ISLAND FEUD by Hugh B. Cave

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IN MEMORIAM: As this issue was about to go to press, we received news of the passing of Hugh B. Cave. He was a great writer and a wonderful person. He will be missed by all who new him. We are all grateful to have been able to work with him to create this special issue of Adventure Tales honoring him and his work.

MATT Martinsen’s Witch was long overdue at Teala Town. When she came at last, with her sails shining white in the South Pacific sunlight, the whole town held its breath.

Tom Trefflan, the shopkeeper, saw me standing on my hotel veranda and came across the road from his establishment, blowing as he climbed the steps. “This is it, John,” he said. “The day of reckoning.”

Phil Pawley, the Burns Philip agent, hurried up from his office on the pier. “We’re about to see history made,” he declared. “I can feel it under my ribs.”

The three of us turned, as one, to look along the shore toward the house of Doc Harty.

You’ve never heard the story of Doc Harty’s downfall, I expect. It’s too big a world. With wars and such hogging the headlines, the little human tragedies go unnoticed. Doc was too young, anyway, to be important.

Full of ambition and the milk of kindness, he came out to the islands to study beriberi for some medical foundation, and stayed on to work with the natives. For headquarters he chose Fanuwin, a handsome island whose people were a dreary lot, haunted by sickness. They eked out a living, the Fanuwin natives, by growing copra and selling it to Matt Martinsen for a third of its worth.

Doc Harty got rid of the parasites crawling about inside Fanuwin’s people and taught them how to stay healthy. A labor of love. During the two years it took him, Martinsen called every three months in the Witch. They came to know each other well.

Martinsen’s daughter, Ruth, came to know Doc well, too.

She was nineteen, and you had a hard time believing she was the daughter of a hard-bitten trader such as Matt. He was a glum, grim man with quick fists and a ready oath; she a slim, pretty girl with a look of far places in her eye.

An odd business, but no odder than many in the islands. The girl’s mother had died when Ruth was young, and the child was brought up by an aunt in Sydney until old enough to know her mind. Back she went to Matt then, to keep his books and help with the work.

But at Fanuwin she seldom stayed aboard ship while Matt did his trading. Up the hill she would go to Doc Harty’s little hospital, to help Doc with his patients. She should have been a nurse, Doc told her.

There were some on Fanuwin who predicted a wedding. Martinsen, when asked about it, only grunted.

Then…

One day Martinsen took his ship into Fanuwin and found no copra sacks on the wharf. To all his questions, the natives simply wagged their heads and pointed to Doc’s house on the hill. The trader, his face a thundercloud, stormed up there.

“What’s going on?” he demanded.

Doc Harty poured whiskey into two glasses—a ritual when Martinsen called—raised his and grinned. “Matt, you’ll have to mend your ways.”

“What?”

“You’ve given these people a rotten deal for years. Now they know the facts of Life. Either you pay the going price for their copra, or I arrange to have someone come here who will.”

Martinsen heard but didn’t believe. “Say that again,” he challenged.

Doc repeated it.

The trader curled his lip and looked Doc up and down. Then, “You meddling young whelp!” he said in a voice he usually saved for his native crew. “I’ll have you on your knees!”

“Now, Matt, you know well enough—”

The whiskey glass was in Martinsen’s hand. He smashed it on the floor at Doc’s feet, wheeled and stormed out of the house. But just beyond the foot of the veranda steps he paused. The inspiration for what happened later must have exploded in his raging soul at that very moment, even before his thinking had properly begun.

There on the hillside path, strolling up from town with a market basket on one shapely hip, was Doc’s housekeeper, Loliti. Martinsen halted before her with a leer.

“Well, now, this is a pleasure!”

Loliti laughed, tossing her hair.

“To look at you,” Martinsen said, “no one would dream you’d buried a husband. Widowhood’s becoming to you, lass. Come along to the ship with me for a drink and a bit of talk.”

Loliti went. And when the Witch departed next day at dawn, she was aboard it.

DOC Harty hadn’t a ghost of a chance because, you see, it was Loliti, not Martinsen, who filed the complaint. Martinsen’s name never officially entered into it at all. He was too shrewd.

The doctor was a wicked man, Loliti complained. Oh, very. She said this in Suva, in the office of a quite high official to whom the welfare of the natives on such islands as Fanuwin was a matter of gravest concern. She said it with such innocent-seeming grief that the gentleman paid profound attention.

“He made eyes at me from the time he came there,” said Loliti, her own eyes brimming with tears. “Of course, I paid no attention. I was faithful to my husband, as anyone on Fanuwin will tell you. But then my husband sickened. He went to the doctor for medicine. And instead of getting better, he died.

