erle Stanley Gardner in mysteries. Other prolific pulpsters like Frank Gruber, who wrote for a wide variety of markets, and made the transition to novels, do not approach the longevity, the consistency, the scope, the breadth, the variety, and the reprintability of Mr. Cave’s story-writing achievement.
The Black Mask Tradition: Hugh B. Cave’s Achievements
The preeminently American style of detective story, the hardboiled private-eye tale, was a creation of one of the greatest of all pulp magazines, Black Mask. Black Mask published 340 issues under six editors from 1920 to 1951. Two of the editors were women. At least thirty-one published writers were women, too. To put Hugh B. Cave’s Black Mask achievement in perspective, more than 2,500 stories appeared in the magazine over thirty-one years. William F. Nolan, hard-boiled historian and editor of The Black Mask Boys (Mysterious Press, 1985), estimates that Black Mask printed thirty million words during those thirty-one years. Hugh B. Cave is not associated by scholars and critics with the classic “Black Mask Boys” like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Frederick Nebel, Raoul Whitfield, Carroll John Daly, Horace McCoy, Paul Cain, and Erle Stanley Gardner. However, Hugh Cave is among only a dozen or so Black Mask authors (out of total 640 contributors) to have stories accepted by all of the magazine’s last three editors: Captain Joseph T. Shaw, Fanny Ellsworth, and Kenneth S. White. In the famous group of contributors listed above, only Erle Stanley Gardner and Carroll John Daly can make that same claim of continuous appearances. Mr. Cave is also among a very select group of authors to have more than one story published in a single issue of Black Mask. Only Raoul Whitfield appeared regularly with a second story in Black Mask, featuring his popular series character Jo Gar. These stories and novels of intrigue in the Philippines were published under Whitfield’s famous pseudonym, Ramon DeColta.
Few writers’ careers in Black Mask span the major transitions that took place in the magazine during the tenure of its last three editors from 1934 to 1941 and later. Of particular impact was the broiling international scene prior and during World War II. Hugh B. Cave integrated this wartime background into his fiction in a more subtle and satisfying manner than most pulp writers of the 1940s did. Many wartime pulp stories now feel dated, jingoistic, or melodramatic. Cave’s tales of this period, particularly “Lost—and Found,” use international intrigue unobtrusively as an integral, secondary element to a satisfying reading experience. These Black Mask stories, written by Cave in the late 1930s and early 1940s, remain as fresh today as they were when first published.
Hugh B. Cave’s
Black Mask tales represent the style of the magazine, particularly as it evolved over the years of his appearances. In its own way, this collection of all of Hugh B. Cave’s Black Mask stories, brought together for the first time, represents a special kind of writing achievement within the Black Mask tradition.
Doug Greene (who with his wife, Sandi, is Crippen & Landru’s publisher) and I are honored to have worked closely with Hugh B. Cave on the production of this book. Hugh answered our questions, provided frank, revealing evaluations of each of the tales, wrote his own brief prefaces to each story, and freely shared reminiscences of his pulp writing days. In addition, Hugh B. Cave provided meticulous records, now stored on computer disks, that span the breadth and depth of his extraordinary writing career. The interview that follows, and the appended checklists, statistics, and bibliographic materials that augment this collection of Black Mask stories, derive almost exclusively from Hugh’s own detailed files. Despite his considerable achievements within the pages of Black Mask, however, Hugh B. Cave is such a widely versatile and endlessly entertaining writer that the full range of his talent and his astonishing staying power are more interesting and significant than even his impressive Black Mask accomplishments, and the interview touches on many aspects of his career.
This collection is offered as a small tribute to the great career of an extraordinary writer, active as ever, and still at the peak of his form as he celebrates his ninetieth birthday.
Keith Alan Deutsch
July 11, 2000
THE BLACK MASK INTERVIEW
HUGH B. CAVE
“You Learn to Write by Reading.”
Hugh Barnett Cave was born in England on July 11, 1910, but he grew up in and around Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe published his first story in 1925 when Hugh was a fifteen-year-old student at Brookline High School. “I wasn’t paid for it,” Hugh makes sure to set the record straight. The story was called “Retribution” and it won an Honorable Mention in the All High School Short Story Competition. “But I did sell one or two stories while still in High School to a Sunday-school paper published (I think) by the D.C. Cook Co. I do remember a letter I got from the company, saying the story was much too long for them but they would use it as a serial, and please would I double-space the next story I sent them!”
Of course, Hugh had been writing stories long before he became a published author, and he made up tales to amuse himself long before that. But in his opinion, the most important aid to his development as a writer was the avid reading of exciting, classic novels and great short stories he did when a youngster. From the very beginning of our correspondence and telephone conversations, I wanted to know what Hugh’s earliest pulp-fiction stories were like. I had a comprehensive list of the titles, and suspected that Hugh was immediately drawn to the genres of horror and fantasy. I asked. He answered. No, he was not drawn immediately to horror!
When I began writing, I wrote adventure stories. I was born with adventure in my genes, I guess. My English mother was born in India, where her English engineer father, George Barnett, built the Great Indian Peninsula Railway and was made a C.I.E. (Companion of the Indian Empire) by Queen Victoria for doing so. He was also Mayor of Bombay. As a nurse, mother served in the Boer War in South Africa. The man who became my father, Tom Cave, followed her to Africa and married her there. The first of their three children, my brother Tom, was born there. Then they returned to England. My brother Geoff (the original Geoffrey Vace) and I were born there in Chester.
