Guy Anthony De Marco

Speculative Fiction Author

Guy Anthony De Marco

Speculative Fiction Author

Hugh B. Cave, date unknown
Authors You Should KnowBlog

Hugh B. Cave: Pulp Polymath at the Edge of Classic Science Fiction

Hugh Barnett Cave was born in Chester, England, on July 11, 1910, and died in Vero Beach, Florida, on June 27, 2004, at ninety-three. Between those dates he wrote more than a thousand short stories, about forty novels, and a substantial body of nonfiction. Readers who meet him through classic science fiction will find him in the early Astounding Stories of Super-Science. Readers who stay with him longer will discover that science fiction was only one room in a very large house: horror, weird menace, crime, adventure, westerns, romance, war reporting, Caribbean novels, and late-career dark fantasy all carried his name or one of his pen names.

That breadth is the point. Cave was a working pulp professional of the Depression years, then a war correspondent, then a Caribbean planter and slick-magazine novelist, then a rediscovered horror writer who kept publishing into the twenty-first century. If you care about how genre storytelling actually got made when newsstands sold it by the pound, his career is one of the clearest maps available.

England, Boston, and a Forced Choice

Cave’s parents had met in South Africa, where his mother worked as a Boer War nurse and his father as an army paymaster. After World War I began, the family emigrated to Boston when Hugh was about five. His first name honored Hugh Walpole, a favorite author of his mother’s; she had once known Rudyard Kipling. Cave attended Brookline High School, where he already showed literary promise. Sources differ on the earliest publication: some credit a Boston Globe student piece, while others cite the professional sale “Island Ordeal” in 1929, written when he was nineteen.

He won a scholarship to Boston University but had to leave when his father was severely injured. He took a job at a vanity press, the only regular employment he would ever hold, and used the desk to write his own fiction and poetry. By twenty he had sold enough to quit. During the next decade, by his own estimate, he published roughly eight hundred stories in nearly a hundred magazines. In a Guardian recollection of his working method, he described buying a magazine, reading it, and writing something of the same sort: tropical adventure one week, western or other-world weirdness the next. To clear about fifty dollars a week in the Depression, he needed roughly one five-thousand-word sale every seven days. That pace explains both the volume of his bibliography and the professional cool with which he moved among genres.

Science Fiction in the Clayton Astounding

Classic science-fiction readers usually meet Cave through Harry Bates’s Astounding Stories of Super-Science. In February 1930, the magazine’s second issue carried “The Corpse on the Grating,” a warehouse horror of a body that should be dead and is not. In September 1930 came “The Murder Machine,” whose blurb promised hypnotic thought waves filtered through minds to mold them into murdering tools: mad science, mind control, and crime in the same package. Wikisource and the Internet Speculative Fiction Database also place “The Death Watch” among his Astounding appearances, and Cave contributed to other speculative and weird markets throughout the thirties.

He was never only a science-fiction specialist. The same years that put him in Astounding also put him in Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Black Mask, adventure titles, and the “spicy” and shudder pulps. That range is historically useful. Early magazine science fiction did not live in a sealed lab. It shared newsstands, editors, and writers with horror and crime. Cave’s Astounding tales sit at that intersection: scientific apparatus and uncanny atmosphere in the same story.

Weird Menace, Weird Tales, and the Pen Names

Stefan Dziemianowicz, writing in the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers, observed that Cave “transformed rural American towns into Gothic landscapes, local powerbrokers into megalomaniacal fiends.” He was one of the most successful contributors to the weird-menace or “shudder” pulps of the 1930s, and a regular in Weird Tales. Stories such as “Murgunstrumm” (1932), “The Cult of the White Ape,” “The Isle of Dark Magic,” and “The Death Watch” helped define his reputation for pulp horror. At least two tales, “The Isle of Dark Magic” and “The Death Watch,” are associated with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Cave lived for a time in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, near Lovecraft’s Providence, and the two corresponded about the ethics and aesthetics of writing for the pulps, though they never met.