“The doctor was kind to me after my husband died,” Loliti went on. “He allowed me to be his housekeeper and paid me good wages. In my innocence, I did not know why. And then—ah, then—”

Martinsen must have coached her well in the two weeks she spent with him on the Witch between Fanuwin and Suva. Blessed with the lusty imagination common to girls of her sort, she could easily have embellished that portion of her tale beyond all belief and thereby lost her audience. She didn’t. Her account was subtly touched with allusions to Doc Harty’s “secret drinking.” And how was a government desk man in Suva to hear the voice of Martinsen back of her sobs?

“But,” said that gentleman, “how do you know the doctor caused your husband’s death?”

“He told me.”

“Told you!”

“When he was drunk one night and angry,” said Loliti. “He called me names and said he wished he had never gone to the trouble of getting rid of my husband. I wasn’t worth it.”

She was questioned, naturally. From the first official she was passed along to a second, third and fourth. Each did his best to find a discordant note in the song she sang. A man of Doctor Harty’s standing? Unthinkable! Still, the islands did strange things to some men, and Fanuwin was such a lonely place, so out of touch. In the end they sent for him.

He denied. He explained. Pale of face, seething, he called them fools. But even he, when faced with the girl, could not shake her story in the smallest detail.

It was unfortunate. No formal charge could be placed against him, of course. The girl had no proof. On the other hand, his own angry accusations … there, too, the proof was lacking, wasn’t it? A mess, the whole affair. Nasty mess.

Big thing was, a man shouldn’t get himself involved in these things. They gave the government a bad name. Such a tale traveled—like a tidal wave, actually. And the usefulness of a man with a cloud over his head was limited—ah, yes, limited. Better not go back to Fanuwin. Not just yet. No shortage of men to carry on there. Some other place, perhaps….

Doc Harty didn’t wait for them to find some obscure niche for him. He found a place for himself outside their jurisdiction: an island in our group where, he told us later, he thought he might begin again. But he didn’t stay long. Knowing where he was, we got off an urgent plea when an outbreak of measles began to wipe out the native population of Teala. So the Doc arrived one day in an outrigger sailing canoe, with his medicines in a wooden chest and became the fourth white resident of our little island community.

He was worth all the rest of us put together. Day and night he labored, dragging us along as his assistants and making us labor, too. The measles were stopped. Doc, like us, stayed on.

Only once was the affair at Fanuwin mentioned. We were building Doc a house by the beach and Trefflan, glancing seaward, saw a fishing boat in the reef passage. “Doc,” he said, “one day you’ll look out there and see the Witch coming in. Martinsen calls every few months for coconuts. What will you do?”

Doc gazed at the fishing boat in silence for a moment. “We’ll have rain if this wind doesn’t shift,” he said.

But among ourselves we speculated. “I know what I’d do,” Pawley said. “I’d beat the dog to a pulp!” Amusing, this, from Pawley. He stood a shade over five feet and never stepped out of doors in a high wind.

“I think I’d put a gun to his head and make him sign a confession,” vowed Trefflan. “And if he refused, I’d blow his brains out.”

None of our business, you say? Agreed. But we knew what Martinsen was up to. A letter would come for Pawley from some storekeeper friend in the Solomons: “Dear Ned: Odd what you say about your Doctor Harty and the good he’s done. Martinsen, the trader, was here only last month and he said…”

One would come for me from a hotel man in the Pandemonium: “This Harty you speak of—is he the same we have heard about from our friend Martinsen of the Witch? I would investigate if I were you. If they are one and the same, you have the worst sort of scoundrel on your hands…”

To sum it up, Matt Martinsen had been cruelly and systematically smashing what was left of Doc’s reputation as he went his rounds. And people believed him. Even his daughter believed him.

Thus I had an idea we would not see Martinsen’s Witch at Teala again. But I was wrong.

When she dropped anchor, I turned to Pawley and Trefflan. “Do you suppose Matt knows the Doc is here?” I said.

“He must,” said Pawley. “Then he can’t be afraid—”

“Give the devil his due. He’s afraid of nothing.”

Our pier hadn’t depth enough for a ship her size. We watched the native crew lower a dinghy. Suddenly, “There’s his girl,” Pawley said. “There’s Ruth.”

“Where’s the man himself?” I asked.

“Below in the cuddy, perhaps. Loading his revolver.”

The dinghy didn’t wait for Martinsen to load his gun, if that was what detained him. The girl dropped into it with her bright hair blowing in the sunlight, and the little boat made for the pin.