Geoffrey Vace was a pseudonym Hugh and his brother Geoff shared for a few early pulp stories. Then Geoff (the brother) dropped out of the game. But Geoffrey (the pseudonym) made many pulp magazine appearances.
Geoffrey Vace became my second most–used pen name after my favorite pseudonym, Justin Case. It was fun to use. Ironic without being obvious. I wrote all my “spicy” stories, more than seventy of them, under that name. I also occasionally used Judy Case. My output was so great, once I hit stride in the early 1930s, that I needed pen names because I often had more than one story in the same issue of a magazine.
And this is why the title story of this Hugh B. Cave Black Mask collection, “Long Live the Dead,” was written by “Allen Beck”—because “Smoke in Your Eyes” appeared in that same December 1938 issue of Black Mask under Hugh’s real name.
For Hugh B. Cave, having two stories the same issue of a magazine was a regular occurrence. “It happened a lot,” he wrote.
But not in Black Mask. Getting two stories into the same issue of Black Mask was quite a feat, particularly under the strong editorial hand of Fanny Ellsworth, who was editor in 1938. This use of pseudonyms has led to some errors and omissions in standard sources. For example, in E. R. Hagemann’s Comprehensive Index to Black Mask, 1920–1951 (Bowling Green State University Press), the meticulous index of record, Hugh is listed as having written only the nine stories that appeared under his own name. Professor Hagemann missed the Allen Beck pseudonym used for the title story of this collection. When I wrote and pointed out Hageman’s Allen Beck error, Hugh replied:
I’m glad you set the record straight. You are right. All of us successful writers for the pulps used pseudonyms, and often they do get hard to untangle. Then there is the problem of house names. Some publishers kept pet pen names in reserve when they wanted a different name on the cover for whatever reason. And the reason wasn’t always clear to me. I preferred to use my own pen names. But a couple of times a few of us wrote under a house name, and we still can’t figure out who wrote which story!
A Brief Aside on Pen Names
No matter how popular a pulp author might be, pulp editors never wanted to appear to publish two stories by one author in the same issue of a magazine. Although I am certain some alert aficionado of pulp history will write in with a few examples that are exceptions to this rule (and I welcome such letters), there was sound marketing psychology behind this standard industry policy. Pulp readers wanted as much entertainment as possible for their change. Harold Steeger built one of the greatest, longest-running pulp publishing empires, Popular Publications, with a just such a bargain strategy. He started a line of different genre magazines featuring “Dime” in each title—Dime Detective, Dime Adventure, Dime Western, and so on. In the early 1970s when I met with him on an almost daily basis for a number of months, he told me that the appeal to value was one of his great strategies that led to his extraordinary publishing success. In fact, Steeger’s Dime Detective became Black Mask’s only true rival. Over time, the summer of 1941 to be exact, Harold Steeger finally acquired what he told me was he prize acquisition of all, Black Mask.
Steeger explained to me why it was accepted pulp wisdom never to include two stories under one author’s name in a single issue:
One Erle Stanley Gardner story featured on the cover of any of my magazines guaranteed an increased sales of 50,000 copies. I learned to increase my print order by about 60,000 copies to cover the assured extra demand of that name on the cover. However, two Erle Stanley Gardner stories in one issue would not increase sales one more issue above that initial 50,000 boost. I’ll tell you why. The reader wants a sure thing and a bargain. A second Erle Stanley Gardner story would only dilute the impact of the first Gardner story. Almost all readers would rather get a story by a different big name writer, rather than two stories from one big name writer. Now two stories by two different major writers is an obvious bargain. However, two stories by one major writer may also be a bargain, but it starts many potential newsstand buyers to thinking. And the last thing we want a potential buyer holding one of our magazines in his hands at the newsstand to do is to start thinking. The buyer may think: well they spent the dough to buy two Gardner stories, so why not an original Ian Fleming James Bond story, instead?
Or maybe the potential buyer starts thinking: maybe one of the two Gardner stories isn’t as good as the other. Or maybe they are both second-rate Gardner tales and they threw them both in one issue to kind of equal one great
story.
It doesn’t matter what that buyer is thinking. Thinking is bad at the newsstand. We want that reader to buy! If our potential customer stops on his way to a purchase for any reason, another magazine may attract his eye and the sale will be lost.
So we at Popular, like many of the other pulp houses, invented house names. Famous phantom authors, who didn’t exist, but who appeared regularly in our magazines. Any good writer who knew the genre of the magazine could write the story that went with the house name. The stories had to be good stories if a Popular Publications house name was used. However, many of the second or third level pulp houses just used house pseudonyms as a convenience. When any author had two stories in the same issue, one story went out under a favorite house name. Or when an editor needed something written fast to fill an emergency gap in an issue, many writers turned out a story that would serve, but it wasn’t a work he’d want associated with his own name. So the editor would roll out one of the house names of the magazine. Or the writer would roll out one of his favorite pseudonyms.
(Note: A list of pseudonyms of Hugh B. Cave follows this introductory interview.)
After pondering the problems of keeping track of pen names, I asked Hugh when he started keeping records. Did he have a system for sending stories out, and if rejected, sending them along to the next appropriate magazine?
I have tried to keep very accurate records, but I have some blank spots, too. It is a hard job for a beginning professional writer. Before Lurton “Count” Blassingame became my agent in the summer of 1931, I used to send stories out to the highest-paying pulps first. If they were rejected, I went on down the line until they sold. Of course, once I sold to a good market I tried to keep that market well supplied. Then I followed the same procedure in the late 1940s for the slicks, where in the beginning I didn’t use an agent. So my record keeping grew out of my method of getting my early stories placed.