He also used pen names freely, among them Justin Case, John Starr (sometimes listed as John Star), Geoffrey Vace, and others. As Justin Case he created the antihero The Eel, an independent gentleman of courageous action and questionable morals whose adventures appeared in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Under that same byline he wrote the cover story for the August 1936 Spicy Mystery Stories, a market he later remembered fondly even when critics preferred his straighter horror and crime. Few writers could claim both Black Mask, where hardboiled crime grew up, and Weird Tales, where supernatural pulp found its flagship. Cave could.

War, the Slicks, Haiti, and Jamaica

During World War II, Cave traveled the Pacific and Southeast Asia as a reporter. The experience produced respected nonfiction such as Long Were the Nights (1943), about the first PT boats at Guadalcanal, along with books on the cruiser Helena, the Seabees, and the Air Transport Command. It also changed his fiction. He had already sold hundreds of stories set in far-off places he had never visited. After the war he could sell South Seas and tropical adventure with authority to slick magazines that paid far better than the pulps: Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, the Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, and others. His most popular short story, “The Mission,” appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1959, later reached hardcover, entered textbooks, and was translated widely.

After the war he spent about five years in Haiti, then rebuilt and managed a coffee plantation in Jamaica. His nonfiction Haiti: Highroad to Adventure (1952) was critically praised as among the best reports on Vodou in English. The novel The Cross on the Drum (1959), an interracial story in which a white Christian missionary becomes involved with the sister of a Black Vodou priest, treated both Christianity and Vodou with unusual sympathy for popular American fiction of its moment and became a bestseller, with book-club selections. Four Paths to Paradise (1961) recorded his Jamaican years. When the Jamaican government confiscated the plantation in the early 1970s, Cave returned to the United States.

Rediscovery and a Second Horror Career

By then the pulp markets were gone. For a stretch, romance for women’s magazines was his steadiest outlet. Karl Edward Wagner noticed Cave’s byline, sought him out, and published Murgunstrumm and Others through Carcosa Press: the first major hardcover collection of Cave’s pulp horror. It won the 1978 World Fantasy Award and restarted his reputation. Further collections followed, including crime gatherings from Black Mask and Detective Fiction Weekly under the Crippen & Landru imprint, and Cave wrote new horror novels such as Legion of the Dead (1979), The Nebulon Horror (1980), The Evil (1981), Shades of Evil (1982), Lucifer’s Eye (1991), and The Mountains of Madness (2004). Haitian motifs returned often. He adapted early to the internet and championed e-books, so many of the same stories that once arrived on gray pulp paper can now be bought as downloads.

Honors accumulated late: lifetime achievement recognition from the World Fantasy Convention (1999), the Horror Writers Association, and the International Horror Guild, plus the Phoenix Award. A biography, Audrey Parente’s Pulp Man’s Odyssey: The Hugh B. Cave Story, appeared from Starmont House in the late 1980s. Cave’s first marriage, to Margaret Long, produced two sons before the couple lived apart; Peggie Thompson, often described as the great love of his later life, died in 2001. He remained, by accounts from friends and convention-goers, a raconteur happy to talk shop into old age.

How to Read Him If You Came for the Science Fiction

Start with the early Astounding pieces: “The Corpse on the Grating” and “The Murder Machine,” both available through Project Gutenberg’s scans of the February and September 1930 issues. They show Cave at the science-fiction newsstand in the year Astounding was inventing itself: scientific MacGuffins wrapped in suspense and dread. Then decide which neighboring room you want. For pulp horror, go to Murgunstrumm and Others. For hardboiled crime, try Long Live the Dead or Come into My Parlor. For the Caribbean novels and respectful Vodou material, read The Cross on the Drum and Haiti: Highroad to Adventure. For the professional memoir of magazine life, open Magazines I Remember.

Cave will not displace the central science-fiction canon, and he does not need to. His value for classic SF readers is historical and stylistic. He shows how science fiction shared writers, markets, and techniques with horror and crime when the field was still young. He shows what a Depression-era professional looked like when “science fiction writer” was not yet a stable job title, only one of many magazine slots a fast hand could fill. And he shows a career long enough to outlive the pulps, survive in the slicks, vanish into plantation work and romance markets, and return when a new generation of horror readers wanted the old intensity back.

Open an early Astounding, meet the engineer of weird machines and living corpses, then follow the byline wherever it goes. Hugh B. Cave is one of pulp fiction’s clearest arguments that genre borders were always more porous than the bookshop shelves suggest.

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