I glanced at Trefflan and Pawley, and we went trooping down the road.

Ruth knew us, of course. She’d been to Teala before, many a time. When I gave her a hand up to the pier she thanked me with a smile, then, facing the three of us, said thickly, “Doctor Harty is here, isn’t he?”

“He’s here,” I said.

“I must see him. My father is ill.”

“What’s the matter with him?” Pawley asked.

But Ruth was not one to waste time in talk. “Where is he?” she said, catching hold of my hand. “Take me to him!”

It was just after ten in the morning and Doc’s yard was full of natives awaiting their turn. When I walked in with Ruth in tow, he glanced up from a job he was doing on the big toe of a wide-eyed youngster.

Doc’s eyes were suddenly as wide as those of his patient.

“Ruth!” he said, staring. Whether he saw the ghost of a dead dream or the daughter of a despised enemy. I can’t say.

Ruth went straight up to him. “Fred,” she said. “I need your help.”

“What is it? One of the crew?”

“Not one of the crew. My father.”

A line of crimson crept up Doc’s face. “Your father!” he said in a whisper.

“He didn’t want me to come to you,” the girl said. “But he’s desperately ill. A hatch cover fell on his leg, days ago.”

Doc took in a breath and bent to his patient again. I couldn’t see his face, but I did see him stop work once to steady his hands. Done at last, he sent the boy on his way with a friendly backside slap, then thrust some things into a bag, and, facing Ruth again, informed her with a grim nod that he was ready.

MARTINSEN lay in his bunk, his once ruddy face gray and shrunken, his eyes dull with pain. But there was defiance still, in his stare.

Without a word Doc drew back the covers and knelt to peel the layers of bandage from the leg. It was the size of an elephant’s leg and pretty much the same shade of gray. He squeezed it, and the grayness turned fish-belly white.

“I can’t help you,” Doc said, his examination finished.

Martinsen reared up on his elbows. “Of course you can help me! You’re the best doctor in the islands!”

“The best in the world couldn’t save you.”

Martinsen’s gaze filled with desperation. “I can pay whatever you ask.”

“Can you?”

“Anything! A statement of truth from Loliti—that’s what you want, isn’t it? To clear your name. I’ll get it, I swear!”

It was an odd way for sworn enemies to face each other, one erect on sound legs, the other propped on his elbows in a pool of sweat. They did it, though; Martinsen pleading, Doc Harty pinning him to the bunk with a look of hate.

“All right,” Doc said then. “I’ll cure you. I can’t, but I will.”

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YOU’D say it was a miracle, I suppose. By every rule in the book, Martinsen should have died.

He didn’t. He lived, and the leg lived with him. In three weeks the man was out of his bunk. In a fortnight more he was ashore, taking a daily constitutional about Teala Town to build himself up.

You think the man was grateful? Secretly he might have been, but not a hint of it ever passed his lips.

To Doc, who stopped daily to examine him, he would mutter blackly, “How much longer am I to stay penned up here in this mouse hole? Is this your revenge? I’m well, I tell you!”

“Not well enough,” Doc would say.

The odd thing was that Martinsen did as the Doc told him. Despising the town, hating the hotel he lived in, mistrusting the lot of us so sorely he wouldn’t permit his daughter to quit the ship and join him, he nevertheless stayed on. Even when the last, lingering twinge had left the leg and he was able to bound up and down my veranda steps at will.

“Why in heaven’s name don’t you give him his walking papers?” I demanded of Doc, when it seemed I was cursed with the man for all eternity. “If you had to live under the same roof with him, you’d say the word soon enough!”

“A little longer,” he replied.

So Martinsen stayed, thriving on the good food and care until he was a picture of health. And what of his promise, that he would obtain a statement from Loliti to clear Doc’s name? Not a word was spoken of it, except by the rest of us.

“He won’t go through with it,” predicted Trefflan. “He never meant to.”

“He’ll laugh in Doc’s face,” said Pawley. “Mark my words.”

I thought they were right. And the waiting went on. Until…

Late one afternoon Doc came to the hotel. “I’ve sent word to your daughter on the ship,” he said, “that you can pack your bag tonight. She’ll be on her way here now, to lend you a hand. Mr. Martinsen, how are you feeling?”

“Right as rain,” said Martinsen.

“Good. Then it’s time we kept our promises—the one you made to me and the one I made to myself.”

