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Hugh B CAVE
Author of horror, crime, fantasy and adventure from pulp fiction's golden era
John Williams
Saturday July 10, 2004
The Guardian
Hugh B Cave, who has died aged 93, wrote more than 1,000 short stories, about 40 novels,
and a considerable amount of non-fiction. His writing spanned every genre, but it is for
his horror and crime fiction that he is best remembered.
Cave was born in Chester. His parents had met in South Africa where his mother was a Boer
war nurse and his father an army paymaster. Following the outbreak of the first world war,
the family moved to Boston in the US. Just after Cave had left high school, his father was
badly injured in an accident so Cave had to abandon hopes of university. He ended up
working for a vanity press, where he began writing his own stories and poems and sold his
first story, Island Ordeal, in 1929, aged 19.
He quickly followed it up in pulps like Astounding Stories, Action Stories and Short
Stories. Aged 20, he was able to give up the only job he would ever have and, during the
next decade, he estimated that he wrote somewhere in the region of 800 stories for about
100 magazines. This was at the time
that every drugstore news-stand was crammed with crime, horror, romance and science
fiction magazines. Any writer who could deliver 5,000 words of tropical adventure by the
day after tomorrow, might even make a living - no small achievement during the depression.
Cave found that he needed to sell that one 5,000-word story a week to make $50.
"There was no TV then," he recalled to pulp historian Tim Dill, "and pulp
tales took the reader to all sorts of exotic, far-off places. Or to the old west. Or to
other planets. Or to worlds of the weird and fantastic. I would buy a magazine, read it,
[and] write something of the same sort."
Gradually, his work caught on. He was one of the few writers to appear both in the great
hardboiled pulp, Black Mask, where Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler began, and in the
classic horror of Weird Tales. Less revered, but his favourite, were his "Justin
Case" stories for the "spicy pulps", where in each story the heroine
inadvertently lost her clothes.
With the second world war, Cave travelled widely around the Pacific and south-east Asia,
as a reporter. This led to several successful non-fiction books and also reinvigorated his
fiction. Cave had written hundreds of stories set in far-off lands but had hitherto never
visited them. Now he was able to write authoritatively set south-sea adventures and to
sell them to
the "slicks"- magazines like Collier's and Cosmopolitan that paid far better
than pulps.
In the early 1950s, Cave moved to Haiti where he became fascinated by Voodoo, and then to
Jamaica where he took over a derelict coffee plantation that he turned into a great
success. In the early 1970s, his plantation was reclaimed by the Jamaican government and
he returned to the US.
This was the low point of his writing career: the pulps had gone and his only regular
market was writing romance for women's magazines. But rediscovery was at hand. Karl
Edward Wagner, a classic horror buff noticed Cave's byline in Woman's Own. The
pair met, and Wagner published Murgunstrumm And Others, a collection of Cave's horror
stories. It won the 1978 World Fantasy Award. Further horror and crime collections of his
pulp fiction followed. Then in his 60s, a rejuvenated Cave produced a stream of fiction,
mostly in the horror genre and frequently using a Haitian voodoo
motif.
Cave was married twice, the second time to the great love of his life Peggie, who died in
2001. A great raconteur, he was still happy to prop up the bar at a convention until well
into his 90s. He took instinctively to the internet, and became a champion of the e-book,
so it is now possible to purchase as electronic downloads the same stories that once came
printed on the grey paper of the pulps.
Bob Corbett writes: Hugh Cave and I met in 1984, after I read his guide, Haiti: High Road
To Adventure, and until recently we carried on a vibrant correspondence. We worked
together on a bibliography of his writings on Haiti for a couple of years. When I could
not locate a copy of the novel The Drums Of Revolt he sent me his only extra copy. I
treasure that book more than any other I own.
Haitian Voodoo religion figured in many of Cave's Haitian novels and stories, but
unlike many foreign writers, he wrote with a knowledge of Voodoo as a religion, and with
respect for it. In The Cross On The Drum (1959), an American Protestant missionary meets a
Haitian houngan (Voodoo priest) and they work hard at understanding each other's
religion. The white missionary even falls in love with the houngan's black sister -
this was heady stuff for 1959 pop American fiction. It was his best-selling Haitian work,
selected both for Doubleday Dollar Book Club and the Literary Guild Bonus Book for 1959.
Hugh visited all the places he talks about in High Road To Adventure. He knew many people
there and was a good friend of Sister Joan Margaret, head of Ecole St Vincent, an
episcopal hospital/school for disabled children. She was the model for the doctor in his
story, Black Stockings, while a pupil at the school was the model for the little girl in
The Mission, the short story of which he was most proud.
· Hugh Barnett Cave, writer, born July 11 1910; died June 27 2004