Adventure Tales #1. Hugh B. Cave
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 SKULL IN THE CLOUDS, by Robert E. Howard
The Black Prince scowled above his lance, and wrath in his hot eyes lay,
“I would that you rode with the spears of France and not at my side today.
“A man may parry an open blow, but I know not where to fend;
“I would that you were an open foe, instead of a sworn friend.
“You came to me in an hour of need, and your heart I thought I saw;
“But you are one of a rebel breed that knows not king or law.
“You—with your ever smiling face and a black heart under your mail—
“With the haughty strain of the Norman race and the wild, black blood of the Gael.
“Thrice in a night fight’s close-locked gloom my shield by merest chance
“Has turned a sword that thrust like doom—I wot ’twas not of France!
“And in a dust-cloud, blind and red, as we charged the Provence line
“An unseen axe struck Fitzjames dead, who gave his life for mine.
“Had I proofs, your head should fall this day or ever I rode to strife.
“Are you but a wolf to rend and slay, with naught to guide your life?
“No gleam of love in a lady’s eyes, no honor or faith or fame?”
I raised my face to the brooding skies and laughed like a roaring flame.
“I followed the sign of the Geraldine from Meath to the western sea
“Till a careless word that I scarcely heard bred hate in the heart of me.
“Then I lent my sword to the Irish chiefs, for half of my blood is Gael,
“And we cut like a sickle through the sheafs as we harried the lines of the Pale.
“But Dermod O’Connor, wild with wine, called me a dog at heel,
“And I cleft his bosom to the spine and fled to the black O’Neill.
“We harried the chieftains of the south; we shattered the Norman bows.
“We wasted the land from Cork to Louth; we trampled our fallen foes.
“But Conn O’Neill put on me a slight before the Gaelic lords,
“And I betrayed him in the night to the red O’Donnell swords.
“I am no thrall to any man, no vassal to any king.
“I owe no vow to any clan, nor faith to any thing.
“Traitor—but not for fear or gold, but the fire in my own dark brain;
“For the coins I loot from the broken hold I throw to the winds again.
“And I am true to myself alone, through pride and the traitor’s part.
“I would give my life to shield your throne, or rip from your breast the heart
“For a look or a word, scarce thought or heard. I follow a fading fire,
“Past bead and bell and the hangman’s cell, like a harp-call of desire.
“I may not see the road I ride for the witch-fire lamp that gleam;
“But phantoms glide at my bridle-side, and I follow a nameless Dream.”
The Black Prince shuddered and shook his head, then crossed himself amain:
“Go, in God’s name, and never,” he said, “ride in my sight again.”
The starlight silvered my bridle-rein; the moonlight burned my lance
As I rode back from the wars again through the pleasant hills of France,
As I rode to tell Lord Amory of the dark Fitzgerald line
If the Black Prince died, it needs must be by another hand than mine.
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