Martinsen, interrupted at a game of solitaire on the veranda, must have expected something of the sort, but even so he needed a moment to gird himself. With the utmost deliberation he turned another card and examined it. Then, “Promise?” he said softly, with an upward glance. “Why, of course. A statement from that housekeeper of yours—that’s what we agreed on, isn’t it? But such a thing will take time.”

“I don’t want a statement from the girl,” Doc said. “I want one from you.”

Well! Over Martinsen’s round and ruddy face spread a look of such genuine incredulity as to lay bare the man’s soul.

It was a lecture, that look. Plain as day it said, Now see here: a statement from a no-account serving girl is one thing, and perhaps I’d have gone to the bother of getting it for you if an opportunity turned up. But a statement from Matt Martinsen … What a laugh!

The trader laughed.

“You refuse?” Doc said quietly.

“You’re out of your mind!” returned Martinsen gruffly. “I didn’t file the complaint against you; the girl did. What kind of fool do you take me for?”

“A healthy one, at least,” Doc said. “I’ve made certain of that. So—”

Say this for Martinsen: he was no man to run from a fight. He rose to meet this one with a crooked grin, and began in the age-old tradition by upending the table against his adversary’s legs. And having staggered Doc with his initial thrust, he quickly pursued his advantage. In the twinkling of an eye, with a knee in his groin and an elbow under his ribs, Doc was against the rail, white of face and gasping.

But the lightning jab was not enough. Doc recovered and threw him off, and then back and forth they went, locked in a contest as primitive as an island legend. The flimsy floor heaved under them like a sea in storm. The hotel seemed likely to topple about their heads.

I hold no brief for the philosopher who says right makes might. Before our anxious eyes, first one and then the other had the upper hand. Up and down the veranda they fought, on the steps, in the dust of the road. It was either man’s battle until the end.

In the end, toe to toe in the roadway, they battered each other with leaden fists until one went down and stayed. The one to go was Martinsen.

Doc Harty looked to us for help and we carried the man to a chair. And once more Doc stood before him, this time in triumph with pen and paper on the table.

“Write,” said Doc.

Martinsen slowly raised a battered face. “No.”

“Write, I tell you! A confession that you put Loliti up to it!”

“Why should I?” the trader retorted. “You’ve thrashed me. But to get a confession you’ll have to hold a gun at my head and threaten to use it—and you’re not the sort to make such an act convincing.” Wearily he stood up, and the puffed lips turned a grin. “Go to blazes,” he said amiably. So much for the philosophers!

Doc Harty stood silent. What could he do? What could any man do, short of murder? He lifted his hands and looked, puzzled, at the skinned knuckles, let them fall again and turned away. Down the steps he went. Across the road.

Martinsen, with a laugh, turned to go upstairs. And there by the staircase, awaiting him, stood his daughter.

She had come in the back way to avoid the storm on the veranda, I suppose. No matter; she had been there long enough to witness the final act of the drama. That was certain. Hands on hips, she faced him—no longer the young lady raised by a maiden aunt in Sydney, but a true daughter of Matt Martinsen himself. A less groggy Martinsen would have recognized the change and behaved accordingly.

He didn’t. “Darlin’!” he cooed, advancing on her. “Run up and pack my things, like a good girl. We’re leavin’.”

“You’re leaving. I’m not,” said she, not budging.

He halted. “What did you say?”

“I said you can leave if you wish to, Matt Martinsen. I’m staying!” Tall and straight she faced him, her bright eyes hurling the challenge. “I’m staying here in Teala to marry the man I love!”

Martinsen looked and saw she meant it, and over his face for the second time that evening spread the look of incredulity. “No,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “No….”

“He’s twice the man you are,” she said, driving the knife deep with her deadly calm, “no matter what you’ve made of him with your lies. And if he won’t have me, then I’ll sit on his doorstep until the whole world knows I want him.”

“I—I won’t permit it,” Martinsen mumbled.

“Stop me then, if you can,” she said, and went past him.

He let her go.

He sat. How long? Trefflan, Pawley and I, we asked one another later how long and could not agree on an answer. How long is forever? With chin on chest and gaze fixed blankly on the floor, he sat, the lamplight dimly registering the mask of defeat that hardened like concrete on his face.

At last he looked at us. “Something to write with,” he said. “If you will.”

I took him pen and paper.

He wrote. He signed his name and we, as witnesses, signed ours. Rising, he read carefully what was written, then passed the paper to me.

“My wedding present,” he said with a sigh. “Give it to them, if you’ll be so kind.”

Ten minutes later we watched him go down the road with his bag, and when last we saw him he stood on deck, gazing shoreward, as the Witch said farewell to Teala for the final time.

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 Adventu re 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!

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 reestablish 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.

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